The mead hall stank of wet fur, old sweat, and the sharp, metallic tang of anxious-fear. The meeting had been put together hastily, and many were unsure as to the nature of the urgent call. It had been Hroth’s impatience to get this over with and nothing more.

  The sun had barely risen over the trees, and many were still heavy with sleep in their eyes. Fenris stood at the rear, pressed against the stone wall by the sheer mass of bodies. There was nowhere to sit. The benches had been claimed, and the overflow clung to the rafters like bats, their legs dangling above the rushes. Isangrim sat upon Fenris’s shoulder, heavy and warm, his small fingers tangled in his father’s hair for purchase. His dark, golden eyes were wide and solemn as they surveyed the assembly beneath him..

  On the dais, beneath the smoke-blackened beams that had once borne the black wolf-head of Black Rock’s banner, Hroth stood with his mate beneath the swirling blue-on-black lines of Deep Water. Beeba was dressed in leather and wolf-pelt, her black hair an unbraided halo around her hunter’s face. Her presence among them was still a profanity to some, whispered under breaths around him.

  She had pulled Albi up to the dias when she happened upon her outside the mead hall, and there his mate stood now in grey wool, her silver hair unbound, catching the firelight like her own solemn standard.

  You look natural upon that dais, Albi. Fenris sent the idle thought to her, and saw the budding smile on her beautiful face, though she could not see him through the pack of bodies.

  I will find a healer who can see to your eyes.

  Fenris rolled his eyes, but did not let the thought waver in certainty, feeling the pride of it in his chest. She was beautiful in the power of it; she seemed born only for standing above them; more so than he ever had.

  You are a fool, Fenris. He could hear the scoff in it.

  Hroth raised his hands. The hall fell silent, save for the shifting of weight and the wet sound of breathing.

  “Though this is not why I’ve called you here at this hour, I would like to start with an announcement that some of you will be thrilled to hear. There has been another Imprint among us.”

  From the shadows near the great hearth, she emerged. Not as a woman of grief, but a woman of fierce strength who was almost unrecognizable as the widow of Asger. Beside her stood a man—thin but strong, pale but tough-skinned, with the calloused hands of a field slave that he kept securely behind his back. His eyes were raised at level with the wolves in the room. He did not show any fear; though he could have, Fenris reflected, from the sheer volume of amber eyes that were fixed on him. Fenris did not know his name. He was from Deep Water, and had not been one from Haggatha house.

  Through the bond, Fenris felt Albi’s sudden, fierce joy blaze like a torch in his chest—a warmth so intense it made his eyes sting.

  She speaks to us, Albi’s thought brushed against his mind, reverent and certain. The Great Mother speaks to us, Fenris. It was true. It was a vision.

  She speaks to you, Albi.

  Fenris tightened his hand upon Isangrim’s small back, feeling the steady thump of the child’s heart against his palm, and tilted sideways so that she could see their faces through a part in the crowd. The corners of her lips curved when their eyes met, a motion so slight it scarcely parted them, yet it was enough to spread a rosy bloom up to her eyes, making her face sweet and vulnerable only for him.

  “Now, everyone, sit.” Hroth commanded, and those that had the space to obey did with a rustling of fur and leather and the creaking of wood. “What there is to speak of now will not sweeten your mead. This human King of the South has sworn our eradication through his wolf-hunters. His grief is a silver knife he means to bury in our throats. It was my warrior who slain his son and grandson, and it is for their death that he seeks his revenge. And it is for his daughter-in-law…. my sister, standing beside me, that he fights to rescue from our clutches, believing her to be a prisoner in our walls.” Hroth’s gaze found Albi.

  A horn slipped from a warrior’s nerveless fingers somewhere in the pack, striking the packed-earth floor with a dull, wet thunk. Every face—Black Rock and Deep Water alike—was turned toward the dais, frozen in expressions of pure, uncomprehending astonishment. Jaws hung slack. Amber eyes, wide and unblinking, reflected the flickering torchlight like a field of cornered deers.

  The ripples of connection were spreading through the minds of those who had not known; connecting disparate moments into one damning, coherent whole. It explained everything. Some seemed to say on their faces; while complicating more.

