“Laura?” The name hung between them.
Raven stayed pressed against the root-ball, both hands around the slate, and understood none of it — except one thing, which arrived cold and fast.
The woman was confusing her with someone called Laura.
“I’m not Laura.” The woman came a step closer.
Her eyes moved over Raven’s face, slow, piece by piece, and then she leaned in and sniffed once — through the mud, the blood, the burnt stench the dead wolves had left on everything.
“I know that now,” she said.
The woman straightened up and stared at her.
Raven’s fingers re-settled around the slate until the edge found the raw part of her palm again.
“Who is—” The woman’s head snapped toward the trees.
Raven froze and listened.
For a moment there was nothing, only the drip of the leaves — then a horn sounded, far off, two short notes and a long one.
Her stomach dropped before her mind caught up, because she’d heard that call a hundred times from the kitchen yard during the autumn hunts, and every servant on the estate knew what it meant.
Quarry found.
Close in.
Blackthorn.
They’d found the way around the quarry.
Raven set her good foot under her and pushed, and the ankle folded exactly as it had folded every time tonight, and the mud took her knee again.
She looked up at the woman before staring away because there was no reason left in the world for a stranger to stand between a wounded servant and a Great House.
The woman said nothing reassuring, because she said nothing at all.
She picked her spear up out of the mud, walked past Raven, and planted herself between her and the treeline.
Torchlight came through the trunks first.
Then the hunters — five of them, spread wide, three in wolf form with their hackles up and two on human feet with steel drawn.
The lead man broke into the clearing at a run and stopped dead so fast the wolf behind him nearly rode up his heels.
He was staring at the old woman.
“Lady Melissa.” He lowered his blade at once.
The others straightened out of their crouches, and the wolves’ ears came up off their skulls.
Whoever she was, five armed Blackthorn hunters had just gone from a hunting party to a group of men caught somewhere they didn’t want to be.
But they didn’t leave.
“My lady.” The lead hunter’s eyes went past her, found Raven at the base of the fallen tree, and hardened.
“That servant belongs to House Blackthorn.
Tonight she assaulted Lady Celeste — injured her, held a knife to her throat before a hall of witnesses, and fled the estate.
The Alpha commands her returned.
We’ll take her and trouble you no further.” Raven’s breath went thin.
She watched the woman’s back, waiting for the step aside, and her hand crawled through the leaves for a better grip on the slate.
Five of them.
She measured the black gap between the trees on her left, and her body answered the question before she finished asking it — she wouldn’t make it ten steps.
Lady Melissa didn’t step aside.
She turned her head instead, unhurried, and looked at Raven.
Then she looked at the two dead shadow wolves cooling in her clearing, and last of all at the hunters.
“Two shadow wolves crossed your western boundary tonight,” she said, “and House Blackthorn sent its hunters after one injured servant?” The lead man’s jaw worked.
“The beasts are patrol business, my lady.
The girl is the Alpha’s command.
She’s dangerous — you see the state of her, that’s Lady Celeste’s own blood on—” “That’s her blood,” Melissa said.
“Look again.” “She remains under Blackthorn authority still—” “She’s outside your boundary, on my ground, and she carries no mark of your House.” Melissa’s voice didn’t rise at all.
“She belongs to no one standing in this clearing.” Silence.
One of the wolves shifted its weight, and its paws made small wet sounds in the mud.
“Then the girl—” Melissa began, and stopped.
She turned her head toward Raven again.
“What is your name?” Raven blinked at her.
All night, nobles had discussed her rank, her blood, her punishment, and her future across the top of her head, and not one of them had asked her a single thing.
Her mouth was slow to work.
“R-Raven.” Melissa waited.
“Raven Rivers,” she finished.
The woman faced the hunters.
“Raven Rivers is under my protection until I decide otherwise.” Raven stared at the back of the gray braid.
She’d braced for the handover from the moment the horn sounded — the mistake corrected, the stranger’s debt cancelled, five hunters walking her home to whatever the Alpha had planned for her in a house with no witnesses left.
Her grip on the slate had gone loose without her permission.
