Chapter 2

The Blackmere retreated an hour later, and no one on our side could explain why.

We were winning. Everyone had seen it. The eastern slope had fallen, the river was in our sights, and their line was hanging by a thread. Then a single horn sounded from the far ridge, one long, low note, and every Blackmere wolf on the field turned and ran as if the ground had caught fire.

The Frostmaw howled in triumph.

I stood in the mud where I had frozen, breathing hard, and did not howl at all.

Luca.

He had called the retreat. I knew it the way I knew my own name. Somewhere out in the dark tree line, the alpha king was walking away from the field with his people, and I could feel it, a thin thread pulled taut between my ribs, growing longer with every step he took.

It hurt. Gods, it hurt.

"Astrid!"

I turned so fast I nearly slipped. A blur of golden brown fur crashed into my shoulder, all elbows and enthusiasm, and then Posy was shifting mid-stride, bare and laughing and covered in mud from the hairline down.

"You're alive," she said, grabbing my face with both hands. "Of course you're alive. You're always alive. But I lost you near the ridge and I swore I saw you just stop, and I thought, she's been hit, she's dead, I'll have to tell Alpha and he'll cry, and I did not want to see Alpha cry."

"I'm fine," I said.

"You're covered in blood."

"Most of it isn't mine."

"Which I'd say is the point, honestly." She squinted at me, and the bubbly grin held, but something sharper moved behind it. Posy had been my second for four years, my friend for fifteen, and she was the only person alive who could read me. "You stopped."

"I was surveying the field."

"For a full minute."

"It was a big field."

She didn't laugh. She just looked at me, her hands still cupping my face, and for one long moment I was sure she could see it all over me. The jolt. The voice. The word.

Then she blinked and the grin came back like a curtain.

"Right," she said brightly. "Shift back, Blade. Let's get you cleaned up before Alpha finds you looking like a butcher's apron. He likes you presentable for the victory speech."

I let my wolf sink beneath my skin. The change rolled over me, fur to flesh, the familiar ache in my joints, and Posy threw a cloak around my shoulders without being asked. She never asked. She just always knew.

I was shaking. I told myself it was the cold.

The camp was already roaring by the time we climbed the ridge.

Fires burned in a dozen pits. Warriors clapped each other's backs, passed skins of spiced wine, sang the old victory songs. The wounded were being carried toward the healers' tents, and above it all, on a raised platform of split logs, stood Alpha Dorian Frost.

He was a tall man, silver-haired, with a face like a carved saint's. Sixty years old and still built like a general. The Frostmaw had followed him for three decades, and I had followed him since I was a child of eight, when he found me half-starved and feral in the northern snow and carried me home in his own coat.

He saw me coming, and his whole face changed.

"There she is," he called, and the whole camp turned. "My Blade!"

A cheer went up. Hundreds of voices. I forced a smile and kept walking, and my chest felt like it was full of broken glass.

Dorian came down from the platform and took my face in his weathered hands, the same way he had a thousand times. He kissed my forehead. He smelled like woodsmoke and cedar and home.

"I saw you cut through their center," he said quietly, just for me. "Forty of them, Astrid. Forty. The old warriors will be telling that story for years."

"Thank you, Alpha."

"Father," he said gently. "In private, always."

"Thank you, Father."

He smiled, and it was warm, and it was real, and it made what came next worse.

"You stopped," he said.

My breath stalled.

He was still smiling. Still holding my face. Nothing in his expression had changed, and yet the air between us went very thin.

"Posy saw you stop," he said. "So did Captain Harrow. A full minute, near the center. What happened?"

Lie. Lie well.

"Their alpha," I said. "Luca Knox. I saw him on the rise. I wanted to reach him, but there were too many between us. I hesitated. I'm sorry."

Dorian studied me for a moment longer than I liked.

Then his smile softened, and he patted my cheek. "Don't apologize. He's the reason they retreat, the reason they'll come again. We will reach him, Astrid. You and I, together, we will finish this."

"Yes, Father."

"Rest. Eat. Let Morwenna look at those scratches."

He released me and turned back to the crowd, raising his arms, and the roar rose again. I stood there in a stolen cloak, in the firelight, with the man who had raised me, and for the first time in seventeen years I could not tell whether the smell of him was comfort or something else.

They're lying to you.

I pushed the thought away.

It came back anyway.

Posy dragged me to the far edge of camp, muttering about mud and hygiene and how I was "a disgrace to the Frostmaw and an insult to fabric," and eventually I let her scrub me down behind a canvas screen with a bucket of river water and a rag.

I said almost nothing. She filled the silence, the way she always did. Gossip about the new recruits. Who had been caught sneaking off with whom. A long, indignant story about a pot of honey that had gone missing from the supply tent.

I let it wash over me, and I listened for something else beneath it.

Nothing. The thread in my chest had gone quiet, stretched too far to feel.

Hours later, when the camp had settled and the fires burned low and even Posy had gone to her bedroll, I sat alone at the edge of the ridge and stared out into the black.

The forest was silent. No horns. No howls.

And then, soft as breath, so close it might have been inside my own skull:

I can feel you lying to them, little wolf.

I stopped breathing.

Don't be afraid. I'm not far.

My hands curled into the dirt.

Come find me.