7. Ghosts | Wilder
There was a ghost haunting him.
Every foot they put between them and the Mannereds was another memory of her he couldn’t outrun.
Wilder saw flashes of her leaning her body out of the carriage to ask Maelys how the birds were, or to ask Ridge about the plants.
Plants that she would never see beneath the sea.
The memories didn’t crash over him all at once. No, they slid in slowly.
A blade easing deeper into his heart with every moment, every step he took away from the sea. Away from her.
Wilder pressed a hand to his chest and tipped his head back to the sky.
It was an eerie, velvet black with no hint of the stars. She would have hated it.
Storm clouds blotted out the stars and cast the black of the night sky in a textured kind of way.
The air was heavy with the encroaching storm.
Wilder was forced to make camp when the exhaustion of their horses had become life-threatening.
Maelys had all but pulled him from his mount when she’d had enough.
A small fire crackled and danced in the center of their group, and he focused his attention on the flames. Smoke twined around them, and he breathed in the scent.
Lyra loved fire; it was one of the many things she had never seen before.
“Do we have a plan?” Maelys asked almost timidly, as if she were afraid of his answer.
She was tucked against Ridge’s side. Wilder couldn’t tell if it had been for comfort or for warmth.
The air carried an unfamiliar chill for the season. This deep in the forest, there was no breeze, and the smoke became heavy as it blanketed them.
Wilder let loose some of his magic, and the smoke floated up and away from them in a perfect column to the sky.
“I’m unsure,” he replied, not taking his eyes off the smoke and squeezing the shell of her necklace between his thumb and forefinger.
He sucked in a breath and allowed his senses to absorb the forest. It smelled of damp earth and new leaves.
There was nothing amiss. It appeared they weren’t being followed this time. He didn’t expect them to be any longer now that she had returned to the depths, but he hadn’t wanted to assume.
Otto lounged against a fallen log and tucked his hands behind his head to better peer at the sky.
Clad in a grey tunic and charcoal pants, he matched the clouds glowing in the moonlight.
His voice was less timid than Maelys’, but just as gentle. “Would you like to know this time?”
Wilder shook his head immediately.
He didn’t want to know anything at all except how she was doing.
Was she still alive?
Was she hurt?
His lips parted to ask, but Otto was faster.
“It’s hard to see clearly under the depths, but she is alive. They are readying her for the council.”
Maelys pressed a hand to her chest. The thick fabric of her travel gown was as green as the leaves of the surrounding canopy.
She breathed a sigh of relief and sank deeper into Ridge’s arms.
A tiny fluff ball of a chipmunk hopped onto her lap and began nuzzling its face into her belly. With gentle hands, Maelys lifted the tiny creature to her face and began whispering to it.
The chipmunk chattered back before hopping down and scurrying away.
Ridge watched the interaction with an adoring smirk before turning his attention back to Otto.
“That’s a good thing, right?”
Otto nodded, still watching the sky.
“He needs her, so he will keep her alive.”
“Who needs her?” Wilder’s gaze snapped to Otto.
A sort of primal claiming wormed its way out of his chest.
No one could claim to need her.
But he could.
No one could keep her safe like he could.
“Drystan,” Otto said. “To legitimize his rule, he needs her hand in marriage.”
Wilder blinked. He wasn’t capable of formulating a reply to that information.
Marriage?
All this time he had been worried about her life being in danger. He hadn’t even thought about the possibility she could be taken from him in that way as well.
“Is their council anything like ours?” Maelys asked.
She plucked at the long pleats of her gown and adjusted the position of her boots against the ground.
Wilder focused on her question and began thinking of any similarities he could remember from the structure of their society to that of the merfolk.
The council his father had constructed was more for information gathering than decision-making as of late. It was obvious his father didn’t discuss anything with the lords and ladies of their kingdom before making decisions.
