A moon’s turn came and went, and the forest’s cold deepened from a bite to a gnawing, skeletal grip. Within the timbered walls of the Alpha’s hall though, a different kind of heat persisted—Isangrim lived. The child was no longer a fading ember. He had become a steady, greedy flame. Where before he had been a bundle of sticks and parchment skin, he had now filled out, his limbs growing dense with pup-fat, his belly round. His cries had shed their thin, desperate edge. They were now deep-chested roars of pure, indignant want; demanding bellows that echoed in the rafters of the longhouse when Albi would walk him up and down the halls.

  And Fenris’s mornings began with an absence; the space beside him in the great bed always empty, and the furs where Albi slept cool to the touch. He would rise from the dream-memory of his Ygrid’s scent, sometimes clinging to the back of his throat, sometimes in a breeze that wandered into his chamber behind the tapestry, as if she had walked by the door.

  He would rise, rub the water from his eyes, and pull on his tunic and boots. Albi was never in the chamber in these early mornings. But the fire was ablaze and fresh and she never left the room cold for him to wake to.

  He knew where to find her, though. And always the dawn air would slap his face, sharp as a knife, when he’d push open the heavy door to the rear courtyard. There she would be: a pale wraith in Ygrid’s old cloak, pacing a slow, patient path through the snow he’d made his own men pack down for her. Isangrim was a lump of fur and wool against her chest, no longer the whisper-thin scrap of his first days. Sometimes she would shift her cloak, and Fenris would catch a glimpse of a round, flushed cheek, an eye the color of polished amber, watching the world she showed him with a solemn, preternatural focus.

  Sometimes she sang down to him, her melodies strange and winding, words thickened with her accent. More often, she talked, her voice a low, steady murmur. “See how the ice jewels the branches,little wolf? The world is sleeping, but it is not dead.”

  To the rest of the pack, she was a ghost that walked their lanes in plain daylight. Fenris had commanded she remain within the longhouse ground for her safety. Albi, with a silence more deafening than defiance, ignored him. She would appear in the village square when the weak winter sun was highest, the babe swaddled tight against the cold, with a purpose that brooked no challenge and a basket woven of reeds hooked over her arm.

  The human slave women grinding grain would fall silent, their whispers resuming only after she passed. The warriors by their posts, their forges, their fires, their racks, all would pause in their work, eyes following the pale stranger in their midst. The warriors’ wives would whisper amongst themselves, making no effort to hide their skewed expressions. She endured it; she had endured worse.

  He’d told her he would purchase whatever she needed so that she did not have to endure any of it. Albi had only told him,“It is no bother to me.”

  But Fenris refused to give her coin, believing that Albi would come around to his command, naturally, out of need one day. If she could not be controlled outright, he would have to find other methods, he decided. It had been Jorik’s fault that the plan failed. It was the old warrior’s heart, weakened by, what he explained later was,an innocent sweetness in Albi, for why he was compelled to gift her with a sack of her own coins.

  With it she would buy pouches of dried hyssop, blocks of rendered fat, skeins of coarse-spun wool the color of mud or moss. With it she bought her own food, her own salves, and her own floral oils.

  To Fenris, when they were alone, she spoke only when required, and her words were as stripped and functional as a gutted carcass.“He fed on the hour, all night.”Or, ”The water skin is empty.”There were no padded courtesies or questions, just bared facts delivered in that rounded, river-stone accent.

  Though the days were well enough, the nights of Isangrim’s first moon month were a siege. He woke often with a wolf’s relentless appetite, his mouth rooting blindly in the dark. Fenris would watch from his side of the bed, feigning sleep as Albi stirred. She would sigh, a sound of profound exhaustion, and without opening her eyes would guide the hungry mouth to her nipple. The child’s suck was fierce, a strong, rhythmic pull that made her whole body tense before yielding. Her body, in turn, answered his demand. Her breasts, overproducing to meet the babe’s want, became heavy, ripe burdens, the skin stretched taut, a web of blue veins visible beneath the pallor.

  When she was too tired from these nights to make her rounds in the village, she ate whatever food was placed before her—the stews, the hard cheese, the dried meat—with a grim, mechanical purpose, shoveling it in as if stoking a forge. The effort of keeping Isangrim nourished carved new hollows beneath her cheekbones, painted bruise-like shadows under her eyes. Yet, paradoxically, she did not weaken. A different kind of strength emerged in her—a tensile, wiry resilience. Her hands, measuring herbs or working the woolen yarn for the babe’s clothes, never shook with exhaustion. It was the strength of a root finding purchase in barren stone, silent, patient, and utterly determined to survive its predicament.

