02

Rule one of being cast out beyond the ridge: do not stop walking.

I learned that approximately four hours ago, when the adrenaline wore off and the cold started getting creative. Now my feet are blocks of wood inside shoes that belong to a smaller woman, my borrowed dress is a joke the wind keeps telling, and the road behind me is gone. Not metaphorically. The actual road. It just ended somewhere back in the dark, dissolving into pine forest and rock, and now there is only the ridge ahead of me, black against a sky that is starting to go gray at the edges.

Dawn is coming. Maren Vane said before dawn, and I have always been excellent at following instructions I hate.

The cold is the kind that gets into your bones and starts rearranging the furniture. My breath comes out in ragged white puffs. I think about turning around approximately every thirty seconds, and every thirty seconds I picture Celeste's smile, and I keep walking. Pride is a terrible survival strategy. It is also the only one I have.

By midmorning I am off the ridge and into the lowlands, and the forest here is different. Older. The pines crowd closer, the undergrowth thicker, and everything smells like rot and wet bark and something else underneath it — musk, old kills, territory marked and re-marked by things that do not answer to any Alpha. Rogue territory. No pack claims this land, which means no pack patrols it, which means anything with teeth can be waiting behind any tree.

I keep the knife in my hand now. My fingers are so numb I have to keep checking it is still there, which is a special kind of absurd. I also keep my eyes moving — treeline, ground, treeline — the way my father taught me before he died, back when I was small enough to ride on his shoulders and the woods were just the woods.

My stomach is eating itself. I have not eaten since yesterday morning — nerves, the wedding hair, all of it — and now hunger is a fist closing around my insides. I find a creek, mostly iced over, and I break the edge with a rock and drink until my teeth ache. The water tastes like iron and pine needles. It is the best thing I have ever had.

That is when I hear it. Branches, cracking, too heavy for deer.

The rogue comes out of the treeline low and fast, and there is no time to think, no time to do anything but move. He is big, scarred across one eye, and he is not playing. This is not a dominance display. This is hunger with fur on it.

I have a knife. I always have a knife — healer's habit, for cutting bandages, for stripping bark for poultices. It is a small knife. It looks like a toy in my shaking hand.

He lunges. I sidestep and his shoulder clips me and I go down hard on frozen ground, the air leaving my lungs in a rush. Pine needles in my mouth. The taste of dirt and blood — mine, my lip split on a rock. He wheels, jaws open, and I do the only thing I can think of: I go for the soft parts. The knife goes into his foreleg and he screams — an actual scream, high and wrong — and he snaps at the blade, and for one endless second his teeth close on empty air an inch from my wrist.

I roll. Gravel and ice tear at my palms. I am on my feet and I am running, and he is limping, and I am faster.

I am faster because I have to be. That is the whole math of it.

I do not stop until the trees thin and I hit the creek again, wider here, frozen solid in the middle with black water moving fast at the edges. My hands are shaking so bad I can barely feel the knife anymore. There is blood on my borrowed dress. I do not know if it is his or mine.

I sit down on the bank because my legs have decided they are done negotiating, and the cold comes up through the ground and into my bones, and I think, with a strange calm, that this is probably it. Cast out with nothing, bled out by a rogue at a frozen creek, and the last thing I will ever hear is water moving under ice.

My mother's face floats up out of nowhere — her hands in my hair this morning, quick and silent, braiding like she was trying to put armor on me. She knew. She knew before I did, and she said nothing, and I cannot decide if I forgive her for that or if I will carry it with me wherever I am going next.

Funny. I always thought I would die somewhere warm. A healer's death. Herbs and blankets and someone holding my hand.

The gray-green light is going strange at the edges. My breathing slows. The cold stops hurting, which I know — I know this, I am a healer's daughter — means the worst part is starting. I am dying, and part of my brain is taking clinical notes, and the rest of me is just so tired.

Then I hear it.

A heartbeat. Slow, deep, steady — and it is not mine. Mine is fluttering like a trapped bird. This one is strong. Deliberate. Close.

I try to lift my head. I cannot. The treeline blurs, and between the dark trunks something moves — something white, huge, silent as falling snow — and my last conscious thought is the stupidest one I have ever had:

Wolves aren't white.