Elena caught Martha by the wrists as the cook’s knees bent.
“Who found him?” She steadied the woman’s arms through the coarse sleeves.
“The ditch patrol. Two minutes ago.” Martha’s teeth chattered.
“His head is turned clean around, Elena.”
Vane kept the six inches of steel she had drawn clear of the scabbard.
“They will blame my riders.”
Howling rose beyond the doorway.
Elena released Martha and hurried through the passage.
The sound came down the stones ahead of her: the broken courtyard howl that meant someone had been murdered inside the palisade.
Tyler was among them.
His fever tugged at the tether with every hurried step she took.
She burst through the archway into the torchlit courtyard.
Thirty Silvercrest wolves formed a bristling ring around the foot of the watchtower.
In the center, Elder Harlan lay crumpled face down in the frozen dirt.
His gray hair was matted with ice.
His head rested at a sharp, sickening tilt against his left collarbone.
Elena remembered those shaking fingers tying linen around her palm.
She had thought there would be time to ask him what happened after they carried her mother out of the cell.
Near the well, Camilla stood with six pack enforcers, her fingers knotting the front of her heavy cloak.
“Disarm those foreigners,” Camilla shouted, pointing straight at Vane’s four door sentries.
“Chain their wrists to the posts before they kill another elder.”
“Nobody touches my guards,” Elena commanded, pushing through the snarling front line.
Two young warriors barred her path, fangs showing.
Elena held her ground.
Asteria’s heat reached her palms, and the men yielded three paces.
She passed between them before either could recover his footing.
“He was an elder of this pack,” Camilla said.
“Your northern beasts broke his spine while our backs were turned.”
“An uncut neck clears nobody,” Elena answered.
“Let me examine him.”
She crouched without moving Harlan’s head.
Crushed finger marks showed beneath his ear.
Across the courtyard, the four northern sentries stood where Camilla had pointed.
“Those four guarded my cot while I slept. Vane was at the door. Ask your watch who passed them. Look at their hands before you chain them.”
“An envoy cannot clear her own escort,” Kenneth called from the stair.
He had come south to observe her work; now his tally rod pointed toward the accused riders.
A sentry’s horn blasted twice from the southern perimeter road.
Two Obsidian outriders came stumbling through the palisade gap, their heavy hide coats shredded by claw marks.
Iron quarrels stuck from the shoulder plate of the taller rider.
Dark blood dripped from his torn boot, steaming faintly where it pooled in the mud.
“Rogue ambush at the ditch,” the wounded soldier gasped, dropping to one knee before Vane.
Elena saw three dark shapes dart away through the scrub along the ravine line.
The attack had come while the pack crowded around Harlan.
If someone had chosen the hour for both, the fleeing men might know who.
Crushed watercress and sheep grease clung to the mud.
She had mixed that boot salve during her second winter in the kitchen.
Western bog hunters used it before crossing the marshes; the Crimson Fang worked those bogs on contract.
She rubbed her fingers together, then looked toward the broken brush.
Camilla’s enforcers were already moving along the bank; if they reached the fugitives first, Elena might lose the only living answer to Harlan’s death.
“Hold his body and our wounded,” she told Vane.
Then she ran after the shapes.
Her bound hand beat against her side until she tucked it close.
The climb from the wardstones still trembled in her legs.
“Elena, stay back!” Tyler shouted from the rampart.
She found the next snapped branch and followed it downhill.
The fleeing man might have answers.
If Camilla’s enforcers reached him first, she might find only a bolt in his neck.
Thorns caught her sleeves as she descended the embankment, following heavy footfalls and the scrape of leather against briars.
He had not shifted.
His coat snagged on blackberry vines as he crossed an icy creek, leaving him scrambling on the gravel.
Elena jumped from the ledge.
Her shoulder struck his side and took them both into the water.
His temple hit the flat rock with a crack before he rolled beneath her and thrust a short knife toward her neck.
She caught his wrist with both hands.
Pain split her bandaged palm; she planted a heel in his hip and twisted until the tendon gave.
The knife splashed into the pool.
She drove her forearm hard across his throat, pinning his skull against a flat rock.
