Chapter 8
Lyra
Lyra kept her hands clasped tightly in front of her as the soldiers lifted Mikael onto the rough wooden stretcher.
The muted winter sky made the paleness in his face worse in a way that made him look less like a king and more like a man already halfway to death’s door.
Through voices and the restless stamping of horses, she forced herself to remain calm while Dag barked orders to the men surrounding him.
“How did you know where he was?” The question had swirled the moment they banged on her door.
“There’s not much out here,” came the response. Dag practically snorted. “It didn’t take a genius to figure it out.”
Anger welled up again. “And yet it took that genius how many days to find him?”
She shouldn’t have said it, but it blurted out before she had any control over her tongue. The blizzard worked both ways. She couldn’t get out, they couldn’t get in.
“Watch your tongue, woman. It wouldn’t be hard to press charges when we have no idea if you might be the one who injured King Mikael in the first place.”
“Don’t put this on me. I have no idea how he ended up buried in that snow.” She pointed at him. “And if his boot hadn’t been sticking out, I never would have seen him. He wouldn’t have been found until spring after the thaw.”
“That may be true, but I would still advise you to watch your tongue.”
She fought against the memories of the man now taking control of the king. Dag’s cruelty didn’t appear to have changed at all, but she refused to turn her back on the king now that they were taking him away.
“Don’t tell anyone where he was found,” she said before she could reconsider the request. Her voice was quieter than she intended yet sharp enough to cut through the commotion.
Dag turned toward her, his expression unreadable beneath the dark beard and windblown cheeks. For a moment the noise around them seemed to dull as his eyes narrowed with unsettling focus, just as they had in the past.
“That will not stop people from asking questions.”
“I don’t care about questions,” Lyra responded. “I don’t want strangers arriving at my home. I don’t want gossip spreading through the villages. Leave my name out of it.”
One of the guards adjusted Mikael’s blanket and revealed the king’s unnaturally pale throat. Lyra had to force herself to look away.
Dag studied her for another long moment, and something in his face shifted. “Have we met before?”
The question tightened every muscle in her body. She managed a small shrug. “I doubt it.”
“No,” he murmured while he stared at her. “You look familiar.”
Lyra said nothing.
“What’s your name?” he demanded.
She could feel it then, the same dangerous sharpness she remembered from years ago that lingered beneath the controlled authority he carried now.
It unsettled her more than she wanted to admit because time had altered many things about Dag, adding age and heavier lines to his face, but it had not softened him in the slightest.
Luckily a younger soldier approached with news about the horses and drew Dag’s attention away before he could continue pressing her.
Lyra silently thanked every god willing to listen while the captain immediately fell back into command and issued rapid instructions about the route back to the castle and which physicians were to be summoned before they even crossed the outer gates.
In the confusion, he let the matter drop.
So did she.
And yet, as she watched them prepare to carry Mikael away, the truth pressed heavily against the back of her throat.
Poison.
She should have told Dag. Any sensible person would have. An injured king in the forest was one thing but a king who had been poisoned was another entirely. It was something darker and far more dangerous, and withholding that knowledge bordered on recklessness.
Still, the words never came. She had no idea why she held back, but it just seemed like the right thing to do at the moment.
Even as the soldiers began their journey down the narrow path with Mikael secured between them and Dag mounted his horse and glanced back toward her one final time, she remained silent without fully understanding why.
Perhaps it was instinct. Or maybe fear. Or perhaps some part of her simply did not trust what would happen once the truth left her mouth.
Beckett moved beside her after they disappeared into the trees. His small hand slipped into hers. “Is he going to die?”
Lyra looked down at him, startled by the bluntness of the question. Children often danced around difficult things, but Beckett rarely did.
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly.
“He can’t help us if he does.” He sighed as though that made perfect sense before they turned to head back inside.
The cottage greeted them with silence so complete that Lyra immediately hated it. Mikael had been impossibly large inside her tiny home and filled the space with a strange restless energy that lingered stubbornly even after he was gone.
Now the rooms felt hollow and just wrong.
She needed to busy herself with work because she didn’t know what else to do.
After standing motionless for several moments beside the now-empty sofa, she finally reached for her gloves and tugged them firmly over cold fingers before she forced brightness into her voice.
