“The queen is punishing Obsidian for the knife, isn’t she?” Cara glanced between Ander and me, looking for whichever of us would give an honest answer. Naturally, she looked longer to Ander.
I’d hoped to keep that guilt from settling on her. Now I admitted, “Yes.”
Ander and I shared a look. There was a difference between understanding the punishment and seeing shifters fight and fall and die.
But she was in our war. There was no preserving her innocence.
“Speaking of. I’d like my knife back,” Ander told her.
“You can’t use it,” she reminded him, but relief slipped across her face. She wanted to be free of it.
“I’ll have to find my own mortal.”
A brilliant idea. He seemed rather too attached to mine.
“I haven’t been to the eastern wall in years,” Ander said to me. “You, more recently.”
“Yes.”
Last year, when I’d been at the eastern wall, we’d been three clans deep, when Maura had fought at my side.
Cara had said our clans could unite. Did she truly see herself as one of us now?
Was she going to say goodbye to her family?
Or would she stay to protect those she had fought so hard to save?
For now, I was going to prepare my clan.
I was not going to think about Tesa’s lamp burning within her tent, and whether she could hear his voice.
Forty
Cara
Fear was with the clan, moving through the final checks, by the time I’d finished some distinctly fraught goodbyes. Lidi had been running wild around camp, so I still had to find her. Tay had been kind and concerned and slightly distant, and I’d been awkward in return. My mother had given me permission I didn’t need, alongside a hug that I did. It all felt rough and unfinished.
Bismyth, worn and dirty, was eating hastily as they stood, getting ready for another fight. Because that was what they did.
Tesa and Riven, masked and hooded, lingered in the shadows of the trees, waiting for Dairen and Inida to carry them with us. Corbyn had suggested that we bring our Nightwalkers—who still made his people uncomfortable—with us. I dreaded that meant Tesa would still be in Ander’s orbit. We could not keep them apart forever.
Kiegan bumped my shoulder, a bowl in his hand, and I almost leapt to hug him. “Kiegan!”
“What are you doing, kitten?” he demanded; the nickname was made less sweet by the way he spoke in a growl and the way he overacted his unwillingness to hug me back. I hung off his neck for a long beat before he sighed and wrapped his arms around me. “Orcs do not hug.”
“You’re only half-orc, and you’re all my friend,” I said because the sweetness would make him want to die.
He gave me a bleak look that made me smile. “I don’t remember asking you to be my friend.”
“That’s how it works. You were able to receive such a great gift without even asking. Friendship is the real miracle.”
He snorted and nudged his pack with his foot. He was eating out of a bowl, and there was less of the stew splattered on his face than usual. I wondered if he was trying to impress Anayla or Sera.
I had one more goodbye. I cast a worried glance over my shoulder at Bismyth, afraid they would leave me—I was not much use in a fight, and Fear might be protective of his flawed miracle—but I couldn’t leave without hugging Lidi.
I found her at the edge of camp, where the trees began, in the center of a cluster of children. They seemed to have made a magic shop out of flowers, ripped apart and carefully arranged on a large flat rock. Lidi and two other girls had their heads bent together, laughing.
She looked up and saw me, and her face opened. I caught her when she launched herself into my arms, rocking us back and forward as if I were comforting her. It was for my own sake.