  Then came a morning when the silence was different. The bed was empty, as it normally was, but the courtyard was empty too; and that wasnot normal. He stood at the rear door to the courtyard and eyed a single set of Albi’s footprints marring the hoarfrost, leading to the gate. But the scent of them was stale more than fresh.

  Fenris found Jorik by the small smithy near the cellar door, feeding slivers of black charcoal into the orange maw of the forge. The heat warped the air around him.

  “Albi?” Fenris asked, his voice flat. The old warrior had developed a fatherly eye for the slave and always seemed to know her whereabouts.

  Jorik did not look up from his task. “She took my grey mare out to the meadow by the creek. The one where my dear Aula is buried. I told her where she might find the herbs Lyris would not sell to her, if she was willing to bring my Aula her favorite winter flowers to place in her grave-stone.”

  Fenris rubbed the hair out of his eyes, stiffening a roll of them.

  “When did she leave, Jorik.”

  " With the first light.”

  “So early?”

  “It was bad dreams that woke her I am afraid,” Jorik said, and seemed genuine in his fear for the slaves well-being, whichconcernedFenris for the man’s softened heart, “of which, the herbs at the creek will help.Fenris,you have been a son to me since Alpha Alfric’s passing. And I say this to you as a loving father in his steed, not as a warrior sworn to your protection. Could you might find it in you to help with the babe sometimes? To let the girl rest in the night?”

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  The patience, thin already, had been fully exhausted by Jorik’s ridiculous words.

  “Thegirlis a human slave, Jorik, her sole task is to nurse and care for my infant pup. You should feel less concern for her well-being, and more for that of yourfuture Alpha.” Fenris could feel spit at the corners of his mouth and wiped it angrily, “did she leave withmy son, Jorik?”

  Fenris was already stripping off the heavy winter cloak from his shoulders, his movements stiff with frustration.

  “The.....slave woman....claimed to have your permission.” Jorik said, his tone flattening into a submissive whisper. His eyes like chips of flint in the firelight, narrowed at him, “Should I have doubted her word, Alpha Fenris?”

  The question hung between them, loaded. To doubt her was to acknowledge that he could not control her. He did not need the truth of that in the air, not even to Jorik, who held larger secrets than this in the vault of his silence.

  Fenris held the older wolf’s stare for a heartbeat too long, then turned on his heel without another word and walked back out to the courtyard. The fear was not that she would run. Or that the boy would be hurt. It was a deeper, more primal disquiet—a sense of something slipping from his grasp.

  In the courtyard, he made his choice. He stripped off all his clothes, the air cold on his skin. The Change took him as a rupture. Bones cracked and re-knitted with wet, popping sounds. Tendons slithered and reforged. Fur, thick and black as a midwinter night, sprouted from his flesh.

  When it was over, Fenris the man was gone. In his place stood the Wolf—a creature of muscle and myth, taller than a warhorse, with a muzzle that could crush a man’s skull..

  The wolf-mind was a raw, unfiltered channel. Grief for Ygrid was no longer a memory; it was a scent on the wind that would never fade, a hollow place in the pack-sense that ached like a rotten tooth. Control, patience, reason—these were human frailties. Here, there was only instinct, possession, and a sharp, territorial fury. And cutting through it all, a scent-path as clear as a road: milk, frost, soap-root, and the vital, sun-warm thread of his son.

  He followed it, hurdling the wall that circled the longhouse court like a step over stone, moving as fast as shadow into the frosted sentinel pines, his paws making no sound.

  The meadow was not very deep in the woods. It opened before him, a vast bowl of white beneath a sky the color of old wool. Jorik’s grey mare stood ground-tethered, head down, nosing at the frozen grass.

  There was Albi with it.