“Come on, sweetheart. Grab your jacket. We have a farmer’s market to get ready for. ”
Beckett immediately brightened at the reminder and scrambled for his mittens so quickly that one nearly fell into the basket of clipped greenery beside the door. “Can I get some candy while we’re there?” he asked hopefully, already halfway into his coat.
Lyra couldn’t help smiling at the eagerness in his face.
Despite everything, the boy still managed to find joy in the smallest things.
Their booth always sat near the local confectioner’s stall, and every market day Beckett spent half his time staring longingly at molded chocolates, peppermint sticks, and honey candies wrapped in shiny paper.
“Of course you can,” she promised as she tied her scarf securely beneath her chin. It was one of the few times she could truly spoil him without guilt, and she secretly enjoyed watching his excitement almost as much as he enjoyed the treats themselves.
“Can I get the cinnamon drops this time?” he asked as they stepped outside into the bitter cold. “Not the peppermint things. Those make my tongue hurt.”
Lyra laughed softly under her breath. “I thought you said the peppermint ones made you breathe smoke like a dragon.”
“They do,” Beckett argued seriously while trudging beside her through the snow. “But dragons probably don’t like it either.”
The path through the woods crackled beneath their boots as they spent the afternoon searching for the remaining hardy winter blooms needed for the bouquets they sold at the market each month.
They gathered pale frost lilies, dark evergreen sprigs, winter roses, and the tiny silver-blue flowers that somehow survived even beneath the snow.
Usually the work calmed her because arranging flowers required patience and focus, and because the rhythm of clipping stems, bundling greenery, and sorting colors into careful combinations gave her mind something steady to hold onto.
This time, however, the familiar task failed to soothe the restless unease twisting tighter inside her chest.
Beckett knelt beside a cluster of white blooms that poked stubbornly through the frozen ground while Lyra crouched nearby with the shears in hand. She trimmed long stems before she passed them carefully into the basket between them.
“This one should go in the fancy bouquets,” he declared with absolute certainty as he held up a flower nearly bent beneath the weight of ice crystals.
“The fancy bouquets?” Lyra arched a brow.
“The ones rich people buy,” he explained matter-of-factly. “The ladies who always smell like berries.”
Lyra snorted. “You mean perfume.”
“Whatever it is, they always buy the biggest bouquets.” Beckett tilted his head. “Do you think if we make enough, maybe we can get the caramel candies too?”
“We are not buying the entire confectioner’s stall.”
His expression turned hopeful anyway. “Maybe just half of it?”
The warmth of the exchange should have eased her tension, yet the air around them still felt wrong somehow.
It carried the sharp scent of pine and frozen earth beneath a sky growing steadily darker as daylight began to disappear behind heavy clouds.
Again and again, Lyra found herself glancing toward the treeline as though she expected mounted soldiers to emerge from the forest at any moment.
Every shadow between the trees seemed deeper than usual and every distant sound made her pulse jump. It was the guilt from not mentioning the poison. She gave herself a shake. If she had, they may have taken her away from Beckett. She had done the right thing.
Beckett eventually crouched near another patch of blooms and brushed snow carefully aside. “Will the king come back when he gets better?”
Lyra’s fingers stilled around the scissors mid-cut. The sensible answer should have been no. Kings did not return to isolated cottages hidden deep within the woods, especially not after nearly dying there.
Men like Mikael belonged to castles and great halls lined with banners and staff, not tiny kitchens warmed by woodstoves and patched blankets. Once he recovered, he would return to his world, and she would remain in hers, exactly as things should be.
Yet somewhere deep inside herself, buried beneath caution and reason and every instinct that had kept her alive this long, she realized the thought of never seeing him again left an ache she did not know how to explain.
The realization unsettled her enough that she said nothing at all.
Beckett glanced up at her, waiting for an answer that never came, before eventually returning to his flowers with any further questions.
By the time their baskets were full and the cold had begun creeping painfully through Lyra’s gloves, unease had curled so tightly inside her chest that she could no longer dismiss it as simple worry.
The forest had gone unnaturally still around them, absent even the distant rustle of animals moving through brush or the call of winter birds overhead.
Mikael had not ended up at her doorstep by chance.
And whatever had begun the moment she dragged an unconscious king from the snow did not feel finished yet.