A CARRIAGE, A GATE, A DIFFERENT WORLD

The morning she left, nobody said goodbye.

Lira stood in the courtyard before dawn, her single bag slung over one shoulder — not that there was much in it. Two spare uniforms. A hairbrush with half its bristles missing. A small, smooth stone she'd found in the garden years ago and kept for no reason she could ever explain, except that it was the only thing in the entire world that was truly hers, chosen by no one but her.

The carriage meant for the servants was smaller than the one waiting for Sable and the other pack children, tucked off to the side like an afterthought, which — Lira supposed — it was. She climbed in beside two other household staff, an older groundskeeper named Bricks and a nervous young laundry girl who couldn't have been more than fourteen, and settled onto a bench hard enough to remind her exactly where she stood in the order of things.

Through the small window, she watched the estate pull away — the Great Hall, the frost-bitten gardens, the room where she'd knelt on cold marble more mornings than she could count. She thought she might feel something. Relief, maybe. Sadness. Anything.

Mostly, she just felt the carriage wheels bumping over frozen ground, and the stone in her pocket, and a strange, quiet hum underneath her skin that she didn't have a word for yet.

The journey took the better part of a day. The land changed slowly around them — the King's territory giving way to open, wilder country, forests thick and ancient, the air growing sharper and cleaner the farther they traveled. Bricks slept through most of it. The laundry girl chattered nervously about what the Academy kitchens might be like, whether the pack children there would be as cruel as the ones at home, whether Lira had heard any stories.

Lira hadn't. Not really. Just the shape of the place from a carriage window years ago, and Corin's quiet warning in the stable yard. The Princes there don't play nice.

She kept that thought folded small and careful in the back of her mind the whole ride, the way you'd keep a blade you weren't sure you'd need yet, but didn't want to lose track of either.

She saw the gates before she saw anything else.

They rose out of the tree line like something out of an old story — black iron twisted into the shapes of wolves mid-howl, taller than any wall Lira had ever stood beneath, stretching up until they seemed to scrape the pale afternoon sky itself. Banners hung from towers beyond them, a dozen different colors snapping in a wind that smelled like pine and woodsmoke and something else underneath it, something wild and old that made the hair on the back of Lira's neck rise before she understood why.

The carriage slowed as it approached the gates, falling into a line of grander carriages ahead of it;gilded, crested, drawn by horses groomed to a shine Lira's whole life had never once afforded her. Pack heirs stepped out of them one by one, greeted by attendants, by other students, by the easy confidence of people who had never once doubted they belonged somewhere.

Lira climbed out of her own carriage last, boots landing on gravel instead of polished stone, and looked up.

The Academy itself unfolded beyond the gates like something too large to hold in one glance. Towers of pale gray stone stretched skyward, their windows catching the weak autumn light and throwing it back gold. Courtyards opened between buildings older than any kingdom Lira had ever heard named, ivy climbing walls that had clearly stood through centuries of exactly this —new students arriving, wide-eyed, small, swallowed whole by the sheer scale of the place.

She stood there a moment longer than she should have, just breathing it in. The cold, clean bite of mountain air. The distant sound of laughter and shouting from somewhere beyond the main courtyard. The low, constant hum of dozens of different pack scents mingling together — something Lira could somehow *feel* more than smell, prickling under her skin in a way she'd never experienced before and didn't know how to name.

"Move it," a voice snapped behind her. An Academy attendant, older, harried, already overwhelmed by the chaos of arrival day. "Servants' entrance is around the east wing. You're blocking the main path."

Right. Of course.

Lira ducked her head and followed Bricks and the laundry girl around the side, away from the grand front steps where pack heirs were being welcomed with bows and banners, toward a smaller, plainer door tucked against the east wing like something the Academy would rather people didn't notice.

But even from there — even from the servants' entrance, cast in shadow while golden light spilled across the front steps for everyone else — Lira caught her first real glimpse of them.

The Princes.

She didn't know their names yet, not really, just fragments of gossip she'd overheard over the years. But she knew instantly, instinctively, which ones they were. It was in the way the crowd shifted around them, the way space simply opened up wherever they walked, like the world itself understood their importance before anyone had to explain it.

One of them — tall, dark-haired, moving through the courtyard like he owned the ground beneath his boots — glanced toward the east wing entrance for just a fraction of a second. Toward her.

Lira froze.

It was nothing. A stray glance, gone as fast as it came, his attention already sliding back to whatever conversation waited for him among the golden crowd. He couldn't have seen anything worth noticing —just another servant girl ducking through a side door, exactly the kind of person his eyes were trained to slide right past.

And yet.

For one strange, breathless second, something in Lira's chest had *reacted*. Not fear, exactly. Not the familiar tightness of being noticed by someone who might mean her harm.

Something closer to recognition. Like a held breath she hadn't known she was holding, finally let go.

She shook it off. Nerves, she told herself. New place, new fear, an overactive imagination filling in gaps that weren't really there.

She followed Bricks through the servants' door, into a narrower hallway that smelled like polish and old stone, leaving the golden courtyard and its towering Princes behind her.

But she couldn't quite shake the feeling that had followed her through that doorway. That quiet, humming pull beneath her skin, like something inside her had just woken up for the very first time and didn't plan on going back to sleep.

She had no idea yet how right that feeling was.