Chapter 21

Wren

The ride to the summit grounds took two full days, and Wren spent most of the first one going over border-dispute logistics with Ezra so thoroughly that by the time they made camp that evening, she suspected she could have recited Ashborne's grazing-rights complaint from memory in her sleep.

"You're overpreparing," Ezra said, watching her go through the intelligence reports for the third time by firelight, Rennick and Dara already asleep a few yards off, the rest of the honor guard taking watch in shifts around the small clearing they'd chosen. "I've seen you do a lot of things in five years, Wren. Overprepare isn't usually one of them."

"There's a first time for everything."

"Mm." He didn't push, which by now she understood was his particular way of pushing anyway — the silence doing the work his words weren't going to. "This isn't about the grazing dispute, is it."

"It's partially about the grazing dispute."

"Partially." He let that sit in the firelight a moment. "Look. Whatever happens when we get there — whoever's standing under that Blackthorn banner — you didn't spend five years becoming Nightshade's Alpha by accident, and you're not going to unbecome her the second you're standing in a room with him again. Whatever that ache's been doing to you the last few days, it doesn't get a vote in who you are anymore. You already decided that a long time ago."

Wren set the reports down, finally, and looked at him across the fire — this stubborn, weathered man who'd opened a door to two starving strangers on the worst night of her life and never once, in five years, let her forget what she'd built since. "You always know exactly what to say."

"Mostly I know what not to say, and I fill the rest in as I go." A small, dry smile. "Get some sleep. Long day tomorrow, and I want you sharp, not running on nerves and cold coffee."

She didn't sleep well, but she slept, and the second day's ride passed in the particular tense quiet of a group of people all privately bracing for something none of them had said out loud.

The summit grounds hadn't changed in five years, as far as Wren could tell, riding in at the head of a modest but unmistakably capable retinue — the old stone hall at the meeting point of all five territories, chosen generations back specifically because it belonged to none of them and could be defended by all of them equally, back when the packs had still needed reminding that alliance was safer than war. She remembered hearing about it as a girl, in half-attentive lessons about pack history she'd never expected to matter to someone as far down the hierarchy as she'd been. She'd certainly never expected to ride toward it herself, at the head of her own delegation, wearing a seal that had waited three generations for someone worth wearing it.

Wren had changed considerably more than the architecture had.

"You're doing the thing," Sable said, riding close beside her, older now, sharper around the eyes in the way five years of real responsibility did to a person, but still exactly as willing to needle Wren about her tells as she'd been the night of the Moon Ceremony that started all of this. Sable had stayed Nightshade's second through all of it — through the ascension, through the alliance-building, through two proposals from perfectly nice Ironfang wolves that she'd turned down without a second thought because, in her own words, she "hadn't left one pack just to get folded into somebody else's" — and Wren counted her, still, as the single most reliable fact in an otherwise complicated life.

"What thing."

"The thing where your jaw does that particular set it does right before you walk into somewhere you'd rather not be." Sable studied her a moment longer. "You know Blackthorn's going to be there. You've known since the summons arrived. You could talk about it, instead of riding in silence for two days pretending you haven't thought about it at all."

"I've thought about it." Wren kept her eyes forward, on the old stone hall growing larger against the tree line. "I've had five years to think about it. I don't need to talk about it. I need to walk in there, represent Nightshade's interests in whatever border dispute Ashborne's dragged everyone out here for, and walk back out again without giving anyone in that room a single thing to use against us."

"That's a very controlled answer for someone whose jaw is still doing the thing."

"I contain multitudes."

"You contain exactly one very stubborn thing wearing several different disguises, and I love you for it, but I'm allowed to notice." Sable's voice softened, just slightly, dropping the teasing edge for something more genuine underneath it. "For what it's worth — whatever happens in there, you don't have to do it alone. You've never had to do any of it alone, not since the day I showed up in your doorway with a bag already packed. That hasn't changed just because the stakes got bigger."

