8. No Return
Sleep was only a temporary relief. The moon was still in the sky when Lyra flinched awake.
The pain crashed back down and burned her eyes. She fumbled in the dark.
“The yarrow is next to you,” Wilder said, his voice rough with disuse.
Her hand clasped around the thin stalks, and she pulled them to her. The best way to use yarrow was to brew the leaves in a tea. But without fire or time to waste, she opted to shove the whole plant into her mouth and began chewing.
It was bitter, but that didn’t stop her from devouring one entire plant and grabbing for another.
Wilder watched on with amused curiosity. And she didn’t care how ferociously she ate the plants. She allowed a bit of the monster within to slip through the cracks of her human facade.
Let him see it.
Even with her human teeth and blunt nails, she looked like the mermaid that would have ripped his heart from his chest and devoured it whole.
Lyra groaned and pressed a hand to her stomach.
“Are you alright?” Wilder asked, sitting up straighter.
“I ate too quickly.”
Lyra belched.
His eyes widened in alarm. He probably had never heard such a sound come from a female before.
“Better?”
“Much.” She beamed at him.
Small white petals littered the cloak, still tied backward around her. Her auburn hair had fallen from the intricate updo she had it in, and it hung in loose tendrils down to her lap.
She looked wild now.
“What time is it?” Lyra asked, staring up at the sky.
“Late.”
His answer didn’t surprise her. She had only mere hours left of the Tithe before it would be too late. But even if she escaped from him now, she wouldn’t make it in time. She had long since passed the point of no return.
Lyra shoved that thought away just in time for a new rippling pain to draw her attention to the muscles of her lower legs. She rubbed at them, trying to remember the name, trying to focus on anything other than the hopelessness that would consume her if she thought about it.
Her life was over.
Never again would she float along the current or admire her powerful tail. Gritting her teeth, she breathed sharply through her nose, trying to focus on the physical pain and not the emotional one. Her legs and those lower muscles. What was the name?
It was the same name as a baby cow. That part she remembered just fine.
“Calves,” she mumbled to herself.
“Excuse me?”
“This muscle,” she squeezed it, “it’s called a calf.”
Wilder’s head tilted to the side, his brows pinching together.
“It is,” he replied slowly, as if she were on the verge of a mental breakdown.
And she was. She was in pain, excruciating pain, and she was lost, with no hope of return.
Lyra looked at her surroundings, taking a deep breath again to clear her head.
She felt a buzzing numbness as the yarrow flooded her senses. It pried her from pain’s grip slowly, releasing each tightened finger with an arduous pull.
“Did you know you could brew the leaves of this plant for tea? Or pulverize it into a poultice to stop bleeding?”
Wilder squeezed the bridge of his nose with two fingers.
“I did not—and I don’t care to.”
Lyra hummed her disagreement but lay back to look up at the stars twinkling between the boughs of the cedar tree.
Wilder had saved her, hadn’t left her in the hands of those humans.
He had also gotten her the yarrow to ease her suffering.
Which was wholly at odds with what she knew about his kind.
And if it was important to his king that she make it alive and uninjured, it meant that he wouldn’t torture or kill her immediately.
She held onto that thought and pushed everything else away.