She made it as far as the doorway.
The North courtyard, the corridor, the stairs, she had crossed all of it on will alone, her back straight and her expression closed, the way she had held herself through hours of the Hearth Hall.
The moment her hand found the frame of her chamber door, the will ran out.
She went down hard.
Her knees hit the stone first, then her hands, and then she was on the floor, and the ceiling above her was tilting in a way she could not correct for.
June’s voice came from somewhere to her left, sharp and too loud.
Then Greta’s, lower and faster, and then both of them were beside her and hands were on her shoulders and her arms and she was being pulled upright, or they were trying to.
“My Lady, my Lady, can you hear me—” “Get her up.
The bed.
June, the bed—” Seren caught Greta’s wrist.
Her grip was not what it should have been, but it was enough.
“Don’t.” Her voice came out steadier than her body.
“Don’t send for the Second Branch.
Don’t let them know.” Greta’s face was pale.
“My Lady, you need a physician—” “The physician.
Not them.” She held Greta’s eyes until the understanding settled there.
“No one else.
Promise me.” “I promise,” Greta said.
“I promise, now let us get you up.” Seren let go.
She did not remember being moved to the bed.
What she remembered was the ceiling changing from stone to pine, and then the weight of a blanket, and then her wolf coming up through her like water through cracked ground, the fever finding the crack and pouring through it without her consent.
Her hands were wrong.
She knew it the way she knew her own name, a fact that existed before thought.
The knuckles too sharp, the fingers lengthening in a way that had nothing to do with what she intended.
June made a sound and pressed back against the wall.
Greta did not press back.
Greta put both hands on either side of the pale, shaking jaw and said, low and clear.
“I have you.
You’re home.” The shift came in pieces, the way it had after the river, unclean and uncontrolled.
Her body moving through shapes it had not inhabited since she was a child, before she had learned to hold herself in the way a wolf of her station was expected to.
The fever burned through whatever discipline remained and the wolf came forward.
It was the only answer it had.
By the time the last of it had passed, what lay against the pillows was pale and four-legged and breathing in the shallow rhythm of a wolf that had run too far.
June stood against the wall with her hand over her mouth.
Greta pulled the blanket up.
“Close the door,” she said.
“And don’t open it for anyone.” The fever peaked before midnight.
With it came the dreams.
Greta knew they were dreams because the wolf’s paws moved against the blanket as though running, and because the sounds that came from between its teeth were not the sounds of a wolf but of a girl, half-words, names, fragments of sentences that had no place in the North courtyard of the Hawthorne keep.
“Aldric.” Rough and broken, the name dragged out of her.
“Aldric, don’t go—” June looked up.
Greta did not look up.
She kept her hand on the pale fur and her eyes on her Lady’s face.
Later, softer, her voice broke on a second name.
“Wendy—” The voice caught before it finished, and what came after was not a word.
June crossed the room and crouched beside Greta.
“Who is Aldric?” she asked, her voice low.
“I don’t know,” Greta said.
“And Wendy?” Greta shook her head.
Six years in this house, this family.
She knew every name in the Hawthorne family worth knowing.
Neither of those names was among them.
Near the third hour past midnight, the wolf shifted back.
Seren lay human against the pillows, her face damp, her breathing fast and shallow.
June changed the poultice.
Greta pressed cooled broth to her lips and Seren swallowed without waking.
The body held.
“Father.” A pause.
“Mother, I—” The wolf came back before the sentence could finish, the shape rising up through her again, gentler this time, as though it had learned what the night would ask of it.
It held for a breath.
Then, in the thin space between wolf and human, barely a sound at all: “Alden.” Greta sat beside the bed through all of it.
She had sent June to rest in the chair by the door an hour ago, knowing one of them needed to be functional when morning came, and kept watch alone in the lamp’s low light, her hand resting on pale fur whenever the trembling grew bad.
Two names lodged in her ears.
Aldric and Wendy—neither of them Hawthorne names she recognized, neither of them faces she could put to a voice.
The others she knew, Father, Mother, Alden, those she understood.
She had never heard her Lady say any of them the way she said them tonight, scraped raw from somewhere that had nothing to do with this room or this house.
She did not know who they were.
She knew only that her Lady had called for them in the dark, in the spaces between wolf and human and dream, when nothing was left to hold the voice in place.
People called for what mattered most when the fever took everything else away.
She would not ask.
She would remember.
The wolf lay spent by the time the gray light found the shutters.
Ribs rising and falling in a slow, even rhythm.
The trembling had stopped, and the shifting with it.
Whatever the night had demanded of her Lady, it had taken it and gone.
Greta exhaled.
She rolled her neck, pressed her palms flat against her knees, and looked at the pale shape against the dark blanket.
The physician would need to be sent for at first light.
She was already running through the steps, who to send, which route avoided the South wing, how to word the request so it drew no attention—when the knock came.
Three times, each knock low and unhurried, the kind that did not want to be heard from the corridor.
June startled awake in the chair.
Greta was already on her feet, one hand raised to keep June from moving.
She crossed to the door without a sound and stood beside it, not in front of it, listening.
Silence.
Then footsteps—unhurried, moving away down the corridor.
Greta waited until they faded before she went to the window.
The courtyard below was gray and unmoving in the early light.
She scanned it the way her Lady had taught her without meaning to, noting what moved and what didn’t, what belonged and what had no reason to be there.
There.
One of the new servants—she recognized the build, the particular set of the shoulders—crossing the courtyard at a pace too purposeful for the hour, moving away from the kitchens and the well, toward the South wing.
Greta stood at the window until the figure disappeared through the passage gate.
Then she turned back to the room, to the pale shape on the bed and June’s wide, waiting eyes.
The physician, and no one else.
She had promised.