The wolves were still dying when Daren made his choice.He could hear them behind him — the sounds of Vasha's sword and Lyset's workings playing out across the training ground in the particular register of a fight in its final stages, the pack's numbers thinning, the voices of the remaining wolves carrying the specific quality of things that have realized the arithmetic has shifted against them but haven't yet decided what to do about that realization. The sounds were distant in the way that sounds become distant when the mind has narrowed itself to a single point and is no longer distributing its attention across the available information.The single point was the master's body.And the voice.*Eat.*It was louder than it had ever been — not louder in volume exactly, more louder in *presence*, the way a person in a room becomes louder when they move from the far wall to directly beside you, the proximity of it changing the quality rather than the quantity. It filled the space behind

"The integration accelerated significantly overnight," Lyset said. "More than I projected. More than the wolf alone would account for." She withdrew her hand from his wrist slowly, sitting back, the expression on her face doing the specific thing it did when she had found something she needed to say carefully. "The master's nature is older than any conversion working. The original strain carries a regenerative capacity that the converted wolves don't have access to. You've absorbed that capacity." A pause. "Your hand is going to heal completely. Probably by tomorrow morning.""That's not —" Daren started."I know," Lyset said. "That's not the part that concerns me."She looked at him directly now — the analytical distance present but thinner than usual, something underneath it that she wasn't managing as carefully as she normally managed things, the finding apparently large enough to have gotten past her default containment."The integration didn't just absorb the regeneration," she s

Aldenmoor woke up to silence and didn't know what to do with it.Not the silence of a city sleeping — that had its own texture, its own particular quality of suspended noise, the held breath of a place that would resume itself at dawn. This was different. This was the silence of an absence, the specific and total quiet of something that had been present for eighteen months and was now simply not, and the city felt it the way you feel a tooth that's been pulled — not pain exactly, more the specific wrongness of a space that your tongue keeps finding because the space is new and the tongue hasn't learned yet that there's nothing there to find.The birds came back first.Daren heard them from the training ground where he'd been sitting since the sunrise — not having moved back to the house, not having eaten, not having done anything except sit in the grass with his changing hand in his lap and the dagger beside him and the letters from his jacket pocket spread out on the ground in front

The letter arrived before midday.A King's messenger — young, efficient, in the gold-and-crimson colors of the royal court, who delivered the sealed envelope to Vasha with the practiced neutrality of someone who had been told exactly what to hand over and nothing about what it contained. She signed for it. The messenger left. Vasha looked at the seal for a moment before breaking it, in the way she looked at things she expected to change the shape of something when she opened them.She read it twice.Handed it to Lyset without comment.Lyset read it once, closed her spellbook, and set the letter on the table between them with the careful precision of something being placed rather than put down.Daren picked it up.It was addressed to *Solenne's Disciples, currently stationed in Aldenmoor* — the formal phrasing of someone who had known exactly where they were and had chosen the official address anyway, the way people who are powerful enough to dispense with formality use it deliberately

They left before the city was fully awake.Not sneaking — nothing about the way Vasha moved suggested sneaking was a category she recognized — but quietly, with the specific efficiency of people who had learned that goodbyes, when they went on too long, stopped being goodbyes and became something else. The small stone house was closed up behind them in the pre-dawn dark, the iron hooks by the door empty for the first time since they'd arrived, the hearthstones cold. Daren looked back at it once from the training ground's edge. Just once. Then he picked up his pack and followed Vasha onto the road north.Aldenmoor was stirring around them as they passed through it — the first market stalls opening, the smell of morning fires, a baker somewhere producing something that made the hunger in Daren's chest perform a complicated maneuver that had nothing to do with food. The city's streets were familiar in the way of things learned through repetition rather than study, the routes between the