  Beside him, old Jorik let out a soft, slow breath, almost a sigh. Fenris glanced at the elder. Jorik’s knobby hands, which had been resting on the head of his cane, had tightened until the tendons stood out like cords. His lips were pressed into a bloodless line. He had not known. The keeper of all stories had been blind to this one. The realization was written plainly on his weathered face—a mix of professional affront and dawning, profound alarm. He looked from Hroth’s stony, defiant glare to Albi’s proud, cold profile, and a slow understanding, tinged with a kind of horror, washed over his features.

  “The Wolf-Hunters have invaded Skoltha, as we know. Rusk from Black Water has a group down at the Deep River, keeping them at bay behind the river’s line but it is….temporary.” Hroth continued, his voice hardening. “Winter is our only ally now, and she is fickle. When the thaw comes, they will surge again, stronger with allies from the West, and they will not stop until the last of us is ash upon the forest floor,” He paused, lighting and inhaling a rolled leaf he’d carried in palm of his closed fist, “I am the first to admit that this tastes of gall. But the truth is plain for you all to see. Deep Water has fought this war for four years now, and we have lost nearly a third of our men. I will not be the Alpha who continues to lead us to early extinction because I could not swallow my own arrogance. Let our end as wolf-men be greater than that.”

  Fenris watched him, this golden giant who had once been a wolf of great chaotic recklessness. He was different now. Beeba’s solemn cautiousness had leaked into him through their bond. “We have only one choice before us. Beeba and Albi will descend our mountain on the morning and will treat with these Wolf-Hunters face to face. By the Great Mother’s blessing they will be given permission to sit with the King in his fortress, and forge a sátt that will be a binding peace and an end to this war.”

  A voice cut through the tension like an axe through kindling. “So you want us to bow down low like groveling dogs?”

  The speaker was a mountain of a man from Deep Water, his skull shaved and scarred, his beard braided with bone. He was the Bor of Deep Water, Fenris thought to himself.

  Aye, he’s the same temper on him, too. Albi’s thought touched him in agreement.

  “Magnes.” Hroth greeted, lifting a horn off the high table to where the man-beast stood among the benches, his fists clenched and his squared face purple with suppressed rage.

  “Are we supposed to forgive the vows of vengeance we made to our warrior brothers they’ve slaughtered in battle? For a war you’ve started among us?”

  Hroth exhaled slowly. “As your Alpha, Magnes, I will command it of you now. Our vows of vengeance have only led to more vows of the same. You’ve lost your brother. You will lose more, old warrior, if you continue with this war. I am not commanding you to grovel, but we will have an alliance that asks us to tolerate these humans. That is what we are being called to do, by these….wonderful circumstances that rise around us.”

  “And what will we give this King? They do not give peace and alliance as we give beggars bread and milk!”

  In the silence of Magnes’ fiery gaze, Albi stepped forward on the dais, her hands resting idly on the firmness of her belly.

  “The Wolves of Skoltha will remain within the bounds of our ancestral lands. We will not cross the Deep River to them; and they will not cross it to us. We will take no more human slaves from their southern riverland settlements. And”—she paused, and through the bond Fenris felt the triumphant smile in her thoughts, the taste of vindication on her tongue—“we will release every slave in our midst, every stolen woman, man and child held in bondage within these walls. Beeba and I will lead them as a great caravan back down the mountain. Those slaves who wish to remain may do so, but not as property. They will be granted freedom, and will be the Free-Folk of Skoltha. They will hold their own land and rights beyond the village palisade, and they will be protected members of this pack. They will be given voice and vote. And should the King in the South require our warriors for the protection of his land from enemies, his enemies will be ours and we will answer his call.”

  Fenris had silently prepared himself against the response, but the physical wave of sound carried forth by the uproar was so immense that not even he could brace against it. He’d pulled Isangrim from his shoulder to his chest as a chorus roar of denial tore from a hundred snarling throats all at once, ancient and outraged; a unity shared by Deep Water and Black Rock alike. Benches screeched against stone as men and women surged to their feet. Beside him, faces twisted toward the Change, jaws lengthening and eyes flaring amber in the torchlight.