“My lady.” The lead hunter chose his words with visible care.
“Alpha Blackthorn will not accept interference in a matter of his own household.
Not even from you.” “Then tell him he knows where to find me.” The hunter looked at her.
He looked at the dead shadow wolves, the spear, the silver blade at her waist, and whatever orders were sitting in his mouth, he swallowed them.
He sheathed his steel and signalled the others with a flat cut of his hand.
They pulled back into the trees one at a time.
The last of the wolves went slowly, and its eyes stayed on Raven the whole way, black in the torchlight, until the undergrowth closed over it.
The horn sounded again from deeper in the forest — one long note, falling.
The clearing stood quiet again.
Raven got her good foot under her, set her back against the root-ball, and pushed herself upright the whole slow way.
Her ankle screamed.
She kept her weight off it and stood anyway, one hand on the dead tree, because this woman had claimed her in front of Blackthorn hunters, and whatever that claim cost or meant, Raven refused to be carried into it.
She managed four steps.
On the fifth, the ankle went sideways under her, and the ground swung up — then a hand caught her arm, and another took her weight under the shoulder, and she was held.
“Who is Laura?” Raven asked.
“You have more urgent problems.” The grip turned her, firmly, toward the dark side of the clearing.
Raven set her teeth.
She was hanging off a stranger’s shoulder a mile from everything she’d ever known, so the issue could not be forced.
They went into the trees.
Raven tried to keep track of the route while she still could.
She marked the turns, the slope of the ground, the stream they crossed on flat stones, because nobody had explained this protection yet, and if it turned out to be something else, she wanted to know the road back.
But exhaustion was catching up with her fast.
Her eyes kept slipping shut between steps, and twice she jerked awake still walking, held upright by nothing but the woman’s grip on her arm.
Then there was a door, the wavering glow of an oil lamp, and a chair, and then Raven was sitting down.
The lodge was one long room under heavy beams, and it was built the way the woman fought — nothing decorative, everything load-bearing.
Log walls two hands thick.
Shutters banded with iron.
A stone hearth deep enough to stand in, with a fire banked low, herbs and snares and smoked meat hanging in rows from the rafters.
It was the doorframe Raven couldn’t stop looking at.
The wood there was carved from knee height to shoulder height with short horizontal notches, dozens of them climbing the frame in uneven little ladders, and beside each notch a name and a number in small, patient knife-strokes.
Denna, six.
Denna, seven.
Joren, five.
Joren, six.
Joren, nine.
Four names, climbing year by year up the doorpost, until every ladder just stopped.
Small painted likenesses stood in plain wooden frames along the mantel.
Melissa appeared younger in the first, seated beside a broad, bearded man.
Others showed children posed on the lodge steps at different ages.
One larger family portrait gathered all of them outside the lodge, a dozen people at least, some smiling while the youngest struggled to remain still.
The portraits thinned as they went—fewer faces in each frame, the family scenes giving way to smaller individual likenesses—and around every frame past the middle of the shelf, someone had tied a narrow black ribbon.
Seven frames.
Seven ribbons.
Raven looked away from them, because the woman had turned around.
Melissa worked on her without ceremony.
She cut the ruined sleeve off at the shoulder and cleaned the three claw lines with something that burned worse than the claws had, and while she worked she turned the arm twice beneath the oil lamp, checking every inch of broken skin.
“Did either of them bite you?” “No.” “Be certain.
A scratch from claws is a wound.
A scratch from teeth is a funeral.” “They didn’t bite me.” Melissa checked anyway, arm, shoulder, and calf, and only then bound the wound.
She wrapped the ankle tight between two strips of bark, cleaned the grit out of Raven’s palms, and tilted her chin up with one finger to study the bruising around her throat.
Her face gave out nothing the whole time.
Last, she pressed a clay cup into Raven’s hands, something dark that smelled of roots and tasted like punishment.
“For the tearing,” she said.
“In your chest.
Drink all of it.” Raven’s eyes came up fast, but the woman had already turned to the hearth.
She drank.
Warmth spread out from her sternum, and the burn that had lived behind it since the banquet hall banked down for the first time to something that only ached.
