Tyler flinched and looked away.
Sweat had plastered his hair to his forehead.
Elena heard his breath scraping between coughs, then felt the tether answer beneath her collarbone.
She stepped close enough that he could no longer study the ground without looking between their boots.
“My mother scrubbed grease from your kettles while your father demanded her blood,” she said.
“Did you know what those winters cost her?”
“I did not choose this.”
“You chose Camilla.”
His gaze stayed lowered.
Neither answer told her what he had known.
“Take your hand away from that monolith, exile.” Orin’s voice carried from the track.
The northern Moonwell keeper came through the dead grass beside Kenneth.
Four Silvercrest warriors followed them with spears upright.
Kenneth still held the wooden tally rod he had brought from the citadel.
Elena stayed beside the cracked pillar.
“The ward is falling.”
“Your awakening at the Moonwell does not establish an inherited claim here,” Orin said.
“Step away from that print until we have examined it.”
“You came to observe repairs,” Vane answered, moving between him and Elena.
“Observe them. Lay a finger on her, and my outriders take your heads before sundown.”
Orin halted beyond her sword’s reach.
His lips drew back from his teeth.
Kenneth held his pen above the treaty entry.
“Does putting your hand there claim the office?”
“I asked who my mother was. Record the repair.” Elena looked at the frost under the orchard roots.
“A title can wait for its own hearing.”
Tyler braced against the fence rail.
“Let her bind it. My warriors will not stop her.” Kenneth entered the repair beside the treaty.
Orin started toward the print; Vane lowered her sword across his path.
Elena drew the iron hunting blade from her belt.
She laid the edge across her right palm.
Below the ridge, Mira’s brother and sister waited beside the washroom hearth; arguing over a dead woman’s title would not warm them if the wards fell.
Elena drew the blade through her skin.
Red blood welled between her fingers and dropped onto the withered roots.
Asteria stirred.
As the wolf’s heat reached Elena’s hand, a metallic sheen spread across the blood.
She pressed her palm into her mother’s print.
The rock groaned.
The first shock drove up her arm hard enough to jar her teeth.
Blood disappeared beneath her hand.
Silver light entered the fissure and spread through the smaller cracks, drawing their edges together.
She held her wrist straight against the strain.
Then another pull caught her.
The stone’s demand remained steady beneath her palm.
This pulse wrenched higher, along the unfinished tether.
She recognized the bite of Camilla’s earlier working.
The packhouse was out of sight.
Camilla again, she thought, and planted her feet more firmly.
Tyler cried out and dropped to one knee.
Elena kept contact until the last fracture closed.
When she lifted her hand, the weight of her arm almost took her down with it.
“That is one,” Vane said quietly.
Elena looked past her toward the ridge.
Three more outer wardstones stood along the slope.
Four stones held the territorial perimeter; she had closed only the lowest.
A bitter draft swept off the ridge, biting through her wool sleeves.
“Look at her hands,” Orin said.
“She cannot finish. She will bleed out before she reaches the crest.”
He watched the blood dripping from her fingers, not the stone she had closed.
Elena folded her hand carefully.
If she died here, he would have that warning ready; she would have no chance to ask why he had tried to stop her before the first cut.
She eased her elbow out of Vane’s gauntlet and started uphill.
Fifty yards above, dead brambles covered the second stone.
Elena pulled them loose, catching thorns in her sleeves and across her wrists.
The ridge blurred at the edges.
She found the crest by touch and laid her bleeding palm against it.
The rock shuddered.
Her breath shortened as the stone drew from her.
The other pull widened through the tether.
She stayed until the glow settled, then peeled her hand away with a low sound that brought someone close behind her.
“Quiet, child,” a voice murmured beside her.
Elena looked through the gray blur of her vision.
Harlan stood at her shoulder, bent beneath his tunic.
While Orin argued with Vane below, the local elder had slipped past the guards.
He took clean linen from inside his clothing and wrapped her fingers, supporting the torn palm in his hand.