  Protect him, leave if you must. Albi told him sternly.

  I will not leave you.

  They do not scare me, Fenris.

  Though the very air around her was moist with the promise of violence. Fenris could feel the threat on her life like a chill through his spine.

  “IS IT NOT ENOUGH WE WILL BE GROVELING DOGS! YOU WISH TO MAKE US TRUE BEGGERS, TOO!” roared Magnes again.

  “Who will till the fields when we hunt? Who will mend the nets, tan the hides, grind the grain? Without their hands, we starve. Is this your peace? A slow death by empty bellies?” It was Lyris, the shopkeep, her woad dyed dress shaking with her trembling frame as she scowled at Albi.

  A swell of agreement followed, guttural and fierce. Dyrus, a younger Black Rock wolf and cousin of Asger’s line, told in the stormy grey of his eyes, shouted on the top of a table he’d climbed, carrying his voice over the crowd, “THEY ARE PROPERTY! Won in fair raids! My grandfather’s pelt hangs in my hut from his raiding of a human settlement! His death gave my family ten strong slaves to see us through the winters of his absence! Should his death have been for nothing?”

  Albi stood her ground, her hands clenched at her sides. Fenris felt the tempest of her thoughts through the bond, a cold, swift calculation, sorting their objections like stones on a riverbed.

  “What is a wolf who relies on chained sheep for its food? ARE WE NOT HUNTERS? ARE YOU NOT WOLVES?” Albi yelled back, and Fenris could feel the sweetness of her anger in his mouth, “You yell to me that it is US who needs THEM! BRING THE SHEEP HERE! ASK THEM WHO THEY NEED! It is not us! Tell me then, WHO IS THE REAL SHEEP?”

  “WATCH THOSE FUCKING WORDS coming from your bitch mouth!” Magnes roared back, his skin rippling. A strong, iron grip on Fenris’s arm–Jorik–was the only thing that saved him from his own Change at the threat given to his mate, like molten fire in his veins, “But them pretty words don’t fill MY grain store. Will my sons go hungry so some cobbler’s boy can fatten his goats?”

  “The free–folk will get land out by the Clearing ,” Albi said, her voice dropping, banking the rise of her anger in an attempt to calm Fenris down, feeling his rage through their bond, “this can be good, fertile land. It hugs the tree line and palisade both and is large enough to accommodate a decent gathering. Fenris and I live there now. That land will belong to the free-folk, if any choose to stay. In return, they pay a tithe to us as a share of their harvest. A fee for the protection of the pack. Our warriors will guard their walls, if any harm falls upon them we forfeit their payment.”

  An older woman of Deep Water with a face of large aging spots spoke, her voice rasping and cracking with disbelief. “And their vote? You would have them sit in on our councils? Have a say in the ways of wolves? It is an abomination! Our ways are for our blood!”

  “They will have a voice in what concerns them–their lands and their justice. In whether a wolf may trample their crops without consequence. In whether the violation of a free-folk’s daughter by a wolf-man’s lust offers the same punishment as if it were a wolf-man's daughter. They will have the right of a blood-debt should any of them be killed with malice. Their Elders will establish their own Laws, and they will be honored by us, as ours are honored by them. Is that so terrible, Lyris?”

  Torvald’s son, Torhin, stood beside Dyrus on the table, his voice the uneven rasp of the time between boyhood and manhood, “If we free them to give them to this King in the South, it looks as if we’ve yielded and we are not weak to yield!”

  “We are not yielding. We are trading the lives of human slaves for the future wolves of Black Rock. I ask you, which blood is more sacred? That of the human or that of the wolf?”

  The hall had quieted, into a turbulent, thoughtful silence. The raw instinct to refuse was still there, boiling beneath the skin. But Albi had planted a seed of cold, pragmatic doubt that was beginning to root. She had shifted the ground from can we to can we afford not to.

  Magnes remained standing, but the fight had seeped from his broadened posture. He looked old, suddenly, as old as Hroth had hinted.

  “It is a world turned upside down,” Magnes muttered, more to himself than to the hall.

  “It is a world that has already turned,” Albi said, her final words gentle on their ears, “Will we turn with it? Or will we fall beneath it, my Wolves of Skoltha?”