  Albi moved through the winter-killed stalks like a spirit of the place, her dark cloak the only smudge of color. Isangrim was swaddled tight against her chest. In her hand swung a small leather satchel. From his concealed vantage, Fenris watched as she knelt, her fingers deftly working at the base of a lightning-split oak, prying loose a cluster of dark, leathery mushrooms. She examined them, sniffed, nodded to herself, and placed them in the bag. She moved to the small stream that lined the edge of the meadow, its water a black ribbon under a lid of ice, and there gathered dried seed-heads and the withered, sage-like leaves of molywort before going to the rise on the bank where Aula’s grave mound was marked by a stone pillar at the top. There she reached into the satchel, pushed away her gathered things, and placed a handful of small winter black roses in the hole at the center of the stone.

  The mare’s head snapped up. Its ears flattened, its nostrils flared wide, drinking in the scent of predator, of the wolf in the trees that was him. It let out a piercing, terrified whinny and reared, its front hooves slashing at the brittle air.

  Albi straightened in one fluid motion, and she quickly descended the rise, back into the flat meadow, her hand flying to the seax at her belt, her other arm locking around Isangrim. Her eyes, wide and wary, scanned the tree line.

  “Hush, my little wolf,” she murmured to the babe, who fussed at the loud noise of the horse, though her own voice was wire-tight. She dipped her head, pressed a kiss to his forehead, then blew a soft, vibrating sound into the folds of his neck.

  From the depths of the furs came a tiny, breathy sound of delight that replaced the fright. The sound struck Fenris with a physical blow, a lance of pure, disarming light in the wolf’s dark consciousness. With a force that he could not control, he stepped from the shadows of the pines.

  Albi froze. She saw the colossal black wolf, a beast of legend made flesh, its golden eyes fixed unblinkingly upon her, her hand falling slowly away from her knife, as if recognizing the futility of steel against such a thing. The satchel hung limp from her fingers, falling into the snow.

  Fenris advanced. One slow, deliberate paw after another, closing the distance. The wolf’s senses were drowning.Albi... her scent no longer just a trail to follow, but an avalanche he was falling down. It was the crisp bite the gathered herbs left on the palms of her upturned hands, the warm, floral notes of soap-root on her skin, the musk of her like thyme, rising from the heated place at her neck, the cloying sweetness of her milk beneath the dry wool scent of cloak, and the underlying note of woodsmoke and sorrow as old as stone. It didn’t just fill his nostrils; it flooded over them, seeped into his bloodstream and vibrated in the marrow of his bones. It was a primal recognition; all the scents he’d ever smelled up until now were her, but just hidden or disguised as others.

  He stopped, mere feet from her. The hook in his chest, the bond he had denied–yanked and a violent tremor wracked the great wolf’s frame. It began in his flanks, a fine shiver, then escalated into a full-body convulsion. His control, already frayed in this form, snapped.

  The world tilted.

  With a choked, guttural sound that was neither beast nor man, the Change reversed itself, a violent expulsion. One moment he was the Wolf, a creature of power and instinct. The next, he was Fenris, naked and gasping, sprawled on his back in the frozen meadow grass below the human slaves feet, the grey sky spinning overhead.

  “Alpha Fenris?”

  Her footsteps, swift and light, crunched through the grass and landed by his ears. She was there, kneeling beside him, her face pale with a shock that overrode her usual reserve. Her free hand reached out. “Fenris, Fenris what happened? Are you ill? Why aren’t you speaking?” The moment the tips of her fingers met the skin of his forehead, the world fractured. A jolt, white-hot and seismic, blasted through him and found her.

  Albi’s eyes flew wide. A sharp, pained gasp escaped her lips. Then her eyes rolled back, showing the whites. Her body stiffened like a corpse, and she began to crumple backward.

  Fenris moved. Naked, disoriented, he surged up from the ground with a snarl. He caught her under her arm as she fell, protecting her head from impact on the earth. His other hand swooped in to cradle the bundle of his son and lift him from her chest as he lowered her to the cold earth.

  Her eyelids fluttered. She breathed, but her consciousness was adrift somewhere deep and dark. And in the vault of his own mind, a voice that was not his echoed, clear, terrified.

  Fenris... Fenris...what happened?

  The knowledge, old and instinctual, rose from the depths of his blood. The tales of his Elders.The Imprint.The soul-bond. The tether that could not be broken. A power thought lost to the stagnation of their pack. A power that had just, with the force of an avalanche falling, bound him to this human slave.

  He looked down at her pale, slack face, at his son nestled in his arm, and formed the thought, pushing it back along that terrifying, intimate channel that had been forced open between their minds.

  Albi.....it is the Imprint. The Great Mother has chosen us.