Chapter 4

Wren

They walked for four days before they found anything that looked like Nightshade land.

The first night, they slept in the hollow of a fallen tree a few miles past the Blackthorn line, close enough that Wren could still catch the ghost of home in the air if she let herself try, which she made a point of not doing. Sable built the fire without being asked and didn't say anything about the way Wren's hands still hadn't stopped shaking, which was its own kind of mercy.

"You should eat something," Sable said, the second night, holding out a strip of rabbit Wren hadn't seen her catch or cook.

"I'm not hungry."

"I didn't ask if you were hungry. I said you should eat something." Sable's brothers had taught her to snare rabbits before they taught her much else about pack life, which was turning out to be the single most useful fact either of them knew, and she wasn't about to let the effort go to waste on Wren's pride. "You're no good to either of us if you fall over."

Wren ate. It didn't taste like much of anything, but it stayed down, which she was learning to count as a small victory these days, the same way she was learning to count most things — the pain hadn't gotten worse today, that was a victory; she'd walked twelve miles without Sable having to slow down for her, that was a victory. She'd stopped waiting for someone to come after them, which felt less like a victory and more like a wound closing over something that was never going to heal right.

By the third of those days Wren had stopped being able to tell whether the ache behind her ribs was the rejection or just plain hunger, and by the fourth, she'd mostly stopped trying to separate the two.

Nightshade territory announced itself the way a wound does — not all at once, but in stages. First the trees changed, older and closer together, the kind of forest that had been left alone too long to be anyone's, the way Blackthorn's woods were carefully, purposefully somebody's. Then the quiet changed. No border markers. No patrol scent laid fresh enough to matter. A pack that wasn't watching its own edges wasn't a pack in any sense Wren had grown up understanding the word, and some old, careful part of her — the part that had grown up memorizing which stretches of forest belonged to which teeth — didn't like walking into land nobody seemed to be guarding.

"This feels wrong," Sable said quietly, hand drifting to the knife at her belt.

"Everything's felt wrong for four days. I'm not sure I trust my own read on it anymore."

They found the first sign of actual people two hours past the tree-line shift: a cabin with smoke coming out of it, badly patched, more moss than roof in places, the kind of structure that had clearly been built by more hands than currently lived in it.

Sable's hand closed around the knife properly now. "Could be rogues."

"Could be." Wren kept walking anyway. She'd run out of energy to be afraid of the wrong things sometime around hour six of that morning, and if this turned out to be the end of the road in the worst possible way, at least it would be an ending, which was more than the last four days had offered her.

The man who came out to meet them looked like the cabin did — held together mostly by stubbornness. Older, gray through the beard, a scar pulling one side of his mouth permanently down, and eyes that did the fast, practiced sweep of two strangers that told Wren he'd had reason to make that assessment before and hadn't always liked what he'd found.

"You're not rogue," he said finally, like he was working it out loud, circling them at a careful distance that wasn't quite threatening and wasn't quite welcoming either. "Rogues don't usually still smell like somebody else's pack. That scent doesn't wash off easy. Not for weeks."

"We're not rogue." Wren made herself hold his stare, mostly out of the same stubbornness that seemed to be keeping his roof up. "We used to be Blackthorn."

Something moved behind his eyes at that. Recognition, maybe, or its cousin, pity. "Used to be," he repeated. "That's a specific way to say it."

"It's the accurate way to say it."

"Rejected?" He asked it plainly, no cruelty in it, just the kind of directness that came from a man who'd stopped having patience for softer words a long time ago.

Wren's jaw tightened before she could stop it. "Does it matter?"

"Not to me. Matters to whoever did it, I'd imagine, a lot more than it should." He was quiet long enough that Wren braced for the door to shut, for the walk to start all over again with nowhere left to walk to. Then he stepped back instead, held the door, and said the first thing in four days that had sounded like an actual welcome. "Name's Ezra. Whatever ran you off, it can wait till you've eaten. Nobody makes good decisions hungry, and you two look like you haven't made a good decision in days."

Inside, the cabin held four other people, which Wren understood after a moment was not a fraction of Nightshade's population but the entirety of it. An old woman sat by the fire, wrapped in a blanket despite the warmth, eyes on the flames and not on the newcomers — Petra, Ezra said, though Petra herself didn't offer the name. A boy of maybe twelve stood over a pot on the hearth, stirring it with the kind of concentration that suggested he'd been told once, sharply, what happened when it burned, and had no intention of finding out twice. Two others, close to Wren's own age, sat near the back wall, thin in a way that had nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with a bad winter that hadn't fully ended even now, months later.

"This is Nightshade," Ezra said, watching her take it in, not bothering to soften it. "Used to be near two hundred strong, three generations back. Disease took half. A bad Alpha took most of the rest — spent the pack's strength picking fights he couldn't win, and by the time anybody had the sense to stop him, there wasn't much pack left to save. Nobody's had much reason to stay since."

"What happened to him? The bad Alpha."

"Buried him myself, six years back." He said it the way you'd report weather, flat and long past grieving it out loud. "Haven't had reason to name another since. Milo there's too young. Rennick and Dara" — a nod toward the two by the back wall — "never wanted it, and I don't blame them. Leading something this thin isn't leading. It's mostly just watching it not quite die."

"You want to stay," he added, "you work. Everybody here works. That's the whole membership requirement. Roof needs fixing, water needs hauling, and somebody's going to have to learn the snare lines better than Milo's learned them so far, no offense to Milo."

"None taken," Milo said, from the pot, without looking up, which surprised a small, unfamiliar huff of something close to a laugh out of Wren — the first one in four days.

Wren looked around the room — the boy at the pot, the old woman who still hadn't looked up, Sable already crouched by the fire warming her hands like she'd decided to stay before Wren had even finished deciding anything — and felt something settle in her chest that wasn't the ache from Blackthorn, for the first time since the ceremony.

It wasn't hope, exactly. She wasn't ready to call it that yet. But it was something with a little more weight to it than nothing, and after the week she'd had, she was willing to take it and not ask too many questions about what it might grow into.

That night she slept on a pallet on the floor, Sable's shoulder warm against her back, and for the first time in four days, she didn't dream about the clearing at all.