  Fenris watched the faces of his people and saw the anger warring with fear, tradition grappling with a terrifying, necessary pragmatism.

  A planted fist fell like a hammer onto a table nearby, running ice sharp down Fenris’s spine.

  With a grunt, Bor heaved his massive frame up onto the table’s surface, as young Dyrus and Torhin had done, the boards bowing beneath his leaden weight. He was a giant silhouetted against firelight. The top of his head nearly brushed the dangling legs of a wolf-boy in the rafters above.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  In his meaty fist, he raised his auroch’s horn. Mead sloshed over the rim, tracing gleaming lines down beneath his tunic sleeves.

  “AYE!” he roared, and his voice was a primal, uncomplicated force, “Free the sheep, then! Let them go! What is wrong with you all?” He swept his horn in a wide arc, spattering mead like a challenge. “I am Bor, son of Bor, grandson of Bor! I am no whimpering dog who needs a human to pat my head and feed me scraps from wooden bowls! The Great Bor crossed the frozen waves with nothing but his fur and fangs! Our Ancestors did not need slaves to build their world—they built it with these–” he raised a shaking fist straight into the air, knocking the wolf-boy promptly down from the rafters with a hard thud to the rushes, “--are we not living with their blood? Have we dishonored their sacrifice by being weak?”

  A few shouts of “No!” answered him.

  “This half-blood—” he jabbed the horn toward Albi, “—speaks more like pure blood than you groveling lot! We are wolves, not mules! WE ARE WOLVES, not sheep!”

  He took a deep draught from his horn, then slammed it down on the table. “If it is an empty field you fear THAN FILL IT! If it is a torn net you fear THAN MEND IT. Look how fat and pathetic and lazy we’ve grown napping on the backs of our slaves! THAT is the abomination, LYRIS! You should thank the Mother the slaves will be gone from us! Have we forgotten who we are? If this saggin’ human King wants his victory THEN GIVE HIM HIS VICTORY OF BROKEN CHAINS. We are the FREE Wolves of Skoltha! We are the children of the Great White Wolf! Our howl should be for HER, for the HUNT! Not for this business of chasing runaway sheep! WHO STANDS WITH ME!”

  It was not a unanimous roar. But a gathering rumble of assent rose, growing louder and louder until it muted out the weakened sounds of protest; a grudging acceptance of their hard truth.

  Through the bond, Fenris felt the fierce, blazing triumph in Albi’s chest. Bor had done what she could not have; the simple act of it was bringing tears to her eyes.

  Bor raised his horn one last time, his voice shaking dust from the rafters above him,. “TO THE WOLVES OF SKOLTHA!” he roared. “FREE THE SHEEP AND FREE THE WOLF!”

  This time, the answering howls that shook the hall were reluctant but decidedly resolved. The world had turned, as Albi had said, and they would as well.

  Fenris felt Isangrim’s small heart beating against his neck, rapid and bird-like, and he knew the child sensed the weight of the moment, the hinge upon which their future turned.

  Hroth raised his horn then from the dais in solidarity with the mountain man of Black Rock.

  You did it, Albi. Fenris could barely form the thought together, you freed them.

  When his eyes met hers again she was smiling at him, her horn raised high in the air.

  ????

  The mead hall spat them back into the cold, the iron hinges of the great door groaning like a dying beast as it closed upon the roar and smoke within. The village street was choked with bodies, a river of fur and leather flowing in both directions—some still drifting toward the hall to hear more of Hroth’s words, others stumbling away with the dazed, hollow-eyed look of men who had seen their world upended. Fenris moved through them with Isangrim upon his shoulders, the child’s small hands fisted in his father’s hair for stability, his dark head turning this way and that, trying to track the eddies of the crowd that seemed to amuse him considerably. Every once in a while Fenris could feel his son’s snorting chuckle through the soft belly squished against Fenris’s neck. He wished he could share in his son’s simple mirth.

  Albi matched his steps beside him.

  Where are we headed? She asked him through their mind-talk, her hand coming to rest in the crook of his bent arm.

  “The Cathedral.” Fenris said aloud.

