The attack came at night, three days later, when Mara had almost let herself relax.
She woke to the sound of horns long, urgent blasts that Elin bolted upright at even before she
was fully awake. "Rogues," Elin said, already pulling on her boots. "A lot of them, by the sound
of it. Stay inside, Mara, bar the doorBut Mara was already moving, pulling her cloak on, her hand finding the blade at her hip
without thinking. Years of training didn't switch off just because someone told her to hide.
Outside, the village had become chaos. Torches lit the dark in jagged patches, people running,
some toward their homes, others toward the treeline with weapons raised. Mara caught sight of
rogue wolves pouring out of the forest, more than she'd seen in the clearing days before, twenty
or thirty of them, eyes wild, moving with the kind of coordination that shouldn't have been
possible for creatures the Order called mindless.
That's not normal rogue behavior, she thought, even as she ran toward the fighting.Someone is
directing them.
She found Kael already shifted, fighting near the village's eastern edge where the fence had been
torn open, and she didn't think —she just moved, drawing her blade and putting herself between
a rogue and a young boy who'd frozen in the open, too scared to run.
The rogue lunged. Mara sidestepped, drove her blade up under its jaw with a precision that
came from years of practice, and it went down before it ever reached the boy. She grabbed him
by the shoulder and shoved him toward a nearby house. "Inside. Now."
He ran. Mara turned back to the fighting, and that was when she felt eyes on her not a rogue's
eyes. Kael's, mid-shift, watching her from across the chaos with an expression she couldn't read
in the dark.
She didn't have time to worry about it. Another rogue came at her from the side, and she moved
through the fight the way she'd been trained since she was twelve years old, blade finding gaps,
feet never planted too long in one place. She wasn't hiding what she could do anymore. There
wasn't time to hide it.
The fighting went on for what felt like hours but was probably only minutes. Pack warriors
poured in from the center of the village, and between them and Kael, the rogues broke and
scattered back into the trees, leaving three of their own dead in the dirt and the smell of blood
and smoke hanging over everything.
Mara stood in the sudden quiet, breathing hard, blade still in her hand, and became aware that
several pack members were staring at her.
A traveler who fought like that. A traveler who moved like a trained killer, not a hunter looking
for work.
Kael shifted back, blood on his arm from a bite he hadn't bothered to protect against, and
walked toward her slowly, his eyes taking in the dead rogue at her feet, the precise wound in its
throat, the calm, practiced way she still held her blade even now."That was no lucky strike," he said quietly, just for her.
Mara's mind raced through excuses, half-truths, anything that would explain away what he'd
just watched. Nothing came fast enough. "I've had to defend myself before," she said instead.
"Where I'm from, it isn't safe for a woman traveling alone."
It wasn't a lie, exactly. It just wasn't the whole truth, and from the way Kael's jaw tightened, she
suspected he knew that too.
"We'll talk," he said. "Later. Right now I need to see to the wounded."
He turned to go, then paused, glancing back at her with an expression that was harder to read
than his suspicion had been — something almost like gratitude, tangled up with something wary.
"That boy you pulled clear," he said. "That's my sister's son. Thank you."
Then he was gone, moving through the village checking on his people, and Mara stood alone in
the dark with a dead rogue at her feet and a truth she could no longer keep buried as easily as
she wanted to.
She had come here to kill him. And tonight, without thinking twice, she had put herself between
his family and a blade.
She didn't know what that made her anymore. She only knew the contract in her pocket
suddenly felt heavier than it had three days ago, and she didn't have eighteen days left to figure
out why
