Novels by patricia dickson

RONAN My wolf remained still. It lay flat again, smoothly on the floor of my chest, belly pressed to cold ribs, ears pinned so hard to its skull I could feel the ache of it in my own jaw. Every time I reached for it — the way a man reaches for a blade he has carried since boyhood — it pressed its head lower. Lower. The way a hound presses itself into straw when it hears the bootsteps of the man who whipped it last winter. I had not known it could be afraid. I had been raised to believe the wolf was the one part of a man that never bent. That it did not flinch, did not kneel, did not learn fear the way flesh learns it. My father had told me that, standing in the yard with snow on his shoulders, his own wolf bright in his eyes. I had believed him the way I believed most of what he told me — before he rode north one autumn, his cloak snapping in the wind, and did not come home. Briar was still wrapped against my chest. The blanket I had tucked around her shoulders had slipped to on

TALIA They hauled me into the yard at first light, and the first thing I noticed was the number. Thirty. I counted twice. It was the only thing I could do with my hands bound. Thirty wolves standing in rows in the churned snow. Not wolves, not really. Men in the shape of men. Arms at their sides. Not one of them spoke. Not one scratched at his beard or stamped his feet against the cold or looked up at the sky. They stood like cut timber waiting for the wagon. Their breath rose all at once. Thirty white threads in the freezing air, in and out together, like one chest was breathing for all of them. The yard stank of frost and pitch. And underneath it, the smell I had learned to hate — sour, sharp, wrong. Compulsion. Drago walked the line. He was built like a door, head shaved clean, a heavy grey wool coat buttoned to his throat. His hands were loose at his sides. Unhurried. At each man, he stopped and pressed his thumb hard into the inside of the wrist. Just one press. Like a bak

BRIAR When we came back up the bank, he walked differently. Not lightly. Not yet. But like the ground had decided to hold him again. Ezra looked up from the map. Fenn from the stones he'd been staring a hole through. Grier from the pot he was stirring, as if it had offended him. None of them said a word. Ronan stood at the mouth of the overhang. Bandaged hands held loose at his sides. And when he spoke, it was in that voice. The one that moves packs. "Last night we tried to take Talia out of his hands quietly," he said. His voice was still scraped raw, but it held. "He built the room to fit us. Every inch of that lodge was measured for a small party that creeps. So we stop being the shape he built it for." Fenn frowned. "Meaning?" "Meaning we don't creep," Ronan said. "We go as a pack. And we go to the Stones." His grey eyes swept them, one by one. Checking. Claiming. "Fenn - Kade Thorne has friends in the north march who have never loved his father, and he knows those highla

BRIARWe found shelter at dawn, nine miles from the lodge. A shelf of grey limestone jutting out over a nameless brook like a lip. We'd walked the last three miles in the water itself, leading the horses up the streambed so the cold would scrub the trail off their legs. My boots were numb. My horse's legs were shaking. I had led Ronan's horse all night. He couldn't close his hands around the reins. He didn't argue when I tied his lead rope to my own saddle. He just let me do it. That frightened me more than any fight would have. Ezra built a fire no bigger than a soup bowl and smothered it half under wet moss, so it smelled more than it burned. Thin, bitter smoke that clung low and went nowhere. The hollow smelled of wet stone and crushed fern, of horse sweat and old blood, and underneath it, something sweetish I refused to name. Frost furred every blade of grass beyond the overhang. Our breath came out in white ropes. "Hands," Ezra said. Ronan held them out. He'd wrapped the

TALIA They dragged me off the window by the chain between my wrists. Two of them. The flat-eyed ones. No words, no hurry — just that tireless, inhuman strength locking around my arms and peeling me backwards off the sill. My forearms scraped. My nails shrieked against stone. For a half second I hung there, stupidly, still trying to hold on, and then the bars tore out of my grip, and I hit the floor hard enough to knock the air out of me. Two dark handprints stayed on the mortar where I'd been. Then the door slammed. The lock clicked—that small, oiled, final sound, like a mouth closing. I lay where I'd fallen, cheek against the cold, and listened. The horn's last note was still in the walls. It trembled in my teeth. Under it — boots. Thirty bodies turning all at once in wet snow, that grinding, panicked rush. And then — Fenn. A howl I would know blind. Cut off in the middle, like someone had slammed a hand over his mouth. Silence. A long, terrible silence where I forgot how

BRIAR We made camp in a hollow a mile and a half south of the lodge. Ezra said the wind was in our favour. A human nose would catch nothing. A wolf's nose, very little. It should have felt safe. It didn't. The pine-and-earth paste we'd smeared on our skin had dried to a crust. It cracked along my forearms. It itched like hell. I scratched until the skin underneath turned raw and stinging — because at least that was something for my hands to do. Dusk fell like a lid. That last red seam in the west thinned to a thread, then went out. The cold turned sharp enough to bite. The horses' breath plumed in thick white ropes. Grier stood with them, one broad palm flat on the mare's neck, murmuring low nonsense. Not really for her. For himself. Ezra took the hooded lantern out of his satchel. Looked at it. Put it away again. He started to pace. Stopped himself. Started again. His chestnut hair was sticking straight up — the way it only did when he'd spent an hour dragging his hands throug