  I’ve always wanted to go there. Her thought fell quietly upon his mind like a tired sigh.

  It is the only place we will not be bothered right now.

  The Cathedral rose before them against the eastern wall of the village, built so close to the towering pine palisade that the black trunks seemed to serve as its flying buttresses, the stones grown up against the wood like barnacles on a ship’s hull. It was an ancient structure, older than the longhouse. A low, sprawling edifice of grey granite and petrified oak, its roof steep and shingled with slate that had gone silver with age. No banner flew from its peaks. No guards stood at its doors. It had no doors at all, only a high, narrow archway draped with the cured pelts of white wolves, their fur stirring in the wind like the ghosts of sails.

  Fenris held one aside for Albi to pass underneath, dipping in behind her.

  Inside, the air was thick with the scent of tallow and old dust, the musk of centuries of paws and pads that had worn the stone floor smooth as glass. The light came from narrow slits high in the walls, shafts of winter sun that fell in pale columns through the floating motes, and illuminated the tapestries that hung in the shadows beneath them. Between the tapestries hung the skins of Alphas and honored wolves—their pelts, cured and mounted. Beside each hung the cloak the wolf had worn in man-form, the leather stiff with age, the clasps tarnished green. Fenris saw the pelt of his own sire, or perhaps his grandsire—the line of it was lost to him now, swallowed by time.

  The wolves did not pray here as Fenris heard men prayed in their white-stone churches of the South. There were no priests, no chants, no petitions for mercy. Instead, the space served as a repository for silence. Wolves came to sit upon the cold stone and wood benches and drop their burdens of fear and hope into the well of quiet. It was a place of reflection and meditation, of becoming small before the vastness of what had already been and was yet to be still.

  At the far end, upon a raised dais of black marble, stood the Altar of Memory. A great stone table pocked with the wax drippings of ten thousand years. Candles stood in ranks upon it, some burning low, others freshly lit, their flames trembling in the draft they stirred with their movement down the aisle. Each represented a loved one lost and kept alive by those who remained to remember them; a small, stubborn defiance of the dark.

  Above it, on the wall behind the altar, painted onto the stone in pigments made from crushed wolf-bone and berry-blood, was She.

  The Great Mother Wolf.

  She was massive, her coat rendered in shades of white and silver so skillfully that she seemed to glow with her own luminescence in the dimness. Her stance was protective, regal, her head lowered in a gaze that swept the hall below with terrible, loving scrutiny. Her eyes seized the breath; they seized his now. They were honey-smoked amber, the same shade as Albi’s, the same depth, the same impossible combination of warmth and predatory distance.

  The resemblance was uncanny, unsettling—an echo across the abyss of centuries, as though the Mother had reached forward through time to cast Her likeness upon the daughter standing before Her.

  Fenris set Isangrim down upon the stone floor. The child immediately crawled toward the candles, drawn by the dancing light, and Fenris picked up an unlit taper from the basket beside the altar, handing it to the boy to gum and worry at. Then he turned to Albi.

  She stood in one of the pale columns of light, her silver hair turned to gold by the sun’s dance upon it. She was beautiful, and she was temporary, and the realization struck him with the sharpness of a silver bullet to his chest.

  “One day,” Fenris said, his voice low in the sacred hush, “there will be no more wolf-men. We can fight extinction until our teeth fall out and our claws dull, but we will never outnumber the humans. We breed too slowly. We lose our young to the First Change. We die too easily. We are the real sheep of this world; you had the right of it. And our history”—he gestured to the walls, to the pelts and the cloaks—“will fit inside this single room, a single room on a whole earth, while the chronicles of mankind, which began before us, will stretch onward long after the last of us. We are a speck. A flicker of a single flame on the table of infinite time.”

  He stepped closer to her, close enough to smell the milk on her skin and the wild herbs from her morning tea on her lips. “I want our flame upon it to have meant something good, Albi. And I am thankful—fiercely, stupidly thankful—that you are the one committed to making that happen.”

  He took her face in his hands, rough thumbs brushing her cheekbones. “As much as I love being a wolf, and being a Father, and how I loved being an Alpha. I love being your mate more than any of it.”