Wren didn't have a response ready for that, so she reached over instead and squeezed Sable's hand where it rested on the reins, and let that be answer enough.

Behind them rode twelve more — Nightshade's honor guard, hand-picked, more than the entire pack had numbered the week she'd stumbled onto Ezra's doorstep half-starved. Rennick led them now, Dara at his side, both of them well past the thin, hollow-eyed survivors they'd been five years ago; Rennick had taken to training new pack members with a patience Wren suspected he'd learned specifically by watching how carefully Ezra had once handled two frightened strangers who'd shown up expecting to be turned away. Ezra rode near the front beside her, silver through his beard gone fuller but his eyes exactly as sharp as they'd been the day he'd decided two strangers weren't rogues after all — technically Nightshade's elder now rather than its Alpha, a title he'd relinquished to her without a single day of visible regret, though Wren suspected some nights it cost him more than he ever let on. Rurik had ridden ahead separately, Ironfang's own delegation traveling under its own banner, the two packs' alliance too well established by now to need the optics of arriving together — though Wren suspected, privately, that he'd find some reason to be standing near her within an hour of the summit opening regardless, the way he generally did at any gathering where both their packs had interests to protect.

Milo hadn't come. Someone needed to hold Nightshade's home ground, and at seventeen he'd argued for the responsibility with enough seriousness — citing, with a straight face, every logistics lesson Ezra had ever drilled into him — that Wren hadn't had the heart to tell him she still sometimes pictured him stirring a pot too small for his hands, twelve years old and trying not to burn it. He'd grown into someone she was, quietly, enormously proud of, in a way that still occasionally caught her off guard with how much it felt like family.

Five years. It didn't feel like five years, riding toward that old stone hall with her chest doing something complicated and familiar that she'd have preferred to blame entirely on nerves about the border dispute.

The old ache stirred, low and unmistakable, the way it hadn't in longer than she could easily remember. She pressed a hand flat against her sternum without meaning to, an old habit reasserting itself, and told herself it was nothing. Politics. Old ceremonies held in old buildings. Nothing more specific than that.

She didn't entirely believe herself. She rode toward the hall anyway.

The hall's forecourt was already crowded by the time they rode in — Ashborne's colors thick along the eastern wall, as host pack should be; Ironfang's banner already raised near the stables, Rurik's people efficient as always; a scattering of the fifth power's colors near the back, present but unaligned as they generally preferred to stay, a pack whose name Wren had learned over the years belonged to wolves who'd built an entire political identity out of never quite committing to anyone.

And along the northern wall, unmistakable even after five years, unmistakable in a way that had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with something lower and older than memory: Blackthorn black and silver, banners raised, a retinue easily twice the size of Nightshade's own.

Wren's hand found her sternum again before she could stop it.

"Alpha." Ezra's voice, low, beside her, not quite a question. "You good?"

She made herself breathe, made herself unclench a jaw she hadn't noticed clenching, made herself remember, deliberately, every single thing she'd built in the five years since the last time she'd stood this close to that particular banner. Nightshade. The seal, still warm in memory against her palm from the night they'd given it to her. Twelve honor guard at her back who trusted her with their lives. A bloodline that had chosen, for reasons still not entirely her own to understand, to wake up inside her instead of staying buried with three generations of ancestors who'd never gotten the chance to use it. A found family that had watched her build every single piece of this from six starving strangers and a cabin with more moss than roof, and had never once, in five years, made her feel like an afterthought for it.

"I'm good," she said, and swung down off her horse before her voice could betray anything else, and walked toward the hall's open doors without once looking back at the Blackthorn banner, though she felt it the entire way, like a weight pressed flat against her spine.

Whatever waited inside that hall, she intended to walk in as Nightshade's Alpha, and nothing else. Whatever she'd once been to the wolves standing beneath that banner, she'd spent five years making sure it wasn't going to be the only thing left of her by the time she reached the door.