Chapter 2 - Outside the Walls (Elena)

The fire had burned lower behind its iron screen, but I hadn't returned to my chambers. Instead, I walked the outer wall’s worn path, my gloved hands locked behind my back, my boots scraping the same black stone line I had traced through over a hundred sleepless nights. The frost patterns on the high windows had long since stopped resembling ceremonial script, and recently, they had begun to look like warnings I continued to ignore.

I passed my bedchamber door without entering. The ache between my brows was familiar enough that I rubbed at it once, then stopped. 

A sovereign does not acknowledge pain that has no remedy.

Two guards stood at the far end of the battlement. I did not acknowledge them. My silver-gray eyes moved across the tree line with the habitual sweep for threats. The palace rose behind me with its cliff-hewn towers, silver ward-lights pulsing faintly along the battlements, and iron braziers throwing orange heat against a wind that killed it almost immediately. Below, the ice road wound pale and treacherous through the dark pines, and the drop from the wall to the snow-covered base of the cliff was sheer enough to measure a life in seconds.

Then something below broke the pattern.

The translucent spirit of a massive black wolf stood motionless at the cliff's base. It was larger than any natural wolf, which marked it as either a lycan like myself or an apex shapeshifter. It did not pace or snarl; it simply stood over a collapsed human shape in the snow, a sentinel guarding rather than a predator claiming.

My gaze locked on the second shape. The woman was compact, naked and dark-skinned, with one leg at a wrong angle, and her ribs barely moving. Her breath was almost nothing, a faint ghost of steam rising into frigid air that would kill it before dawn.

The moment my eyes confirmed the woman was dying, the black spirit wolf lifted its head. It looked directly up at the wall—directly at me—and then turned and walked into the tree line, vanishing without looking back. 

I rushed to the nearest guard post and issued a single command: “Open the gate.”

The guard’s half-formed objection died before it left his mouth. A second guard stepped forward, his hand raised in the gesture of a man trained to stop threats but not sovereigns. “Majesty, the woman is unknown. You should not go out alone. I can send a retrieval party—”

“No.”

I walked past him toward the massive, frost-rimed iron gate. It groaned on its hinges as it swung inward, the sound carrying across the silent courtyard like something waking. I stepped through the threshold—the first time in three years I had crossed the palace wall for anything other than a required state ceremony—and the wind hit me full in the face, unmediated by stone.

Snow bit through my boots immediately. The open air above me, the absence of cliff overhead, the sheer exposed distance between the gate and the dying woman below registered in my body as unfamiliar. My hand let go of the gate’s iron frame. One beat. Then I moved forward.

I shifted as I walked, my lycan wolf form rising through me with the controlled precision of long practice. Black-furred and massive, I crossed the deep snow without effort, reached the woman's body, and circled once, reading the damage. There was dark blood stiffening in her coarse curly short hair, and more blood along her ribs and one shoulder. One of her legs was clearly broken, her chest movement was shallow.

I pressed my wolf body against hers to begin transferring heat, then shifted back to human form. I stripped my coat and the upper layers of my clothing with cold efficiency, baring my torso to the killing air, and pulled the woman's body against my bare skin—arms under her back and legs, her dead weight held against my chest. I pressed my fingers to her throat and found her pulse; it was faint and irregular, but it was there.

I carried her myself. The guard who had followed to the gate’s edge reached for her; I said nothing, only looked at him, and he stepped back. When I had passed back through the threshold into the gatehouse’s sheltered interior, I lowered myself to the stone floor with the woman still pressed against my skin, called for blankets in a clipped voice, and counted her breaths while rubbing warmth into her limbs with both hands.

Her body was cold enough that my own heat seemed to vanish into her on contact. I held tighter when she shuddered. 

Then the woman's eyes opened, and they were the amber eyes of a shapeshifter.  They were sharp with raw instinct, with no recognition in them, only threat. She must not have realized in her delirium that she was no longer in her wolf form, because her teeth closed on my forearm, hard and sudden, breaking the skin. I felt it move through me before thought caught up: the bite, the blood, and the living shapeshifter in my arms who would rather wound than risk trusting a stranger.