Chapter 3 The Outpost

The thief was half my size and twice as fast, and I only caught him because he slipped on the ice.

He went down outside the Thornwatch storehouse with a sack of oats clutched to his chest, and I had a fistful of his collar before he could rise. He was all bones and filthy wool, black-haired, with eyes far too large for his hollow face. He could not have been older than fifteen.

“Let go!” He bared his teeth, and I glimpsed the wolf in him, thin and wild and terrified. “I’ll bite. I swear I’ll bite.”

“Then bite,” I said, breathing hard. Ten strides across the yard had left me dizzy. “But first tell me why you’d rather starve than ask.”

He went still. I don’t think anyone had ever said such a thing to him.

I had been at Thornwatch seven months by then. Seven months of wind through the gaps in the stone and snow piled so high against the tower that the warriors spent half of every morning digging out the door. Old Ansel, the watchman, had been told I was the murderer’s daughter and the heir’s rejected mate, and he spoke to me as little as he could. Tomas, the young warrior, didn’t speak to me at all.

I let go. “What’s your name?”

“Wren.”

“Keep the oats, Wren. Come back tomorrow after dark, and I’ll have bread for you too. Don’t let Tomas see you. He hates rogues more than he hates me.”

He came back the next night, and the night after that. I left bread beneath the storehouse eaves, and cheese when I could spare it, and once a pair of my father’s old wool stockings that I had packed without knowing why. His parents had been cast out of a southern pack, blamed for a raid on a trade road that they swore they never made, and they had died in the cold that first winter.

“Everyone thinks rogues are monsters,” he told me one night, crouched under the eaves with his mouth full. “But the wolves who raided that road weren’t rogues. They had boots. Good ones.”

The only thing he would never take from me was the honey cakes.

Calista’s parcels came at the start of every month, carried up the mountain by a courier who never stayed the night: elderflower, honey cakes, and a letter full of gossip from home. She told me about the new bakery by the river and the trackers’ winter trials, and she always ended the same way. Eat something sweet and think of me. Your favourite girl, C.

I ate them because they were all I had of home. And every month, I grew worse. The fog I had carried for more than a year thickened until some mornings I could not lift my head. My fingers swelled. My heart fluttered on the tower stairs. I stopped being able to feel my wolf at all. When I called for her, there was only silence, like a house where someone had died.

The first time I offered Wren a cake, he recoiled. “It smells wrong. Bitter. Like the root they grow near the southern roads.” He pushed it back into my hand. “Your friend can’t cook.”

I laughed for the first time in weeks. It never occurred to me to wonder why a starving boy would refuse food.

I wrote to Logan eleven times. The first letters asked why he had sent me here and what I had done. By the eighth, I had stopped asking for anything but an answer. The eleventh held three words.

Tell me why.

None of them came back.

News of home came only with the border patrols, who stopped once a fortnight to change horses. I learned to sit by the guardroom fire with my porridge and listen while they talked over my head.

“The stores are a mess,” one grumbled in late winter. “Root cellars opened in the wrong order, the east ridge short of flour, and three clerks who can’t count past their fingers. Whoever ran it before was a miracle worker.”

My spoon clattered against the bowl.

“It’ll be sorted come spring,” another said, grinning. “The heir’s to name his Luna at the Spring Moon. Stormbringer’s girl, they say. The pretty tracker.”

Calista had written to me eight days earlier. Four pages, and not a single word about Logan. For the first time in my life, I wondered what else my best friend had not told me.

The wolves came on the last night of winter.

I was awake, as I always was by then, my heart stuttering under three blankets, when the first howl rose beneath my window. It was answered from the east, then the west, then from behind the storehouse, until the outpost was ringed with voices. Ansel bellowed for his spear. Somewhere in the dark, a horse screamed.

Someone hammered on my shutter. When I dragged it open, Wren’s face appeared in the gap, white with terror, snow in his hair.

“Run,” he gasped. “Out the back, into the trees. They’re not rogues. They smell like the capital, and they’ve got good boots, same as on the southern road. They’re not here for the stores, Fiona. They’re here for you.”

Below me, a door crashed open. Tomas shouted once and fell silent.

“Come with me,” Wren begged, reaching through the shutter for my hand. But I could barely stand, and he saw it in my face. A wolf snarled somewhere very close, and he let go and fled into the dark.

The fighting below ended quickly. Far too quickly. Then footsteps climbed the tower stairs, light and unhurried, as if whoever made them had all the time in the world.

My door swung open.

Calista stood on the threshold with snow melting in her golden braid and a tracker’s silver ring gleaming on her thumb. She was smiling the warm, sweet smile I had loved for more than two years, and she was holding a box of honey cakes.

“There you are, Fi,” she said softly. “I told you I’d always find you.”