Asteria’s power flared in her blood, turning the rogue’s snarl into a choked rattle.
Elena ripped open his soaked collar with her left hand.
Pinned to the rough lining was a curved iron fang stamped with three tally notches.
“Crimson Fang,” Elena said.
The rogue spat blood across her knuckles.
Boots hammered down the bank.
Orin pushed through the hazels with four Silvercrest spearmen and Tyler behind him.
The Moonwell keeper carried a spear of his own.
Tyler caught a sapling to stay upright, his face gray in the torchlight.
“Step away,” Orin said, setting the point beside the prisoner’s eye.
“He was taken on valley ground. Let valley justice take his head.”
“Lower it, Orin.” Elena kept her forearm across the mercenary’s neck.
“The elder is dead,” Kenneth called as he stumbled down with a torch.
He caught Orin’s spear shaft above Elena’s shoulder.
“Hold him for the hearing. I want this man’s employer before another body washes downriver.”
The point moved closer.
Elena could not hold the prisoner and catch that shaft with her injured hand.
The mercenary’s eyes no longer followed the spear together.
Elena lifted her forearm from his throat and pressed her torn sleeve to the split at his temple.
“Keep him breathing. Bring linen.” If Orin struck, she would lose whatever the ambusher knew, while Camilla’s charge against the escort remained. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
Vane was still uphill with her wounded riders.
Elena looked at Tyler, then at the blood seeping through her own binding.
“The fourth boundary stone is still broken, Tyler.”
He blinked sweat from his eyes.
“Let them kill him before he answers, and I will not touch it. Before dawn, your pack will be digging through frozen ground.”
“You threaten the people you came to save?” Orin demanded.
“I bled for them today. I will not bleed again to bury his answers.” She looked past the spear at Tyler.
“You exiled me. You do not get to silence me as well.”
Tyler’s panic tightened the tether.
He glanced uphill toward the remaining stone.
Elena held the mercenary against the rock and waited.
“Hold your spears,” Tyler ordered.
“Alpha, this is madness,” Camilla protested from the top of the bank.
“She is protecting a murderer.”
“I said stand down,” Tyler barked, his Alpha command snapping through the trees with enough raw force to bend the warriors’ knees.
Orin grudgingly lowered the point of his weapon.
Tyler waded into the creek and stood over her, blocking the torches.
“Elena Evans walks under my personal mantle within Silvercrest borders. Any claw drawn against her is drawn against my throat.”
Water ran from the mercenary’s collar beneath Elena’s arm.
She loosened her pressure enough for him to breathe.
On the bank, the Silvercrest warriors lowered their eyes.
One whispered “our Luna” and took an elbow from the man beside him.
Tyler extended his hand.
Elena stood without it; he had secured her passage, then spoken as though she belonged beneath his cloak.
Vane entered the hollow with her broadsword across her breastplate.
Her gaze passed from his hand to Elena’s torn binding.
“Envoy Evans.” She took her place beside Elena.
“Haul him up,” Tyler ordered.
Two warriors dragged the prisoner onto the grass.
His belt pouch tore loose, spilling gold across the gravel.
Elena crouched and picked up a coin.
Mud filled the twin wolf heads of the Silvercrest stamp.
She wiped it away with her thumb.
The edge was bright and unclipped; the treasury dies had made it, but nothing on the disc named the person who had handed it to him.
“Silvercrest gold,” she said, kneeling beside the shivering man.
“Who bought Harlan’s death?”
The mercenary laughed, coughing up dark red foam.
He looked past Elena, his yellowed eyes fixing on Tyler’s face.
“You look just like him, boy,” the rogue rasped, his voice rattling in his ruined chest.
“Give me the name,” Tyler demanded, his fingers curling into fists.
“The old Alpha paid the guild forty years ago to poison the Warden in the woods,” the mercenary whispered.
“And he sent the runner this morning to break Harlan’s neck before the old fool gave up the seal.”
Tyler stumbled back into the mud, his face white.
“My father died three winters ago. He lies locked in the western tomb.”
“Then who used his High Study account to pay me at noon?” the mercenary gasped, and went limp against the stones.