  Albi rose onto her toes and kissed him, a seal to their covenant of recognized mortality.

  She turned from him then and reached for the altar. Her hand closed upon a fresh candle, the wax white and unscarred, and took up the flint that lay beside the basket. The strike of it on stone was loud in the silence, a spark that caught and held. She cupped the flame with her hand, protecting it from the draft, and set it upon the stone among the others.

  “To Ygrid,” she said aloud, her voice clear and steady. She stepped back and Fenris lit his own candle, the flame small and orange in the vastness of the hall. He set it beside hers, twin lights in the expanse of time’s table. “To Finn,” he said, simply

  Whispers at the Table

  The wind atop the palisade watch-tower was a knife’s edge, cutting through the heavy furs and biting at the exposed skin of Fenris’s face. Below them, the mountain pass wound like a grey serpent through the snow, and upon its back crawled the caravan—a long, dark stain of humanity moving southward through the forest of the wolves.

  There were hundreds of them; two or three but not quite four. Men, women, and children who had been property yesterday and were, by the strength of Albi’s will, free folk today. Their absence would leave a hollow in Skoltha, a gap-toothed emptiness in the labor and the life of the village. He could feel it already in the echo of their strange silence, the mountain swallowing their heavy foot falls.

  Fenris stood beside Hroth and felt a strange sense of rightness at its absurdity; it felt fitting to share this bitter camaraderie of despair with the man who had taken everything from him. Hroth’s massive frame was hunched against the parapet, his golden hair snapping in the wind. In his fingers, pinched against the cold, was his rolled leaf, the sweet, acrid smoke of it curling upward only to be torn away by the gusts. Fenris watched those fingers tremor, subtle as a moth’s wing, with the same uneasy anxiety that flooded through him.

  “She’ll be fine,” Fenris said, though the words tasted like ash in his mouth, weak and tinny, offering nothing against the vast white silence of the forest before them. Hroth chuckled, a dry, hollow sound that held no humor. He did not look away from the winding line of bodies below. He said nothing.

  Fenris closed his eyes. Through the bond, he had been tracking her—each step a heartbeat in his chest, a pressure behind his eyes. Albi walked at the front of the caravan, beside Beeba, her stride steady and sure. He felt the crunch of snow beneath her boots, the bite of the wind on her cheeks, the steady, determined thrum of her purpose. But with every yard the caravan descended, with every twist of the path that took her further from the stone of Black Rock, the connection frayed; a thinning, a diffusion, a thread pulled too fine. The thoughts came slower down this thread, muffled by distance, until only the sensations remained—only the cold, the ache in her lower back, the heavy, rhythmic tread.

  Then, at the distance of perhaps half a league, the thoughts stopped altogether, and all that stayed with him was the spasm of a muscle against his left rib, steady and insistent. Her heart beat. Nothing more, only the drumbeat of her life continuing somewhere below the tree line, growing fainter with each pulse.

  This was how the morning of Albi’s departure was ending.

  The last thing he had caught from her mind, before the distance blurred her into silence, had been a shard of sorrow; a memory of Isangrim at her breast, the dark curl of his hair against her pale skin.

  When I return, she had thought, he will be weaned. He will no longer be my little babe.

  Fenris opened his eyes. His arms ached, and he realized he had been clutching Isangrim too tightly. The boy had fallen asleep against his father’s shoulder, his small weight a warm, trusting anchor in the freezing dawn; his breaths rising into the air like tiny clouds. Fenris adjusted his grip, spreading his hand across the child’s back.

  The wind shifted, carrying the scent of them—human sweat, woodsmoke, fear, and hope—away toward the riverlands. The pass stood empty, save for the snow.

  Hroth remained at the parapet, his eyes fixed on the void where his mate had vanished. He raised the rolled leaf to his lips, inhaled, and held the smoke in his lungs until Fenris thought he might never breathe again.

  “I’ll stay a while,” Hroth said, his voice rough as gravel.

  Fenris nodded, though the man could not see him. He turned from the wall and descended the narrow, frozen steps of the tower, Isangrim’s small head lolling against his neck with each jarring step. The gate of Black Rock loomed ahead, and he passed through it, leaving the village behind for the Clearing and for his hut.

