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The operatives came in where Ruby had said they would. Imogene was waiting there with three wolves.

Below us, the red line started up the slope. They came the way Ruby had drawn it: fanning out, pressing wide, driving toward the eastern end of the ridge where the ground fell away toward the stream. The push at the Harrow, all over again. Only this time, the wolves they were trying to drive over weren’t there. Imogene had pulled her line back fifty yards into the trees, and when the operatives crested the eastern rise expecting to find us backed against a drop, they found nothing but empty rock.

Imogene’s wolves came out of the pines behind them.

The fighting erupted.

Steel flashed in the thin sunlight. Wolves hit the red line from two sides, snarling, going for arms and legs and throats. An operative swung a silver-edged blade, and a young wolf yelped and went down, rolling in the frost. Another operative raised a crossbow and fired, and hit a wolf mid-leap in the shoulder. The smell of blood rose with a copper tang in the cold air, and the snarls and shouts and the clash of metal rang off the ridge.

I stayed where I was, in front of Ruby. Every instinct I had screamed to charge down that slope. But the gray lines hadn’t moved yet, and I wouldn’t leave her.

Then I saw Gage.

He’d come up through the gap between the lines in his wolf form, running flat out toward Imogene with word from the western watch. Directly into the path of an operative kneeling behind a boulder with a crossbow, sighting down the slope.

Gage didn’t see him. He was running too fast to see anything.

I couldn’t reach him in time. No one could.

Behind you, I warned.

Ruby stepped out from behind me onto the open crest of the ridge. She raised her knife. “Louis.”

Red against gray granite, full in the sun.

The operative’s head came up. He looked at her and hesitated, as if trying to understand why one of their own was calling him.

She threw her knife and hit him square in the chest. He went down with an agonized cry.

A significant distance. Fern would be proud she’d guessed correctly.

Gage flashed past the boulder and into the trees.

Ruby stepped back behind me, breathing hard. She’d bought Gage Corrin his life.

I saw her, Imogene said in my head, her voice rough. Tell her I saw…

But she wasn’t the only one who’d seen Ruby on that ridge.

Two operatives broke from the red line and ran straight up the slope toward us.

I didn’t think. I went.

I met the first one halfway down the rise. He had a silvered blade up and ready, and he was fast, trained the same way Ruby was trained. It didn’t matter. I hit him before he could swing, and we went down together in the frost, and my jaws found his throat. I’d done this before, more times than I could count. I’d told myself every time it was the last. I felt nothing now but a cold, clear certainty.

No one was touching my mate.

The second one’s blade caught my flank as I rose. Silver burned along my ribs like a brand. I turned, snarling, and he stumbled back a step, and that step was all I needed.

When it was done, I tried to climb back up the slope. My back leg buckled.

The burn had spread. It crawled along my ribs, white-hot, eating inward, and every breath dragged across it like a blade. Silver doesn’t just cut a wolf. It stays in the wound and poisons, and it keeps poisoning until someone gets it out. I’d seen strong wolves die of a scratch.

I went down on my side in the frost.

Ruby ran down the slope at a dead run, red cloak streaming behind her, and dropped to her knees beside me. She drew her knife, and for one heartbeat, an instinct in me flinched at the sight of an Order blade that close to my throat.

She didn’t look at my throat. “Hold still,” she said. “The edge was silvered. I’ll have to get any flakes out.”