Chapter 6

Five days is a very long time to be afraid.

I spent the first one reaching for Luca. Every hour, sometimes every few minutes, I closed my eyes and pushed at the thread in my chest with all the force I had. I asked him questions. I demanded answers. Once, in the dead middle of the night, I actually whispered please into the dark like a child.

Nothing came back.

It should have been a relief. It was the outcome I had begged for. Instead, the silence settled into the hollow under my ribs like a stone, and by the second morning I could barely swallow a mouthful of bread without feeling it lodge.

You told him to go, I reminded myself. He went. Good.

I chewed. I did not taste it.

The camp filled with preparations.

Dorian had a genius for them. He walked the lines each morning in his plain gray tunic, greeting warriors by name, asking after their children and their old injuries. He drew the ford on a sheet of parchment for Harrow and the officers. The parley would be held on the river's eastern bank, on a flat stretch of gravel beneath a stand of alders. Forty Frostmaw under the white banner. Twelve Blackmere, by the terms of the message. The main force would wait on the western ridge, out of sight, in case anything went wrong.

"In case," Dorian repeated, and smiled at me across the table. "It's only caution, Astrid. I would never forgive myself if I sent you unprotected."

I nodded. I was getting very good at nodding.

On the third day, I passed the supply wagons on my way to the practice yard, and something snagged at the edge of my eye.

The canvas on the last wagon had come loose. Underneath, stacked in neat folded rows, were dozens of plain gray cloaks. Wool, heavy, without a single mark on any of them. No sigil, no clasp, no trim.

"Spare cloaks," said the quartermaster, hurrying over to lash the tarp back down. "For the cold nights. The Alpha's orders."

"They're unmarked."

"They're wool, Blade. Wool doesn't need a crest." He said it lightly, but he didn't look at me.

I told myself it was nothing. I told myself for the rest of the afternoon.

The fever came and went in waves.

It was worst at night. I would wake with my hair plastered to my forehead and my body burning, and I would lie there listening to my own heartbeat, wondering how much longer I could bear it. Morwenna had said two cups of tea a day. On the fourth night, I drank three.

It helped. Barely.

Posy found me at the edge of the camp near midnight, sitting on a stump with my hands wrapped around the empty cup, staring at nothing. She sat down beside me without a word. She had a whetstone in her lap and a long, narrow blade, and she began to sharpen it slowly, steadily, in long even strokes.

Shk. Shk. Shk.

I let the sound fill the silence.

"You don't have to say anything," Posy said, after a while. "That's the deal. I'm not going to ask. You're not going to tell me. We just sit."

"That doesn't seem like a very good deal."

"It's the only deal I can bear right now." She ran her thumb along the edge and grimaced. "I'm going to be at your back tomorrow. Whatever happens at that ford, whatever it is. Whoever's standing on the other side. I'll be right behind you."

"Posy—"

"I don't need the details." Her voice was too light, and I heard the tremor underneath it. "I need you to promise me you'll come back."

I looked at her. This girl I had known since we were ten years old, who had held my hair back the first time I was sick from a kill, who had stolen honey to make me smile on the worst days. She was smiling at me now, her round face bright in the firelight, and there were tears standing in her eyes.

"I promise," I said.

"Good." She sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and went back to sharpening. "Because if you die, I'll be so annoyed."

I laughed. It hurt.

We sat there together in the dark, until the moon went down.

We set out before dawn on the fifth day.

Forty wolves in gray-and-white cloaks, riding hard through the pale morning. Harrow at the front, scowling at the road. Posy on my left, humming under her breath. The white banner snapped in the wind above us, absurdly bright against the dark trees.

I rode with my hands clenched on the reins.

For the first hour, nothing changed. Then, gradually, as the road curved toward the river, something in my chest began to shift.

It started as a loosening. A slow, strange easing of the tightness I'd carried for five days, as if a fist had begun, cautiously, to open. I noticed it around the second hour. By the third, I could breathe without effort for the first time in what felt like weeks. The fever eased. My hands stopped shaking.

Oh, I thought, dizzy. Oh, no.

Because I knew what it meant.

The ache had never been about distance from my clan. It had never been about the war, or the bond as a weapon, or any trick. It was about him. It had always been about him. And every mile I rode toward the Stonewater ford, every inch closer, the wound in my chest was healing.

He was there. He was already there. I hadn't seen him or heard a single word, and I knew.

"Blade?" Posy murmured. "You've gone pale."

"I'm fine."

"You're humming."

I was. I hadn't noticed. It was an old lullaby, low and tuneless, the way you hum when a hand is stroking your hair.

I stopped at once.

The ford lay at the bottom of a shallow valley, where the river spread wide over flat gray stones and slid, glittering, between two banks of alder. A single white banner hung from a pole on the far side.

Under it, twelve wolves waited in dark cloaks.

Harrow raised his hand, and our column halted. The river murmured between us, the water pale and shallow. No one spoke. A crow cried somewhere overhead.

I picked out the figures one by one.

The nearest was lean and scarred, a man of about thirty-five with cropped dark hair and a face like a knife. He stood a step in front of the others with his arms folded, his jaw set, and he was looking at me with an expression I had never seen aimed at me in my life.

It was not fear. Every enemy I'd met feared me. This was hatred, pure and quiet and total. The way you look at the blade that has killed someone you love.

That must be Dax, I thought, without knowing how I knew.

And behind him, at the center of the little group, tall and still and dressed in black, stood the man I had spent five days trying to call.

Luca.

He was watching me.

I held my breath. The thread in my chest pulled tight, warm and bright and aching, and for one wild instant I thought I might fall out of the saddle. His eyes met mine across the river, gray and steady and unreadable, and every word I'd prepared went straight out of my head.

He looked at me.

And something crossed his face. It was there and gone in half a heartbeat, so fast that no one else could have seen it. It wasn't longing. It wasn't relief.

It was alarm.

He had known I was coming. I was certain of it. If the ache had eased in my chest for hours, it must have eased in his, and he must have felt me draw nearer with every mile. Yet he looked at me like a man watching a door swing shut behind him.

That was not the face of someone who had asked for me.

It was the face of someone who had just understood why I'd been sent.