  It was warm when he arrived, a welcome comfort. The fire roared in the hearth, casting wild shadows that danced like spirits against the stone walls. Jorik stood by the table, his old back bent over a pot that steamed with the rich, earthy scent of boiled barley and venison. The old man looked up as Fenris entered, his eyes sharp beneath his peppered brows, but he said nothing of the sorrow etched into Fenris’s face. He nodded toward the bed.

  Fenris laid Isangrim down upon the furs, arranging the child’s small limbs with a gentleness that felt foreign to his hands. The boy sighed, a soft, milky sound, and curled into the warmth of the pelts, clutching the wooden wolf Alfric had carved for him.

  “Sit, son” Jorik said. It was not a suggestion. “You cannot stand guard over an empty road.”

  Fenris sat. The bench was harder than it’d ever been beneath him. Jorik placed a wooden bowl down lightly on the table, the stew thick and heavy, and a cup of the dark, sour ale that Fenris favored. He ate without tasting any of it.

  “They are saying things in the village,” Jorik said, settling opposite him with his own bowl. “The ones who stayed of these free-folk.” He paused, chewing a crust of bread. “These humans are fearful and grateful, but fearful, they are. They know not how to live without a master’s hand. They look to you, Fenris, for guidance and help. You are the mate of the woman who burdened them with this freedom. They will need of walls of their own to be raised quickly.”

  Fenris swallowed, the food a lump in his throat. “Hroth will expect me to build it alone.”

  “Aye,” Jorik said. “He will. And you will roll your eyes and curse his name, but you will do it. Because it is right. And should you ever need them, those free-folk will be your back and your shield. You are building an alliance, Fenris. Your own community upon the border of Black Rock. It will be written in the Old Stories, and told of one day to our Descendants.”

  Fenris did roll his eyes then, a brief, weary gesture, but he did not completely disagree.

  Jorik leaned forward,“There is talk also of Haggatha. Of the man she has taken. The slave–freeman– from Deep Water.”

  “What have you heard?” Fenris asked, this time genuine in his curiosity.

  “They say he was a shepherd. That the man was quite docile and gentle. Kaleb, I believe, is the man’s name..”

  “I am happy for Haggatha.” Fenris says and means it.

  Jorik’s eyes gleamed in the firelight. “Aye, as am I…as am I.”

  “But?” Fenris raised a brow.

  “No but. However I…do think that it is concerning that the Imprints are not happening wolf and wolf, is all. It has not happened yet, but how will we handle the day an Imprint breaks the mate-bond between wolf and wolf? I suppose they worry about it, and I worry about them.”

  “I suppose.” Fenris shrugged, swallowing another bite.

  “Yes…yes…well…”

  Fenris looked at him then, really looked, and saw the weight of something unsaid on his brow.

  “Speak of it,” Fenris laughed exasperatingly, “what is eating your mind?”

  Jorik sighed, “It is what the people say to me. The people whisper, Fenris. They say the Great Mother walks among us again. They look at Albi—her hair, her eyes—and they say she is the Mother returned. The White Wolf made flesh again to save us from ourselves. I worry what will happen to their Faith, if something were to happen to her on the road now. I worry it will be severe.”

  “You have done a lot of listening to whispers this morning, Jorik, and the day is not yet done.”

  Fenris held his cup, the wood smooth beneath his thumbs. The thought of the painting in the Cathedral crossed his mind, though. The honey-smoked eyes of the Great Mother Wolf that looked down from the wall at him. He thought of Albi’s face in the firelight, her certainty, her ferocity.

  “I would be lying if I said I hadn’t had similar thoughts,” he admitted, his voice barely audible.

  Jorik nodded, as if this confirmed something he had long suspected. He reached across the table and poured more ale into Fenris’s cup, the liquid dark as blood.

  They sat in silence then, the fire crackling, the wind whispering against the wood and leather door-hangings. Fenris drank, cup after cup, chasing the warmth, trying to fill the hollow space where the bond had been, with something—anything—that would keep him from turning to ice the dark. But with every swallow, the silence grew heavier, and the hut felt emptier, and the drumbeat of Albi’s heart was faint and farther away.