Greta had been awake since before dawn.
She sat at the foot of the bed with her hands knotted in her lap, watching.
The physician had promised the fever would break by nightfall.
Then again by morning.
Another half-day had passed and their Lady had not moved, had not spoken, had not opened her eyes.
Then the furs moved—not the way they moved when a sleeping body turned over, but the way they moved when something underneath them was too large to stay hidden.
The furs slipped to the floor.
The wolf that lay across the bed was pale as birchwood, eyes closed, ribs lifting and falling in the slow rhythm of deep unconsciousness.
Young and underfed from the fever.
Seventeen, the body not yet grown into its full size.
Greta crossed the room and crouched at the bedside, putting her hand against the wolf’s jaw.
“My Lady.” Her voice came out low.
“I’m here.
You’re home.
Come back to us.” The trembling started.
The full-body shudder of a wolf fighting itself, the shape collapsing inward.
It took longer than it should have.
Then Seren’s hands appeared—pale and small, pressed flat against the bed—and the rest of her followed.
Morning light came through the window, pale and gold, and outside, birds called back and forth.
Seren lay motionless beneath the furs, listening.
The ceiling above her was not the damp stone of Blackhold Keep’s eastern tower.
It was polished pine, carved with the Hawthorne knot, the same knot her father wore on his collar and her mother had embroidered into every blanket she had ever made.
The furs beneath her fingers were soft and worn, the ones she had slept under since she was old enough to climb into a bed by herself.
She did not move.
She remembered the Bloodsbane.
The cold spreading through her chest like river water in winter.
Her wolf releasing, finally, after years of holding on.
The stone floor against her cheek.
Bianca’s voice, distant and sorrowful, saying something that did not matter anymore.
This should not be possible.
I am dead.
My mind is showing me something kind before it goes dark forever.
She closed her eyes again.
“Is the fever gone?
She was in the river so long.
The physician said she should have woken by now.” The voice was young and worried, familiar in a way that made Seren’s chest ache before she could name why.
“The Second Branch has been watching closely.
They’re calling it an accident, but you know as well as I do—” A second voice, lower, angrier.
“I saw Miss Sienna’s hands on her shoulders.
I saw it.
And no one will listen because the Eldridge wolves were here and the Alpha King’s son doesn’t need scandal at his visit.” “Shh.
Keep your voice down.
If someone hears—” “If someone hears the truth, maybe they’d do something about it.” Something struck the inside of her chest like a fist—her own pulse, returned.
She opened her eyes.
Two girls stood at the foot of her bed.
One had her dark hair pulled back in a tight braid, her hands fisted at her sides.
The other was fairer, softer, wringing a cloth between her fingers.
Greta.
June.
Her first maids, before the palace, before Knox, before the Ashfen compound and Bianca and the long slow destruction of everything she loved.
They were young, faces unmarked by what was coming, and alive, and Seren had not expected how much that last part would matter until they were standing right in front of her.
“The physician said the fever broke during the night,” June was saying, her voice unsteady.
“But she hasn’t moved.
What if—” “I’m fine.” Both girls whipped around.
Seren was sitting up.
She did not remember deciding to move.
Her body had done it, the way a wolf rises when it hears danger, before the mind has finished waking.
Her hands were small and pale, the skin unworked.
She turned them over.
These were not the hands of a thirty-eight-year-old wolf who had spent five years as a hostage and another decade fighting for scraps of favor.
No calluses on her palms.
No silver scars on her knuckles.
No joints swollen from winter cold in the Ashfen compound.
Her nails were neat and trimmed, berry-stained from the last time she had pressed juice into them.
Seventeen.
These were the hands of a seventeen-year-old.
“Greta,” she said.
Her voice came out hoarse, but young.
Young.
“Bring me a mirror.” Greta hesitated.
“My Lady, you’ve been ill.
The physician said—” “Now.” The word cracked through the room.
Greta went pale, exchanged a quick glance with June, and hurried to the dressing table.
She had spent twenty years learning to command wolves who would rather see her dead.
Greta returned with the mirror, a small round thing in a carved wooden frame, the glass warped at the edges because it was old and had belonged to Seren’s grandmother.
Seren took it.
The girl in the reflection had a round face not yet sharpened by years, a full forehead, large eyes red-rimmed from fever but clear now, a pale brown like the bark of river birches.
A mouth too wide for beauty but one people had always called charming.
This was the face she had not seen in twenty years.
She had watched it age in the palace mirrors.
The softness sharpening into something harder, the warmth going with it.
The eyes moving from hopeful to watchful to flat and cold as winter stone.
She had watched it gaunt in the Ashfen compound.
Hollow-cheeked and bruised.
She had watched it in the Cold Palace, where the mirrors were cracked and showed only pieces of a woman who had been broken so many times she no longer remembered what wholeness felt like.
This girl in the mirror did not know what was coming.
Seren did.
She knew what this face would become.
What would be carved into it.
What she would let happen to it.
Never again.