He walks into the dark.
Kael hands me a clay cup from a table near the fire ring. Something amber. The pine-resin smell I recognize from the Wax and Wane. I take it.
A pressure builds behind my sternum. Brief. Directionless. Gone before I can locate it.
The cup cracks.
A single hairline fracture, clean along the base. The liquid doesn’t spill. The crack is barely visible, and Kael hasn’t noticed, and Celeste is three steps away, saying something to the taller of the two unfamiliar wolves. I set the cup down on the ritual stone carefully and look at my right hand.
Nothing visible. No glow, nothing that announces itself. There was a moment just now where something moved through it that I didn’t put there.
It caused the hairline fracture on the cup.
I close my hand and follow Kael.
The smaller structure is the one they’ve set up for us. A fire is already built and burning low in the small hearth. There’s a bed that takes up most of the room. A window looking out onto the clearing where the ritual happened.
Kael stops in the doorway. “Fire’s been going for two hours. Shutters lock from the inside. No light gets through. Anything else you need tonight, knock on the main cabin door.” His attention turns to me. “For what it’s worth. Speaking those words. My pack will remember it.”
He leaves before I can respond.
I place my jacket over the chair back and stand at the window. The open ground is quiet now, wolves dispersed, fire ring burning down. The stone at the edge still dark with his blood and mine.
Erik’s wolves can move through my territory with Accords authority. Intelligence transfers are treaty obligations now, notprofessional courtesy. I just acknowledged that what Konstantin has built is bigger than any single lord can contain.
The fire in the hearth shifts. A log settles.
I turn my right hand over in the firelight. Study the palm above the linen wrapped around the cut that has more than likely healed.
Celeste crosses the room and stands beside me at the window.
She doesn’t touch me. She’s looking out at the dying fire, the night beyond. Her shoulders are still. Her hands are at her sides.
“They’re still out there,” she says.
“Yes. About three square miles of them around this position.”
She considers this. “Is that unsettling?”
“It should be.”
She turns to look at me. Her hand comes up and finds the place on my chest where the crimson crescent sits. She traces it once, through the fabric.
“You’re thinking about something.”
I am.
“Something happened tonight that I don’t have an explanation for yet,” I say. “When I do, you’ll be the first person I tell.”
Her eyes search my face.
“Okay,” she says.
I cover her hand with mine.
She holds my gaze, then turns back to the window. We stand like that. Her hand under mine on my chest. The night outside full of wolves.
She moves to the bed. Pulls back the plain linen and sits on the edge of it, working off her boots. Firelight catches the curve of her shoulder, the line of her neck.
