Chapter 3

Wren

The walk home took longer than the walk to the clearing had. Wren noticed that somewhere around the halfway point, the way you notice small useless facts when you don't have room left for the big ones — that she was slower now, that her hands wouldn't quite stop shaking, that the ache behind her ribs hadn't faded the way pain was supposed to fade once the thing that caused it was over.

It didn't fade. If anything, walking away from the clearing seemed to settle it in deeper, like it was looking for somewhere permanent to live.

Her mother's light was on when she got home, which didn't mean anything. Her mother's light was always on, and it had been a long time since that meant anyone was waiting up for her. Wren let herself in quietly anyway, out of habit more than hope, heard the television going in the front room, and didn't stop to say anything. Nobody called out to ask why.

She sat on the edge of her bed a long time without taking her shoes off. Somewhere in the house a door closed. Somewhere outside, the pack was still talking about her — she could feel it, a low hum of attention she'd spent her whole life avoiding and had somehow ended up drowning in anyway, for exactly one night, for exactly the wrong reason.

By the time the sky started going gray at the edges, she'd stopped crying and started packing, and she couldn't have said which decision had come first.

She was folding the second of her two good shirts into a bag too small for the job when someone knocked once and didn't wait for an answer before opening the door.

Sable stood in the doorway with a pack already slung over one shoulder, dressed for walking, hair tied back the way she wore it for anything that involved actual effort.

Wren looked at the bag before she looked at Sable's face. "No."

"Wasn't asking."

"Sable—"

"I said I wasn't asking." She came in, sat on the end of the bed like she had a hundred times before, and started refolding the shirt Wren had just butchered, because Sable had never once in her life watched someone do something badly without fixing it. "You think I'm going to stay here and let Talia's mother pretend to be sorry for you at the market for the next six months? I'd rather leave."

"That's not a reason."

"It's the only one I've got, and it's good enough." A pause, something steadier underneath the joke now. "I'm not letting you do this alone. That's the whole reason. Take it or don't — I'm coming either way."

Wren didn't have anything left to argue with, and some small, exhausted part of her was grateful enough not to try very hard.

They left before the rest of the pack was fully awake, which Wren told herself was practical — easier to walk out unnoticed than to do it under an audience twice in two days — and which was also, if she was honest, the last mercy she had it in her to ask the Goddess for.

The territory line was marked by nothing more than an old fence post and a change in the trees, the kind of boundary you'd miss if you didn't already know it was there. Wren had crossed it a hundred times as a kid, daring herself a few feet into unclaimed land and running back before anyone noticed. She'd never once crossed it without a plan to come back.

She stopped there anyway, just for a second, and made herself look at the only home she'd ever had.

Nothing moved. No one came after her. She hadn't expected anyone to, and it still cost her something to have that confirmed.

Something in her chest still ached, low and constant, a wound with no name yet. She pressed a hand flat against her sternum without meaning to, and made herself a promise instead of a wish, because wishes hadn't done her much good lately: whatever she became out there, she was never again going to be the kind of person a room could look straight through.

"Ready?" Sable asked. Not pushing. Just asking.

Wren turned around, and didn't look back again. "No," she said. "Let's go anyway."