Chapter 5

Briony's POV

The horn cut through the pack house before I even made it to my room, three short blasts that meant one thing, border trouble.

I was already moving before I finished thinking about it, gown forgotten, running barefoot down the hall toward the healing house because that's where I will be needed, horn or no horn, mate or no mate. Sage caught up with me halfway there, already in her gear, blood on her knuckles that wasn't hers.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Scouts hit the east patrol. Three down, one bad." She didn't slow down. "Faro took a blade to the gut. Silver-laced."

"Silver." My stomach dropped. Silver didn't just cut, it poisoned, ate through a wolf's healing from the inside out, and there wasn't a stitch in the world that fixed that.

We burst through the healing house doors right as they carried him in. Faro was young, younger than me, and the wound in his side was already black at the edges, veins standing out dark under his skin like ink spreading through water.

"Get him on the table," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt.

Old Bettina was already there, sleeves pushed up, hands moving fast over a tray of herbs that wouldn't be enough and we both knew it. "Silver's too deep," she muttered, mostly to herself. "Too deep, too fast, I can't pull it clean…"

"Then we slow it." I pressed both hands to the wound, feeling the wrongness of it under my palms, heat where there shouldn't be heat, poison working its way toward his heart with every second we wasted talking. "Bettina, the charcoal paste, now…"

"Won't hold him. Not this deep." She was already crying, and Bettina didn't cry, not in the fifteen years I'd known her working this room. "I've seen this before, girl. He doesn't have the night."

Faro made a sound I will never forget, something between a scream and a whimper, body arching off the table, and Sage grabbed his shoulders to keep him from thrashing the wound wider open.

"No." I said it out loud, mostly to myself, mostly because I refused to believe it. "No, we're not losing him. Not like this."

I don't know what I did next. I couldn't explain it if someone held a blade to my throat and demanded an answer. I just pressed down harder, both palms flat against that black, poisoned wound, and something in my chest cracked open the same way it had at the binding stone,except this time it didn't feel like it was being taken from me. It felt like it was pouring out of me, down through my arms and out through my hands.

The room went warm, like standing too close to a fire.

"What…" Sage's voice cut off hard.

Under my palms, the black lines in Faro's skin were shrinking. Pulling back. The poison retreated the way frost does when the sun finally hits it, and the wound itself, the actual gash, was knitting shut in front of my eyes, skin closing over muscle closing over the mess the silver had made of him.

Faro's breathing evened out. Just like that. Like somebody had reached in and turned the danger off.

Nobody said anything. The whole room had gone silent except for Faro's breathing, slow and even now, and my own heart hammering so hard I could hear it in my ears.

I lifted my hands off him and stared at them like they belonged to somebody else. There was a faint warmth still humming under my skin, fading slow, like embers cooling down after a fire.

"Bettina." My voice came out shaking. "What just…"

She wasn't looking at Faro anymore. She was looking at my hand, at my palm, and her face had gone the color of old paper.

"Give me your hand," she said.

I held it out. There, right in the center of my palm, was a mark that hadn't been there this morning,a faint line curling into a shape like a knot, or a root system, or something I didn't have a word for, still glowing faint and gold under my skin.

"That's not possible." Bettina's hand was shaking around my wrist. "That mark hasn't shown itself in this pack in three generations. I thought it died with your great-grandmother."

"What mark?" I pulled my hand back, heart climbing straight into my throat. "Bettina, what are you talking about?"

The doors slammed open behind us, and I didn't need to turn around to feel who it was, the pull in my chest told me before my eyes did, the way it always did now.

Kieran stopped in the doorway, eyes going straight to Faro breathing easy on the table, then to me, then to the mark still glowing faint gold in my open palm.

"What the hell did you just do?”