Her eyes went to the door again — the fourth time since she’d sat down, and the bar was still in its bracket, and the shutters were still closed, and nothing outside made any sound except rain starting in the trees.
That was when she noticed the portrait hanging apart from the others.
It hung on the wall beside the hearth inside a dark wooden frame.
Melissa again, younger—gray already threading her braid, but her face fuller and her shoulders straighter—stood stiff and formal in a high-collared uniform coat.
Not hunting leathers.
A dress uniform, cut for ceremony.
Raven didn’t care about the coat.
Pinned at its collar was a badge: a wolf’s head over crossed spears, circled by a ring of stars.
She was out of the chair before her ankle could vote, hopping one-footed past the table with her hand braced on its edge, and stopped in front of the portrait with her nose a hand’s width from the glass.
Three years of stolen gazettes.
The crest had headed every admissions notice, every ranking list, every trial report she’d ever fished out of a waste bin and flattened and kept.
Valerius.
“You know that badge,” Melissa said from the hearth.
“Yes.” “What do you know about it?” “Valerius Academy.” Raven meant to stop there but the picture was right in front of her and the words came up like floodwater.
“Autumn admissions opened last month.
Unranked applicants need a sponsorship or a House endorsement, entrance trials run in three stages, combat is weighted double for omegas — which is unfair, but that’s their weighting — personal rankings reset each term, House points don’t.
Top twenty in the personal rankings get considered for Vanguard placement, and this year they’ll take unranked wolves through the open trial on the last day, if any survive the qualifiers.” She stopped, because her breath had run out before her memory had.
Melissa had gone still by the hearth.
The ladle hung in her hand, forgotten over the pot, and she was studying Raven’s face with an attention she hadn’t given the hunters, the wolves, or the wounds.
“That’s not gossip,” she said.
“That’s study.” Raven’s face heated.
She knew what came next, because it had come next in the kitchen every time — Valerius is for wolves, girl.
She braced for it and looked at the floor.
“Do you think you could enter Valerius this week,” Melissa asked, “if someone gave you the chance?” Raven’s head came up.
The question sat there, impossible, in the middle of a lodge that smelled of herbs and smoke.
She searched the woman’s face for the joke and couldn’t find it, and her heart had started to pound anyway, painful against her bruised ribs, and she hated it for pounding — hope in this quantity had never once been safe to hold.
“I don’t know if they would accept me,” she said at last.
Her voice came out low.
“No sponsor.
No House.
No—” she stopped short of wolf.
“I don’t know.” Her eyes went back to the badge, over the crossed spears and the ring of stars.
“But it’s been my dream for years.” Melissa set the ladle down.
She crossed her arms and studied Raven for a long moment — the bound arm, the bark-splinted ankle, the bruised throat, the mud, and the girl underneath all of it who was still standing on one foot because sitting back down hadn’t occurred to her.
“Do you want to enter Valerius?” CREATORS’ THOUGHTS Retroferd THE QUEEN’S COMMENT ROOM Interviewer: We don’t have any reader questions yet.
Raven: Good.
Enjoy the silence.
It won’t last.
Interviewer: Shouldn’t you welcome the readers?
Raven: They watched me reject two Alphas, threaten their sister with a knife and run into a forest full of monsters.
If they’re still here, they already feel welcome.
Interviewer: Fair enough.
But they were promised dangerous Alpha mates.
When are those men appearing?
Raven: No reader asked that.
Interviewer: They will.
Raven: Unfortunately, so will the Alphas.
Interviewer: How many?
Raven: Enough to destroy any hope I had of living peacefully.
Interviewer: Are they handsome?
Raven: That was part of the problem.
Interviewer: And dangerous?
Raven: That was the rest of it.
Interviewer: Did any of them manage to tame you?
Raven: You have read the title, haven’t you?
Interviewer: Any message for the readers who arrived this early?
Raven: You came before the crowds, which makes you witnesses.
Leave your questions in the comments.
Next time, I might answer one.
Interviewer: The best question?
Raven: No.
The one that annoys me most.