“It’s hard to say,” Otto mused. “Though their council did play a part in Drystan’s uprising. He laid some carefully executed half-truths to secure their allegiance. Lyra plans on dismantling their trust in him.”
Ridge’s eyes widened before a chuckle rumbled from his chest.
“Lyra has plans?”
Maelys shook with his laugh and leaned back to smile at him.
Otto shrugged, a small grin tugging up the corner of his lips. “Not expertly crafted ones, but a vague path. The princes of each territory are married to each of her sisters. She’s gathering information where she can.”
Wilder remembered her mentioning such things to him at the summer cottage. But he didn’t know how her sisters’ marriages would help in her quest.
She had said she wasn’t close to any of them, and what friends she did have in Atlantis were nothing like the ones at his side.
Lyra had no allies there, and was utterly alone in a place that had tried to make a martyr out of her once before.
“Is she in danger?” Wilder asked.
Their council sounded as if it were composed of the strongest males in their realm, or at least the most powerful.
A twig snapped behind them as Baelwyn ambled through the thicket, his arrival intentionally loud, eyes darting as if tracking unseen watchers.
“We’re surrounded by a multitude of chipmunks,” he muttered as he ambled closer. “Clever beasties.”
Ridge relaxed the hand he’d drifted toward his blade, and Maelys hid her smile behind her hand at Baelwyn’s rambling.
“Not at present,” Otto answered, his reply directed at Wilder’s previous question.
Wilder’s hand trembled when what felt like a living thing coiled through him as if it were readying to strike.
Not at present.
He pressed his hands together to stop his shaking.
“What else?” Wilder demanded, every muscle tight as he waited for an answer.
Otto’s eyes matched the smoke wafting up from the fire. “There have been a great many changes in Atlantis.”
Baelwyn sat on the stump beside Wilder and pulled a long pipe from his robes.
“It’s a moonless night,” he murmured. “The pixies are in a tizzy.” His bushy brow furrowed as he took a long drag.
Smoke rings drifted into the air before turning into shapes that resembled fairies and other winged creatures. “What are we discussing?”
Maelys grinned at Baelwyn’s smoke art. “The changes in Atlantis and Lyra’s safety.”
“And?” Baelwyn continued to puff on his pipe.
“She is safe—for now,” Wilder answered. “We were just getting to the changes.”
Baelwyn waved a hand for Otto to proceed.
“Other than the uprising, there seems to be a religious movement sweeping across their realm. Drystan saw that change as a foothold for his rule. There’s also …” Otto’s eyes swirled, “... Disasters.”
“What kind of disasters?” Wilder leaned towards Otto.
His words had been sharp enough to carve the answers out, but Otto did not flinch.
“Earthquakes.”
Baelwyn stroked his beard and looked towards the heavens, deep in thought.
“Interesting,” Ridge replied. “Now, should we get on to discussing our own plans?”
Frustration was burrowing deep within Wilder’s chest.
Their answers had only led to more questions, and he found the path in front of him unclear.
A multitude of emotions fought for priority, each more insurmountable than the last.
Otto opened his mouth to reply.
“I don’t want to know,” Wilder said sharply.
He couldn’t have this fight again.
He would choose his own path, fight his own battles.
Maelys leaned closer to the fire. “Not even if it means a better chance of rescuing Lyra?”
“I will do this on my own,” Wilder growled. “Without the intervention of fate. This is my life, my choices, and she is?—”
“She belongs to no one but herself,” Maelys interjected.
Her voice was sharp enough that the forest quieted to listen.
The words landed cold and true.
Wilder inhaled, the fight draining from him as quickly as it had come.
Maelys was right.
Lyra wasn’t his.
She belonged to no one.
Otto filled the silence that stretched taut between them. “It would help me see better if I knew whether you planned on confronting your father.”
“About what?” Wilder asked, his brow wrinkling with confusion.
Otto sat up from the log and stared at Wilder.
There was something Otto was trying to convey, but its meaning was lost on Wilder.
