Nobody crossed into Kael's territory after dark, and I was doing it anyway.
The road had a name among the northern packs. They called it the Dead King's Road, a stretch of ancient forest that marked the boundary between Ironveil and the Ashveil Kingdom, Kael's domain. The trees here were older than any pack I knew of. Their roots broke through the frozen ground like knuckles. The silence was the kind that had weight to it, the kind that pressed against your eardrums and made your wolf pace in tight, anxious circles.
Mine was not pacing.
She was completely still, which was worse.
"She's scared," Mara said quietly, reading me the way only she could. She meant my wolf. "I can feel it from here."
"She's not scared." I kept walking. "She's listening."
Mara pulled her coat tighter and said nothing else. Smart woman.
I had given her the broad strokes during the two hours we'd been walking. The pregnancy. Eleven days along, confirmed by the pack healer in secret, a woman I trusted with my life and had paid three months of savings to keep quiet. The Thirteenth Seed, that was what the old texts called it, a pup born of a rejected bond, conceived in the last hours before severance. The legends said they were wolves of impossible power. The elders said they were dangerous. Roland's inner circle, if they ever found out, would call it a reason to put me in the ground before I could give birth.
Mara had not cried when I told her. She had gone very still, the same way I had when the healer first said the words. Then she had picked up her pack and kept walking.
That was why she was the only person I had told.
"How much do you actually know about Kael?" she asked now.
"Enough."
"That's not an answer."
I exhaled. The cold air turned my breath white. "Cursed Alpha King. Hasn't been seen publicly in three years. His territory hasn't been breached by any outside pack in living memory. Roland won't follow us past the boundary line." I paused. "He's afraid of him."
"Roland is afraid of very few things."
"I know."
That was the entire point.
Mara was quiet for a moment. The trees thickened around us, the canopy blocking out what little moonlight the clouds had been letting through. My eyes adjusted without effort, one of the few advantages of being a warrior-Luna with a wolf who had been trained since age twelve. I could see in near-total darkness. I could track a scent across running water. I could fight three opponents simultaneously and had done it more than once.
None of that felt like enough right now.
"There are stories," Mara said carefully, "about what happened to the last woman who entered Kael's territory uninvited."
"I've heard them."
"And?"
"And I've also heard what Roland has ordered his enforcers to do to me by sunrise." I stepped over a gnarled root without breaking stride. "So I'm choosing the story I have a chance of surviving."
Mara accepted that with a small, tight nod.
We walked for another twenty minutes before my wolf came back online, surging up from that eerie stillness with a single sharp pulse of warning. I stopped moving instantly. Mara stopped half a step behind me, her hand going to the blade at her hip out of pure instinct.
The forest had gone from quiet to absolute.
No wind. No insects. Not even the sound of our own breathing seemed to carry.
Then I smelled it. Cedar and ash and something underneath that had no name I could put to it, something cold and ancient and completely without mercy. It coated the inside of my nose and sat at the back of my throat and my wolf, my warrior wolf who had never once submitted to anything, pressed herself low.
Not in fear.
In recognition.
"Nadia." Mara's voice was barely a sound.
"I know."
I did not reach for my weapon. Reaching for a weapon right now would be the last mistake I ever made. Instead I stood straight, shoulders back, chin level, the same posture I had held at the altar three hours ago when Roland had tried to make me small in front of three hundred witnesses.
I would not be made small twice in one night.
The voice, when it came, did not come from any single direction. It came from everywhere, low and absolute, the kind of voice that had never once needed to be raised.
"You are on my land."
I held my ground.
"I know," I said. "I need to speak with the King."
A pause. The darkness between the trees shifted in a way that darkness should not be able to shift.
"You are speaking with him."
The cold hit me before I saw him, a drop in temperature so sudden and complete that my next breath burned. And then he stepped out of the dark between two ancient oaks, and every instinct I had ever trained into silence came screaming back to life at once.
He was nothing like the stories.
The stories had not been nearly enough.
