Tyler stumbled after her, his boots slipping on the damp flags.
His hands opened at his sides, empty now that she had pulled her sleeve free.
A cough stopped whatever he meant to say.
Dark spit struck the stones.
Elena waited for the answering pain beneath her collarbone: the tether pulled with his next breath, bringing the ache of his injured side into her own.
Leaving him behind would not spare her that.
Commander Vane stepped between them, her iron plates clinking beneath her dark mantle.
“The horses wait at the lower gate, Lady Evans,” Vane said.
Elena turned toward the stairwell.
Behind her, two northern guards supported Tyler beneath his arms, keeping his injured side clear of the wall.
Valerian waited below the portcullis with his knuckles against his scabbard.
Beyond him stood the armed riders he had promised before his lords, their horses facing south.
“Keep your steel drawn,” he said as she reached the gravel.
“I intend to.”
“If Vance turns on the escort, Vane has my command to bind him. Keep him alive until the work is done.”
Elena took the mare’s reins.
“And after that he answers for the prisoners. Bring them back, not his corpse.”
Valerian looked at Vane.
“The prisoners come north.”
His bare fingers brushed Elena’s neck.
She laid two fingers over his wrist and kept him there a moment.
His warmth reached her through Tyler’s fever; the True Mate connection answered, though the other tether still hurt.
She let herself lean into his touch before lowering his wrist.
His hand left her neck with hers.
“Return whole,” he said softly.
“Bring those people home with your riders. Then we can talk about a seat beside you.”
She mounted.
Twenty Obsidian outriders formed around her beneath upright lances and black hide shields.
Vane took the point, settling carefully into her stirrups with one elbow close to her bound left side.
Kenneth and Orin rode with the party as council and Moonwell observers, their horses behind the escort rather than in its ranks.
Kenneth carried the terms he had recorded at dawn.
Near the rear, two guards steadied Tyler as his head sank toward his horse’s neck.
They rode south through the mountain gap that morning, slowing whenever Tyler could no longer sit upright.
The descent into the Silvercrest valley felt like riding down into an open grave.
Elena remembered running through these briars on her birthday evening, mud dragging at her boots while Tyler’s hunting dogs bayed behind her.
Now the track widened into pack land, but the familiar earth looked sick.
The grass in the ditches was gray and brittle.
A thin, bitter frost coated the low stone walls, though the sun stood high overhead.
Silvercrest wolves lined the cart road.
They huddled beneath bare trees with their coats pulled tight.
Elena recognized the gatekeeper who had barred the kitchen doors against her, and old Dennis, who had spat on her shoes when Tyler cast her out.
Neither moved toward the road.
Their attention followed the Obsidian banner above Vane’s shoulder; Dennis gripped his coat shut with both hands.
“They look like sheep waiting for the knife,” Vane muttered.
“They know their wards are dying,” Elena said.
The stones’ failing pulse hummed in her teeth.
Tyler had said they needed her blood; the frost spreading beneath the midday sun gave her reason to believe him.
Whether the valley had always drawn from her, or only begun dragging at the unfinished tether after her rejection, she could not tell from the road.
Before the inner stockade, the trail gave Elena a view from the lower orchard stone up to the locked fourth beneath the old tower and the taller central anchor on the crest.
Harlan met the envoy at the gate.
“Outer beds hold a repair for thirty days,” he said.
“The fourth still needs its seal. The center is a different closure; leave that open, and the next month begins the work again.”
They reached the inner stockade as the midday bell began to clang. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
The iron gates creaked open on neglected hinges, groaning against the frozen slush.
Camilla Moore stood waiting on the wide packhouse porch, wrapped in heavy silver fox skins that trailed across the wet wood.
A dozen valley warriors flanked her steps, gripping ash cudgels and short hunting spears with white-knuckled hands.
She had painted her cheeks with red paste, but her skin showed gray beneath the dye.
“Welcome back to Silvercrest, Elena,” Camilla announced, her voice carrying across the silent yard like the strike of an iron rod.
“Parley law requires us to receive our Luna’s guest with courtesy.”
Elena reined her mare in the middle of the yard.
She looked down at the woman who had worn her stolen clothes and ordered her beatings.
“I am the envoy of the Obsidian Throne,” Elena said.
“Address me as such, or hold your tongue.”
Camilla’s lips pressed into a bloodless line.
“A northern cloak does not change what you are. Disarm your escort. Silvercrest does not permit foreign iron past the courtyard posts.”
The valley sentries leveled their spears, stepping forward to hem in the twenty outriders.
Tyler slid from his saddle and fell to his knees.
He caught the horse’s flank, tried to rise, and doubled over coughing blood into the snow.
The guard beside him reached under his arm.
Elena stayed mounted.
“You brought me here to save your territory,” she said across the yard.
“Lower those spears, or I turn this horse around. You can tell your elders why the lower village freezes by nightfall.”
Camilla descended one tread.
