Chapter2

Lyra ‘s POV

The Cold Plains broke my skin open in three days. Darian offered me a brazier and a warm tent, and I turned both down.

"There's no princess out here, Uncle. Stop looking for one."

He studied me a long moment. "Royal blood or not, this place buries soft women."

"Then teach me. Wolf, blade, bow, war-strategy — all of it. From today I'm just another soldier under your command."

Something moved behind his eyes. I'd said the very thing he'd come prepared to say to me.

"Good," he barked, and he was grinning. "Then I'll hold nothing back."

He didn't. At dawn we ran the ice, and he drove my wolf out of me over and over until shifting stopped tearing and started singing. Afternoons went to the bow and the blade. Nights went to his annotated war scrolls by low firelight. He'd ordered the garrison to show me no mercy, so they didn't. They picked me for every sparring circle and put me in the snow, again and again.

I let them. When the bowstring split my fingers open, I buried my hand in the drift until it went numb and drew again. My wolf learned to run until her paws bled and then run further. I was starting from nothing, so I paid in the only coin I had — every hour the others slept.

Three winters later, the boy who used to pin me down knelt in the snow with his arm twisted up behind him. Kael Frostbane laughed through his teeth.

"The Commander was right. You're cruel to yourself and worse to everyone else."

I dropped him. "Get up. We're riding the line."

Darian took us out along the frozen river. Deep winter, he said. The strays were too busy starving to raid us.

Then it came back to me — the war report that reached the court in my last life. A brutal cold snap. Ice thick enough to carry them. The enemy pouring across in the dark, and our border drowning in its own blood.

"They're starving, Uncle. Starving wolves raid. If that ice holds their weight, they'll come over it tonight."

His face went hard. "Measure it. Now."

It held. It would've carried war wolves and horses both.

We laid the ambush instead, and I tasted my first battle that night and loved it. We broke them on the river.

Alpha King Ragnar Vorthys summoned Darian home to the Red Moon Court for his reward, with the new year coming on.

In my last life, this was the season Selena first came crawling back to court.

I wondered how she was enjoying all that splendor she'd killed me for. I was going to see her.

——————————————————————

Lyra ‘s POV

The day I rode out, the court buried me. A proclamation went across the whole Blood Moon Realm: Lyra Crimson, dead of a bloodline mutation. So the girl who came home three winters later wasn't a princess at all — just Darian Wolfshear's adopted son, a low-ranking lieutenant with a borrowed name and a soldier's coat.

Ragnar Vorthys gave out the rewards, then kept me back alone. He reached for my hand and stopped short when he felt what the frontier had made of it, rougher than any man's in his own guard.

"Have they been cruel to you out there, Lyra?"

I gave him a warrior's salute. "I couldn't serve you at court, Your Majesty. Holding your border was no cruelty."

That pleased him. He gave me the golden blood-whip and leave to stay in the palace a few days.

I went looking for my mother, Luna Isolde, and found Selena in the Crescent Garden instead — pearls in her hair, blood-jade at her throat, a warmer cradled in soft hands. We were born the same hour and no one alive would've called us sisters now.

She covered her mouth. "Poor little thing. You've got the face of a scullery maid."

Her women laughed. I didn't move.

"You worry too much. I've never been better."

It was the truth. Out there I ran on my wolf's back under an open sky, I had brothers who'd die beside me, and my fate belonged to nobody but me. Selena heard a brave lie. She always hears what she wants.

Then a shriek cut across the garden. Our eldest sister, Victoria, first daughter of the King's first wife, standing over a shattered blood-jade cup with her wolf pacing at her heels.

"Someone's going to pay for this."

Selena curtsied low. "Sister."

Victoria's eyes brightened. She flicked a hand toward her wolf. "Then let her bite you and we'll call it even. You're so gifted at pleasing me."