He stepped even closer, a few feet from Kyra, and Kyra saw the friend of her father look back and forth from her to the foreigners, as if unsure whether to get involved.

“Don’t try to protect her,” the foreigner said to him. “Unless you want to end up dead, too.”

Her father’s friend, to Kyra’s disappointment, raised his hands and backed away.

“I said I owed her father a favor,” he said. “I fulfilled it. I won’t harm her. But what anyone else does with her, well….that’s not my business.”

Kyra lost all respect for the man as he slinked back into the crowd. Yet it also emboldened her. It was just her now, and she liked it that way. She needed to rely on no man.

As the men closed in on her, preparing to grab her and Dierdre, Kyra tightened her grip on her staff and steeled herself. No matter what happened, she would not be taken alive by these men.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Alec marched across the plains of northern Soli, the hills rising and falling, staring into the rising sun, bleary-eyed, weary with exhaustion, numb with cold, and no longer feeling the hunger in his belly. He and Marco, beside him, had hiked all night through Whitewood, neither, after their encounter with the Wilvox, willing to take a chance at sleep. Alec could feel the exhaustion in his legs, and as he hiked, watching the horizon, the clouds began to part and the morning sun broke through, lighting the green hills he remembered from childhood—and he felt so grateful to have emerged from the forest. There was nothing like being under open sky. He marveled that he had survived the long trek, so many long and nights, all the way from The Flames.

Alec, still smarting from his wounds, reached up and felt his stiffening leg and arm, the wounds still raw from where the Wilvox had bitten him. He walked more slowly than he had been, yet Marco was walking slowly now, too, he, too, recovering from wounds and slowed by exhaustion and hunger. Alec could not remember the last time he rested, the last time he ate, and he felt as if he were entering a dreamlike state.

Seeing the open sky, the breaking dawn, the familiar hills he knew so well, knowing he was, finally, close to home, Alec, overcome with exhaustion and emotion, felt tears run down his cheeks. It took him several minutes to realize he was crying. He quickly wiped the tears away. He supposed they had sprung from his delirium from his wounds, his hunger, and his joy at seeing his homeland—a place he had never thought to set eyes upon again. He felt as if he had escaped the jaws of death and had been given a second chance at life.

“Where is your village?” Marco’s voice rang out beside him, startling him in the deep silence.