Chapter 2: Cast into the Darkwood

They did not let her walk.

Two guards hauled Clara through the Great Hall by her arms, her boots scraping uselessly over the stone. The pack parted for her. Not one hand reached out. Not one voice rose. Women pulled their children back, as though what had happened to her might be contagious. Others stared with open, greedy fascination.

At the hall's great doors, a guard ripped the gray pack coat from her shoulders, the only warm thing she owned. It was frayed, patched at the elbows, and she had worn it for six winters. He tossed it onto the floor like rubbish.

"Pack property," he sneered.

The night air hit her in her thin servant's dress like a slap of ice.

They dragged her down the castle steps, through the courtyard, and out through the northern gate. Every step sent fresh agony through her chest, where the severed bond throbbed like a torn muscle. Blood still dripped from her chin. Her wolf, so recently awake, was a thin, wounded whimper at the back of her mind, curled around its own pain.

Don't cry, Clara told herself. Do not give them that.

The wind rose as they entered the forest road. Snow began to fall, soft at first, then thickening, then driving sideways in hard white sheets. The guards' torches guttered. Behind them, the lights of Silvercrest shrank to a golden smear and disappeared.

An hour passed. Or perhaps it was only minutes. Pain stretched time into something shapeless.

At last the trees opened onto the river.

The Ashen River marked the end of Silvercrest territory, a black ribbon of water churning between iced banks, wide and fast. Beyond it, the forest turned gray and ragged, its pines stunted and twisted, its undergrowth swallowed by drifting snow. Every child in the pack was taught the same rule from the cradle: Beyond the river is the Darkwood. Nothing that crosses it comes back.

The guards threw her to her knees on the frozen bank.

Hoofbeats thundered behind them. A rider burst out of the storm on a gray stallion, wrapped in a black fur-lined cloak that streamed behind him like wings.

Ethan swung down from the saddle.

He had come himself.

Clara lifted her head. Snow clung to her lashes. For one pathetic, treacherous second, her heart leaped. He came. He's changed his mind.

Then he walked toward her, and she saw his face.

"Look at her," Ethan said, to the guards, to the night, to no one. "Eight months I let her believe what she wanted. A scullery girl, thinking she could climb into my bed and into a Luna's name." His mouth twisted. "She was convenient. Nothing more."

Each word landed like a nail. Clara's fingers curled into the snow.

"You lied to me," she whispered, and her voice scraped like gravel. "The bond doesn't lie, Ethan. I felt you. I felt you."

"The bond," he said coldly, "is a flaw. A weakness. I cut it out before it could rot my pack." He crouched until his eyes were level with hers. For an instant, something flickered behind the cruelty, something shaky and raw. He crushed it. "You were never meant to have anything, Clara. Be grateful I didn't kill you in the hall."

He rose and turned to his warriors.

"Hear me," he said, and his voice carried over the river's roar. "This woman is cast out. No Silvercrest wolf will feed her, shelter her, or speak her name. Any who aid her will share her exile." His gaze swung back to Clara, flat as a closed door. "And if she ever sets foot on this side of the Ashen again, she is fair game. Any wolf who finds her may tear out her throat, and I will reward them for it."

Silence. Even the guards looked uneasy.

"Throw her across."

"Alpha Heir, the ice is thin—"

"I said throw her."

The guards seized her. Clara did not scream. She did not beg. She looked past Ethan, over his shoulder, and saw a pale figure in white fur standing on the rise above the riverbank. Seraphina watched the scene with a small, satisfied smile.

Then the world tilted.

She was airborne for one weightless heartbeat. The ice rushed up and smashed into her shoulder, and the whole frozen surface groaned and cracked beneath her. Dark water surged through the fissures, bitter as knives, soaking her dress to the thighs. She clawed forward on hands and knees, ice biting her palms, her breath tearing in and out of her lungs in great rags.

The far bank. Hold on. Just reach the far bank.

She dragged herself over the edge and collapsed face-down in the snow of the Darkwood.

Behind her, the torches wavered, turned, and withdrew. The hoofbeats faded. The river roared on, indifferent.

She was alone.

Clara lay there while the blizzard buried her. The cold was a living thing, gnawing through her wet clothes, her skin, down into the marrow of her bones. Her fingers had gone white, then waxy, then numb. Her lips split and bled. Her stomach, empty since dawn, clenched in hard, hollow spasms. Every breath crystallized in her chest.

It would be so easy, a small voice whispered. Close your eyes. It won't hurt for long.

Eight months of promises. Sixteen years of crumbs. Every morning she had scrubbed his floors and lowered her eyes, grateful for one stolen touch in the dark. She had loved him so stupidly.

Something inside Clara, something that had been bent and bent and bent until it should have snapped, did not break.

It hardened.

She dug her bloody fingers into the frozen earth and pushed herself up onto her knees. The movement tore a groan from her throat. The world swayed. She tasted copper and ice, and she spat red into the snow.

"No," she rasped.

The wind swallowed it. She said it again, louder, and her voice carried through the dead trees like a blade being drawn.

"I am not going to die here."

She forced herself to her feet, swaying, her ruined dress stiff as armor. She turned and looked back across the river, at the faint glow of Silvercrest burning on the horizon, at the pack that had watched her bleed and done nothing, at the man who had taken her heart and ground it under his boot.

"You wanted me gone, Ethan Vance," she whispered, and her breath fogged and vanished. "You wanted me dead."

Within her chest, where the bond had been, her wolf lifted its head. It was still wounded, still frightened, but awake.

"I swear on my parents' graves," Clara said, and the words came out low and steady, "I will come back. I will burn every lie you built. And when I do, you will beg me for the mercy you never gave."

The storm answered with a scream of wind.

Then, beneath it, she heard something else.

A twig snapped, close, to her left.

Clara froze.

Between the black trunks of the frozen pines, the snow seemed to thicken and shift. A low, rumbling growl rolled through the dark, too deep to belong to any ordinary wolf. One pair of eyes ignited in the blizzard, burning crimson. Then a second pair. Then a third.

They were not Silvercrest eyes. They were not wolf eyes at all.

Slowly, silently, the shapes began to close in.