“You dare threaten the Alpha in his own yard?”
“Watch the gate.”
Elena turned her mare toward it.
Vane and the twenty outriders wheeled with her, lowering their polearms into a wedge.
The sentries in the gateway shuffled backward.
“Wait!” Tyler’s shout broke halfway through.
He dragged himself toward the porch and caught Camilla’s gown in his bloody fist.
One pull sent her boots sliding on the wet wood.
“Stand down! Lower the steel!”
“Tyler, before the entire pack—” She tried to wrench the cloth free.
“She keeps her guards.” He twisted his grip until a seam strained.
“She goes where she pleases. Lower them!”
The valley warriors looked toward the porch.
One spear dipped, then the others followed.
Elena halted her mare.
Tyler sagged against the railing, and his panic reached her a moment later through the tether.
She gripped the saddle with her knees until the yard stopped tilting.
He had yielded, but she still had to carry the shock of it.
A side door near the scullery clattered open.
Martha hurried out, wiping flour from her hands onto a greasy apron.
Elena remembered the rye crusts the cook had slipped into her pockets on nights when Tyler’s orders forbade feeding her.
Martha passed the coughing Alpha without looking at him.
She reached Elena’s stirrup and knelt in the slush.
“Mistress Elena.” Her voice shook.
Two stable hands followed her down.
Three scullery girls set their pails aside and bowed; then the other servants in the lower courtyard knelt too.
Elena could see Martha’s apron soaking through at the knees.
Camilla drew back against the porch, gripping her fur collar.
“Stand up, Martha,” Elena said.
“You bow to no one in this yard.”
The cook lifted her face.
She rose with difficulty and retreated toward the kitchen.
Elena watched until she reached the door; those knees would ache through the evening’s work.
“The west guest room is unlocked,” Tyler gasped from the steps, wiping dark phlegm from his chin with the back of his hand.
Elena knew that room.
It sat directly above the scullery tubs, drafty and thin-walled, where the stench of lye and boiled grease seeped through the rough floorboards.
She had scrubbed its floor on her knees for three years.
Putting her there was Camilla’s petty insult, but Elena did not care about a feather bed.
“Two riders to the kennels,” Elena told Vane.
“Mira’s mother, Toby and the little girl. Get them out of Camilla’s hands.” She pointed at Tyler.
“Order the doors opened before you show me an orchard.”
Tyler called for Marcus’s keys.
Vane sent two riders with the Beta and took four more beside Elena; fourteen held the packhouse gates.
Before they reached the orchard, one of the two returned.
“All three alive. We have them by the washroom hearth. Their mother cannot sit a horse. My partner is with them; Marcus is finding a cart.” Elena gave him her remaining medicine roll.
“Keep her warm. Nobody moves them without us.” Tyler led the orchard party past the timber stores, leaning on Marcus when the Beta returned.
Elena stepped through the orchard gate and stopped.
The fruit trees had split down their trunks.
Gray sap seeped from the cracks, smelling of stagnant water, and frost packed the lower branches until several bowed almost to the ground.
Elena caught a twig between her fingers; it broke before she bent it.
“The reports gave us three weeks,” Vane said, touching the splintered end.
“Whoever wrote them should have walked this orchard.” Elena rubbed the dead wood between her fingers.
“The inner ring is gone. Four days, at most, before the rest follows.”
She walked past the ruined trees toward the valley boundary.
The first boundary monolith stood seven feet tall at the edge of the ravine, half-swallowed by dead briars.
Fine fractures ran across its surface, leaking a high, sickening whine that made Asteria snarl behind Elena’s ribs.
“Place your hand against the center,” Tyler muttered from ten paces back.
“Your blood will mend the stone.”
Elena stepped close enough for the stone’s pressure to throb behind her temples.
She scraped frozen moss from its base, looking for the carved wolf head of the Vance crest.
Her fingers found a hollow beside it.
A human handprint lay pressed into the rock.
She traced its edges.
The finger ridges survived too cleanly for a chisel; it looked as though the stone had yielded around a living hand.
Her right palm fitted imperfectly into the depression.
These fingers were longer, the palm narrower.
Beside the thumb, a jagged notch interrupted the smooth outline.
She rubbed that notch with her own thumb.
At the kitchen hearth, her mother had held Elena’s frozen fingers between her hands and breathed on them.
The scar at that joint had always caught against Elena’s skin.
“Tyler.” She kept her palm against the print.
“Whose mark is this?”
He looked away into the orchard.
“My father said your mother bound the south ridge forty years ago.”
Elena withdrew her hand.
Her mother had scrubbed those men’s kettles, endured their boots, and been buried in an unmarked ditch beyond the palisade.
Yet her thumbprint remained beside the Vance crest.
Elena touched it again.
His father had called her a stray; here was something he had not scraped away.
“What did he tell you about her?” Elena asked.
“You called me wolfless while these stones waited for my blood. How much did you know?”