Page 174 of In Violent Waves

A canopy tent had been pitched beside the carriage in front of a thicket of brush that Oak was collecting for a fire.

“Is that safe?” Lyra asked.

She stood in front of her tent with her hands on her hips. They hadn’t started a fire once on their journey from Terra to the Wilds. Now it seemed counterintuitive.

“They already know where we are,” Oak replied with a shrug. “Might as well be warm.”

Otto pressed the pillow into Lyra’s stomach, and she wrapped her arms around it.

“You did well. Found that fire in your veins after all,” Otto murmured.

Lyra squeezed the pillow to her chest and tucked her chin into it. She hadn’t known where it had come from, that rage. Maybe it had to do with being used as a pawn again. Maybe it was because she thought they had all been in danger.

But maybe more than any of that, it had to do with protecting him.

“You’ll do wonderful things … now that you finally found your voice, too.”

Lyra’s eyes flashed, but she huffed and pushed through the flapping fabric that made up her tent door. Leaving a bewildered Otto staring after her.

The tent was small. No bigger than the cot that took up most of the floor space. Her trunk had been unloaded from the carriage and was placed beside a stack of quilts.

Lyra closed her eyes and tilted her head back. Sighing through her nose, she thought back to her room at the castle. She missed Daisy, she missed the bathing chamber, and she missed her big, fluffy bed.

The thread of gold around her heart was muted, dulled in a way that told her she was empty right now. She had used all ofher power in one go to kill that wulver. But she wasn’t afraid. She knew it would come back.

When she blinked her eyes open again, she noted the netting that made up the tent roof. The night sky was ablaze with millions of twinkling lights. Lyra curled up onto her cot, kicking off her boots, and she lay back looking up at the blanket of stars in the sky.

Constellations that told stories over a millennium. Heroes and villains, ordinary people making decisions that would cast them into the oblivion of legends.

She hadn’t felt the guilt she had the last time she used her power. Although she was a child then, she could still vividly remember the anguish she had felt when she had learned the fate of that boy.

But now—she felt still.

Her eyes slipped closed, and she thought of her decisions. Where would these choices lead her …

Wilder sat on the ground, out of reach of the swaying flaps of Lyra’s tent. She had been asleep for a while now. Her rhythmic breathing had placed him in a trance as he listened.

She was prone to nightmares, and he listened for them now.

“I see no ambush this night,” Otto murmured from his left. He poked at the burning branch with a long twig.

“So you’ve said,” Wilder replied.

“Ridge couldn’t scent out Cyrus because he was never a traitor. He stayed true to his cause—the wulvers.”

Wilder nodded, having puzzled that much out already. Cyrus wasn’t technically a bad seed in the general sense of the word.

“But that’s not why you are still awake, is it?” Otto asked.

Wilder rolled his eyes, but did not reply. Oak and Dust twitched in their sleep on their bedrolls beside the fire. The tent that Ridge and Maelys had pitched for themselves had eventually fallen silent. Wilder envied them. Envied their freedom in each other and finding their releases.

“I know you do not like to know—” Otto began, his brow scrunched and worry dimming his eyes.

“Then do not tell me,” Wilder snapped.

“It does not end well,” Otto whispered, ignoring Wilder’s order.

Otto never disregarded an order like that. Wilder stared long and hard at the man he’d known his entire life. From the tightening white skin around his eyes to the gray irises themselves.