Raven lunged the last body length as the wood fell away under her feet, and her hands caught the stone lip of the far ledge as the beam and the yelping wolf crashed down into the dark below, wood and rock hammering the flooded pit floor a long time later.
She hung by her fingers.
The stone bit through her palms.
She kicked for a foothold and found none, and her arms — spent from the knife, from Celeste, from a full day of trays and terror — began, very simply, to fail.
Her grip slid a knuckle’s width down the rock, and it came to her with total clarity that this was the place.
Not the banquet hall, not the hunters or the forest.
Right here, at the edge of everything, with nobody watching after all.
A sound came out of her that she’d never made before.
She was crying, tears cutting through the mud on her face, but she hauled anyway — because her whole life had been doing the next thing while crying about it — one elbow up onto the stone, palms tearing open, boots scraping and slipping, a scream through her teeth, and then she was over, chest-down on flat rock, sobbing air.
The hunters on the far side were shouting to one another about the long way around.
Raven pushed up to her hands and knees to run.
The ground went.
The whole shelf of loose slate under her simply let go of the hillside, and she was falling again — not through air this time but down a long steep slope in a landslide of mud and stone and snapping branches, rolling, the world battering her from every side at once.
Something struck her ribs.
Her ankle caught between rocks and wrenched the wrong way, and then the slope spat her out onto soft wet earth at the bottom, and everything stopped moving.
She lay on her back, fighting for every breath.
Above and behind, very far away now, the hunting howls sounded again — searching, spread out along the quarry rim she’d left them stranded on.
The collapse had taken the slope with it.
There was no path down where she’d fallen.
The howls prowled the high ground, frustrated, and slowly, over long minutes, they faded off to the north to find a way around.
Raven stared up through the black lattice of branches, ribs aching, ankle screaming, palms raw and stinging with dirt in the wounds.
I’m out, she thought, and almost laughed.
Goddess help me, I’m actually out.
The laugh came out broken, and then it wasn’t a laugh anymore.
She lay in the wet leaves and cried.
Not the quiet kind she’d learned in the servants’ quarters where the walls were thin, but the kind she hadn’t let herself have since she was small — ugly, heaving, both hands pressed over her face.
Everything came up at once.
The bonds.
Her wolf.
The sock of coins she’d never collect.
Even the stupid sweet bread, still sitting in its paper beside a dead candle in a room she was never going back to.
She cried until her bruised ribs ached with it, and the tears ran hot through the mud on her face and into her hair.
At some point it wore itself out, the way it always did, and she just lay there, breathing.
That was when she noticed she could hear her own breathing too clearly.
The forest had gone quiet around her.
No crickets, no owls, no small things moving through the leaf litter.
Nothing at all.
The smell reached her next — wet fur, blood and something underneath both, sweetish and rotten, like meat forgotten at the bottom of a summer barrel.
Raven turned her head.
A stag lay a few body lengths away, half-eaten, its stomach opened.
Blood had soaked into the ground all around it, and even in the weak moonlight it showed black — not the dark of red at night, but black, and where it had pooled thickest, the leaves were shriveled and curling.
A sound slipped out of her before she could trap it.
A small, strangled catch of breath.
Behind the carcass, something rose.
It had been a wolf once.
It was too big now and too thin at the same time, its soot-black fur hanging off it in patches with bare gray skin showing through, black veins crawling beneath like cracks in porcelain.
The broken haft of a patrol spear stood out of its shoulder, buried deep, an old wound that should have killed it or at least made it favor the leg — and the creature moved as if the spear simply wasn’t there.
Its eyes were ringed in raw red, the pupils fully black, wide, drinking her in.
A string of dark saliva swung from its jaw and dropped, and where it touched the leaves, it hissed.
Its shadow, cast by the thin moonlight, moved a half-beat behind its body.
Raven began to slide backward across the wet ground, palm over palm, very slowly.
A growl answered her — from behind.
She twisted.
A second one had already circled her while she stared at the first.
Smaller, this one, part of an ear gone, its jaw healed crooked so the teeth didn’t line up, and between those teeth, thin black vapor leaked out with every breath like smoke off a doused fire.
While she watched, the two of them moved apart — deliberately, one swinging left, one right, opening the angle so she couldn’t face both.
They were flanking her.
Kieran’s voice came back to her, unwanted: It took the corruption two days to reach his mind, and he spent the last one begging us to kill him.
One bite.
That was all it took.
Not even a kill — a graze of those teeth.
Raven looked at her twisted ankle, at her empty, bleeding hands, at the spear shaft sunk uselessly in the big one’s shoulder where some patrol wolf had already tried and died.
She reached inward one more time, down into the dark water, for the flicker.
Nothing.
Not even a ripple.
Raven looked from one circling monster to the other, tears of pure exhausted fury standing in her eyes, and heard herself say, out loud, into the silent forest: “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Out of every direction the hunters could have driven her, every square mile of forest in the territory, her legs had carried her to the exact patch of ground where the nightmares ate.
Eighteen years of the worst luck a girl could carry, and it had saved its masterpiece for tonight.
Her chin was crumpling.
She hated that her chin was crumpling.
The smaller wolf feinted at her.
It wasn’t even a real lunge — a dart of the head, testing — and Raven fell for it completely.
She’d snatched a broken branch off the ground and she swung it wild, too early, hitting nothing, her whole side left open.
The big one came out of that open side like the dark itself.
She threw herself away from its jaws, and the teeth missed — but claws didn’t, raking fire across her upper arm, three lines torn through sleeve and skin, and the force of it slammed her into the mud.
The smaller wolf’s crooked jaws closed on her branch and the wood burst into splinters.
Raven lay in the wet leaves, bleeding, ankle useless, weapon gone, and reached inside herself one last time.
She didn’t reach with anger now.
She begged.
Please.
I don’t need you to speak.
Just help me move.
Silence.
So that was it, then.
She’d rejected two Alpha heirs, held a knife to a noble’s throat, bargained an oath out of a Great Alpha, crossed a rotten beam over a black pit — and escaped House Blackthorn by the width of five minutes, just to die in the mud a mile past the wall, alone, with no one even left to lie about how it happened.
Her hand closed on a jagged shard of slate.
Raven dragged herself up onto one knee, arm bleeding, chest heaving, and raised the stone.
It was nothing.
It wouldn’t get through fur, let alone whatever these things had instead of lives.
She raised it anyway, because somewhere between the kitchen and this forest floor she had run completely out of kneeling.
The big one gathered itself, muscles bunching under the patchy fur, and launched at her throat.
“Duck,” a woman’s voice snapped behind her.
Raven dropped flat on instinct.
Twang.
A silver-tipped spear flashed over her head, crossed the clearing in a breath, and buried itself in the shadow wolf’s open mouth.