Lyr Thornwright's Arc

Chapter 45 of 8

Weeks passed and the market believed the story they all told about what happened in the Barrens. An old woman killed Kasim to save Finn from a snare, and it got brutal when Locket intervened. No one questioned Locket’s fondness for Finn, or the way he looked at her with adoration. Finn rested at home and grew stronger each day, and Lyr visited him often despite his parents wishes for her to stay away. Locket lived at the cottage as a girl under Lyr’s ward, and spent her waking hours with Finn's family. Lyr stood at her stall and looked at the pendant in her palm. It could bind her to fur forever, or bind her to skin forever. She wanted neither. She wanted both. Cade came to her stall that morning, carrying a crate and set it on her table without a word. Inside was a mound of her furs and her finished wares; blades and small carvings she had never had time to sell. His stall was empty behind him. He filled hers with the work they made together and left his bare. "You're giving me your whole stock," Lyr whispered. "I'm giving you a chance to succeed," Cade corrected. He did not look at her for long and his jaw was tight the way it always was when he cared more than he wanted to admit. "You earned it. I didn't." Lyr turned the pendant over in her hand and considered it. "Locket wants to be a woman with Finn, but keep the fox too. A middle path." She met his eyes. "There's no charm for that.” Her head shook with sadness. “Trinket only wrote a cage,” he said with a sad smile to match her thoughts. Cade leaned on the table. "Trinket built a lock because she was afraid of losing herself to her own choices. She was afraid.” His sadness grew. “You aren't Trinket." He nodded at her hands. They didn’t shake anymore. "You hunt as a coyote. You skin a hare as a woman. You can be both. No wire or wood gave you that." Lyr stared at him. She spent months chasing a charm to fix her, even bled for a ritual. Now she knew that the cure was not in the wood or the metal. "So the pendant is useless," she stated simply. "The pendant would trap you," Cade clarified. "You don't need to be trapped. You made a choice in the desert and you continue to choose it every day." He straightened. "That's the middle path. It was never a charm. It was you." Lyr looked down at the blood-sealed pendant and thought of Locket, who lived as an animal for years because she believed she needed to pick one side. She thought of Trinket, dead before she had the chance to choose. She thought of herself, standing at her own stall, human, steady, unafraid. She set the pendant beside the empty crate Cade brought and covered it with a fur. "Then I won't bind myself," she said. "Not to coyote. Not to woman." Cade watched her a moment before something in his face eased. He picked up an empty basket and walked back toward his empty stall. Lyr held her hands out flat over her furs and for the first time she understood that the curse wasn’t intended to be lifted. It was a thing to carry.