Otto reluctantly gave up and shook his head as if dreading what he was about to say.
“About his role in all of this?” Otto waved his hand in a circle. “About his deal with Drystan?”
“What?” Maelys shrieked.
Baelwyn grumbled something under his breath about treacherous leeches.
Wilder’s eyes slid closed. He hadn’t told any of them that part of the story.
Partly because he hadn’t been able to confront the knowledge of his father’s complicity in this deceit to himself, and partly because he didn’t even know what he would say to him.
“My father,” Wilder spat the title out like rancid food, “brokered Lyra’s kidnapping with Drystan.”
The storm inside him that he had worked so hard to dam exploded from him.
His magic fed their small fire and sent a large column of blue flames to the sky before he could wrangle himself back under control.
Maelys stared at him, horror draining the color from her face. Her smattering of freckles stood out starkly now against her bone-white skin.
“Why?” Ridge asked, a line forming between his brows. “What would King Oberon get out of that?”
“A common enemy,” Baelwyn answered grimly.
He had put the pieces together faster than any one of them had.
Wilder nodded.
An owl hooted in the distance, and a log split in the fire, before Wilder finally spoke again.
“He believed my hatred towards Lyra would drive me back into obedience like it had—the first time.”
“The … first time?” Maelys’ voice was but a whisper. “You couldn’t possibly mean?—”
“My father orchestrated all of it. My kidnappings and hers.”
He shrugged off his words, but it didn’t stop the pain of saying it out loud from worming under his skin and burrowing into his chest.
Wilder had finally learned the truth and knew why he had been kept hostage for so long. His father had arranged it all.
Maelys and Ridge looked to Otto for confirmation, and he dipped his chin.
Betrayal and horror marched across her face. Ridge’s jaw had unhinged as he stared with widened eyes.
“It wasn’t my story to tell. And he wouldn’t have wanted to know,” Otto offered as an explanation.
The anger Maelys sent in his direction was palpable.
Ridge’s jaw snapped shut, and Maelys continued seething. “You could have filled the rest of us in. That treachery goes beyond our Prince. It impacts our entire kingdom!”
Otto had the decency to look ashamed as a blush crawled up his neck.
“What would you have me do?” he asked, turning his palms skyward.
“Intervene!” she yelled. “By choosing not to act, you’re becoming complacent in the face of this wickedness.”
Wilder shook his head. “That’s enough, Maelys. He did exactly what he should have done. What I would have ordered him to do.”
Maelys alternated her shock between the both of them.
“That’s not how this works,” she gestured between all of them. “We should have been alerted to this treachery. We should have been given a choice.”
Wilder stared at the fire, trying not to hear the truth of her words, trying not to feel the air against his skin, or smell the lingering smoke in the air.
Lyra would have told him the same thing. She had actually told him a similar thing once.
She should be here—challenging his every choice and questioning his every word.
Instead, she stood alone before a council that would call cruelty divine.
Everything appeared so clear to him now.
King Oberon had mistaken control for order.
Wilder had mistaken ignorance for choice.
He felt the consequences of that now.
Otto had been correct; Wilder would have preferred to live in ignorance for the rest of his life.
He could never go back to the way it was. Now, everything he knew would be impossible to ignore.
It was such a precarious sort of balance. Much like magic.
“Magic demands balance,” Wilder said finally. “Otto choosing to change what he saw could have wobbled that balance in ways even he could not foresee.”
The fire flared with his magic, the air giving it fuel to burn brighter.
“Then we’ll discuss it and come up with a different plan,” Maelys ground out. “There’s always a way.”
Wilder rose to his feet as the path forward finally opened before him. Resolve settled into his bones like steel.
This was not something he would meticulously plan out. He would not open himself up to fate’s meddling plan.
Wilder had one goal and one goal only.
“I will not ask my father for permission,” he said. “I will do what needs to be done, and that is the plan.”
Somewhere beneath the storm-thick sky, something ancient listened.