“You should not be bleeding for these graves,” he whispered.
“The kitchen girls are still here.” Elena had to work to shape the words.
“The ward falls on them too.”
“Your mother said the same.”
She looked at his hand beneath hers.
Fresh blood warmed the cloth between them.
“My mother died of the winter cough. You read her burial prayer.”
Harlan glanced down the path.
His fingers shook as he tightened the knot.
“She died of no cough. Listen to me. She was the hereditary Warden of the Stones. The Vance line could not hold these wards alone. They needed her.”
Elena gripped the edge of his sleeve with her uninjured hand.
“They called her a stray.”
“Thomas lied to protect his claim.” Harlan leaned close to her ear.
“When she refused to cut her palms for his stones, he abolished her seat. Three days later, they carried her out of the lower cell. They told the pack the frost took her.”
Elena looked at the knot he had tied.
He had stood beside her mother’s grave with those hands folded over his prayer book.
He had known what lay beneath the shroud.
“Why tell me now?”
“Because the fourth stone will kill you,” Harlan rasped, his face tight with dread.
“It carries an anchor lock. You cannot seal it with blood alone. You need the Warden’s seal, Elena. Look beneath the floor of the old tower—”
“Harlan!” Orin’s voice thundered up the ridge.
“Step away from her!”
The old man pulled back into the shadows of the scrub.
He gave Elena one desperate, haunted look before shuffling back toward the road.
Elena turned uphill toward the third monolith.
She placed each boot before trusting it with her weight, while Asteria fought the suction along the tether.
At the stone, she caught the linen in her teeth and pulled it from her palm.
She drove her hand against the rock.
A roar rose through the mountain.
Silver fire ran along the boundary.
Warmth spread through the orchard below, burning rot from the soil and forcing the frost toward the trees.
Tyler collapsed on the lower path, dry-heaving into the dirt.
Elena looked toward the fourth stone beneath the old watchtower.
She took one step toward it.
Her legs folded.
She reached for the slope, but gravel slid beneath her numb fingers.
Vane caught her before her face struck.
The weight drove a grunt from the commander’s bound side.
She braced a boot in the shale and called a rider up; he took Elena’s legs while Vane held her shoulders.
“Put me down. The last stone—”
“You are done.”
They carried her downhill.
At each uneven step Elena pressed against Vane’s breastplate and heard the shortened breath behind it.
She tried to draw her weight away from the injured side, but could barely lift her head.
Along the lower palisade, fifty pack members watched them pass.
Several looked uphill at the silver line still burning through the orchard.
Nobody called her wolfless.
Tyler stood by the ditch, his face hollow, staring at her with helpless torment.
Then the light failed completely.
Elena woke to the bitter smell of burning tallow.
She lay on a wood cot inside the thick stone walls of the lower watchpost.
Heavy linen bound her right palm, smelling of crushed elder leaf.
Commander Vane stood by the iron-barred door, her broad shoulders cutting off the evening dusk outside.
“You slept two hours,” Vane said, not turning her head.
Elena pushed herself upright.
Her bones throbbed with a deep, hollow ache.
She held the edge of the cot until the room stopped tilting, then looked toward the door.
“The fourth stone,” Elena demanded.
“Still broken,” Vane replied.
“Tyler put six guards around it. The elders are in the courtyard screaming at each other about your mother’s name.”
Elena thought of Harlan’s warning.
Her mother’s title.
The abolished office.
“I need Harlan,” Elena said, swinging her boots to the stone floor.
“He knows what Tyler’s father did.”
The timber door crashed open.
Martha, the old omega cook, stumbled into the room, her hands clutching her stained apron.
Her face was gray as ash.
“Lady Elena,” Martha choked out.
Vane drew six inches of steel from her scabbard.
“Speak.”
Martha looked at Elena, her eyes wide with terror.
“Elder Harlan,” the old woman whispered, trembling so violently she dropped against the doorframe.
“They just found him at the foot of the watchtower. His neck was broken before he hit the stones.”