Not deep enough to kill. Paste, pressure, bandage, done.
Dara goes still again.
Head tilted. Listening.
This time her face does something I don't have a name for.
"Mel."
"What."
"They're coming this way."
"Who—"
"All of them."
The sound changes. Closer now. Not distant. Trees cracking. Bodies crashing through underbrush. A wave of noise rolling toward us through the forest—
Behind me, Keer Jr. is screaming—out of the coop, gods know how—shrieking through all of it because the world is ending.
Wolves break through the tree line first. Pack wolves. Running flat-out, some shifting back as they cross into the clearing, some still on four legs. Wounded. Bleeding. Falling. Getting up. Running again.
Then the humans.
Pouring through the trees behind them. Not three, notfive. Dozens. Pursuing the wolves who broke off from the smoke—chasing wounded prey into open ground—
And then they stop.
Some of them.
The ones in front pulling up short. Heads turning. Eyes going wide.
They see it.
Dwellings. Cookfires. A line of clothes drying on a rope between two posts. Wounded humans laid out near my station, paste-stained and bandaged. A small pink chicken running sideways across the dirt with a rooster shrieking after her.
Not a den.
Not a wolf nest.
A village.
They have just chased their enemies into a village.
The ones behind them are still pushing forward. Still moving. Haven't seen yet. The momentum doesn't stop just because some of them did—
And then he comes through the trees.
Tall. Armored. Sword drawn. Lean build, weathered face, graying brown hair close-cropped. The man who was the voice in the trees an hour ago. The man at my cottage. The man who watched his own men die in my yard. Who saw Kestria shift and walked away with it.
Theron.
His eyes find me across the clearing.
Then his face changes—seeing what's around me, seeing the dwellings, seeing the wounded laid out—and even Theron, who came knowing something was here, stops for half a second to take in the scale of what this is.
Half a second.
