CHAPTER 5

Nobody came to show her to breakfast.

Alira had been awake since before the sun came up, which meant she had not really slept. She had lain in the unfamiliar bed and listened to the sounds of a new territory settling into morning. Distant voices. The creak of a gate. Somewhere, a mut barking once and then going quiet.

She had waited till after the hall sounds picked up below. Then she got dressed, put her hair up, and went to find food herself.

The great hall was not hard to find. She followed the smell.

It went quiet when she walked in.

Not the loud kind of quiet. Not the kind where people stop and stare openly. The kind where conversations lower and eyes cut sideways, and everyone suddenly finds something very interesting about their plate. She had grown up in Oakshade Pack territory. She knew that kind of quiet. It was the sound of a room deciding what you were.

She picked up a empty bowl from the end of the table, filled it from the pot near the fire, and sat down at the far end of the bench. Alone. She ate steadily and did not look up to count how many people were watching her.

She already knew the answer was most of them.

A young wolf near the middle of the table leaned toward the one beside him and said something too low to catch. The second wolf glanced at her. She kept eating.

This was fine. She had survived worse than a cold welcome.

What she had not expected was how much it would feel like her father's house. Different walls, different wolves, the same feeling of being present without being wanted.

She finished her bowl, rinsed it at the basin in the corner, and walked back out.

Lucien Dravon had not been at breakfast. She had checked, quietly, without making it obvious.

He was not at lunch either.

*****

Her room had one window.

It faced the inner yard, which turned out to be useful. She spent the afternoon sitting on the narrow ledge of it, her back against the frame, one knee pulled up, watching Ashveil move through the hours below her.

There was more to it than she had expected. She had thought a vengeance-built pack would look hard all the way through, and it was hard, in places. The wolves who trained in the yard moved like people who had been taught that softness cost you. The watch rotation at the gates was tighter than anything she had seen in Oakshade Pack territory.

But there were other things too. A woman sitting outside the storehouse nursing a very new baby. Two older wolves playing some kind of dice game on a low wall, arguing cheerfully about the rules. A boy of maybe twelve chasing a puppy in and out of the stables, both of them ridiculous with happiness.

This was not what she had pictured when she thought of Lucien Dravon's pack.

She watched until the afternoon light went flat, and then she sat with her back to the window and thought about what to do with herself.

She had her medical kit. She had her knowledge. She had a journal full of eight years of evidence hidden under her clothes in a travel case. What she did not have was permission to do anything, a friendly face to orient herself, or any real sense of how long she could sit in this room before the walls started to close.

She stood up.

She had not come this far to sit in a room and wait for someone to decide what she was allowed to be.

******

She found the infirmary on the second try.

The first door she opened was a storage room. The second was in the lower corridor of the main building, past the kitchens, where a thin line of light showed under the door even though it was nearly evening.

She knocked.

No answer.

She pushed the door open.

The woman inside was somewhere in her forties, with dark circles so deep they looked like bruises and the particular grey color of someone who had not slept in longer than was good for them. She was bent over a workbench with a cloth pressed to a wolf's forearm, her hands moving efficiently even through what was clearly total exhaustion.

She looked up when Alira came in.

"Wrong room," she said, and looked back down.

"Is it?" said Alira.

She stepped inside and looked around properly. The infirmary was small but well-stocked in some areas and dangerously thin in others. She could see three occupied beds at the back. On the workbench beside the healer: two open wounds waiting, a bowl of water that had gone red, and one pair of hands doing the work that should have had three pairs on it.

"I'm Alira," she said. "I'm a healer."

The woman did not look up. "I know who you are."

"How long have you been awake?" said Alira.

A pause. Then, reluctantly, "Thirty hours. Give or take."

Alira crossed to the basin in the corner, rolled her sleeves up, and washed her hands.

"Tell me what you need," she said.

The healer finally looked up. She studied Alira with the flat, measuring look of someone who had no patience left for anything that was going to waste her time. Her eyes went to Alira's hands, clean and waiting. Then to the three wolves in the beds. Then back to Alira's face.

"The one on the left has a fever that won't break," she said slowly. "I've tried two different compresses. Nothing's holding."

Alira moved to the bed on the left and looked at the wolf there. Young, maybe eighteen, flushed and breathing fast. She put her hand to his throat, felt his pulse, then pressed two fingers behind his ear at the lymph node.

"When did it start?" she asked.

"Yesterday morning," said the healer.

"Has he eaten since?"

"He can't keep anything down."

Alira straightened. "Have you got willowbark and dried nettle together? You want both, not just one." She paused. "Also, something with ginger if you have it."

The healer stared at her for a moment. "That's not a standard treatment."

"Standard hasn't worked," said Alira simply. "Do you have them?"

Another pause. Then the healer moved to the supply shelf and started pulling things down without another word.

They worked in silence for a few minutes. Not uncomfortable silence. The kind that existed between two people who were too busy to waste breath on things that did not matter.

Then the healer stopped.

"You know the Alpha didn't authorise this," she said. Her voice was careful. Not threatening. Just honest.

Alira kept her eyes on the compound she was mixing. "I know," she said.

"He was very specific. Basic courtesy. You're not supposed to—"

"I know what he said," said Alira, cutting the lady off.

The healer was quiet.

Alira looked up then, and met her eyes directly. "Your patient has had a fever for over a day, and you have been on your feet for thirty hours," she said. "I am not going anywhere, and neither are you, so we can either stand here and talk about what I am and am not supposed to do, or we can get him better." She tilted her head toward the other two beds. "Then we move to them."

The healer looked at her for a long moment.

Then she said, quietly, "My name is Wren."

"Wren," said Alira. "Tell me about the other two…."

Wren told her.

They worked through the evening and into the night, side by side in that small room, and by the time the wolf on the left finally stopped shaking and his fever began to drop, Wren had stopped treating Alira like a problem that had walked through her door.

She had started treating her like a healer.

Alira did not think about the Alpha's rules or the cold breakfast or the wolves who had watched her like she was something to be decided about. She thought about the fever coming down, the next patient and whether Wren had the supplies she needed for the morning.

She was still thinking about it when the infirmary door opened at midnight.

And Lucien Dravon stood in the doorway.