SARA

Chapter 2

CAIUS

He had expected her to be afraid. Most packless wolves brought within range of a Duskveil Alpha at three in the morning were barely holding their own bodies upright. Their wolves, suppressed or absent, still registered the hierarchy instinctively. Still sent the signals that kept most living things alive, which was to make themselves as small and unthreatening as possible in the presence of something significantly above them.

This one had looked at him and made a joke.

He had received a message two hours ago that the Grey, the Undercourt’s most valuable operative, had been tracked to Blackblood territory. The report had described a ghost. Someone who moved like smoke and left no evidence of passage. In three years of running operations that had crossed Undercourt territory, his information officers had never gotten closer than a description, average height, moves fast, never speaks above a murmur, never leaves a trace.

He had come himself because he didn’t trust anyone else not to lose them in the dark.

He had not expected the Grey to be a girl who looked barely past twenty, standing in the middle of his forest at three in the morning as if she had simply decided to take a walk and found the scenery serene.

She was walking ahead of him now, toward the garrison outpost with the pace of someone who had made a calculation and was executing it. He watched the back of her head, the dark auburn hair pulled back roughly, and tried to determine what the calculation was. She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t performing calm over fear, he knew what that looked like and it looked nothing like this. She was genuinely, functionally unbothered by being taken into custody by a Duskveil Alpha at three in the morning in the middle of the forest.

Which either meant she was catastrophically stupid or she had an exit plan that he was sure would not go through.

He didn’t think she was stupid.

The ledger was in his hand. He would have it sent to his intelligence team by morning. Whatever the Grey had come into his territory to retrieve would tell him more about the Undercourt’s current operations than three years of conventional monitoring had managed.

He watched her step over a root in the dark without looking down, navigating the terrain with a familiarity that bothered him. She knew this stretch of forest. She had been in it before. Multiple times, probably, to move through it like this.

Which meant she had been running operations in his territory for longer than his intelligence had realized.

“How many times?” he asked.

She didn’t pretend to understand the question. She looked back at him and said nothing.

They reached the garrison outpost as the first pale suggestion of dawn was beginning to grey the sky to the east. The two guards at the entrance saw him and straightened immediately, their eyes cutting to the girl beside him with poorly hidden surprise.

“Alert the convoy,” Caius said. “We’re going to the Keep.”

He watched the girl’s chin lift slightly at that. The first real reaction she had shown. Gone in a second, face smooth again, amber eyes moving across the garrison entrance with that same careful cataloguing quality he had noticed in the forest.

She was mapping it. Even now. Even being taken into custody, ledger confiscated, and being transported to the royal seat of the Blackblood Crown, she was mapping the space around her out of pure instinct.

Caius looked at the thin leather ledger in his hand and then at the girl standing in the garrison entrance with her hands loose at her sides and her chin level.

Something about this, he thought, was not going to be as simple as it looked.

He was rarely wrong about things.

He then went to speak to his convoy commander.

The Blackblood Keep appeared on the horizon.

It was sitting at the top of a long black ridge against a sky that was just beginning to bleed orange at the edges, massive and dark and completely without warmth. It was built from stones so black they seemed to absorb the early morning light. Towers rose from each corner, the walls were thick enough that Sara kept thinking about how three men could stand side by side on top of them with room to spare.

She had seen it from a distance before. Everyone in the Ashfen Wilds had. On clear nights it sat on the ridge like a bruise against the sky, visible for miles. She had always given it exactly the respect it deserved, which was to stay far enough away that it remained someone else’s problem.

She was now heading directly toward it.

Sara was with two Duskveil soldiers on either side of her and Caius in the front with his convoy commander. She could hear the low murmur of their voices through the partition but not the words. She had stopped trying to catch them twenty minutes ago and focused instead on what she could control, which was her own thinking,

captured, ledger confiscated, being transported to the royal seat of the Blackblood Crown as a trespasser with the worst case outcome, she was processed as a packless criminal, held indefinitely, and the ledger was decoded before she found a way to destroy it. If the ledger contained what her Undercourt contact had described, coded operational communications, then decryption meant exposure of the entire eastern network. Fourteen operatives. Three years of infrastructure. Gone.

She thought about it positively too, she may processed, held briefly, found to be carrying nothing of apparent significance, and released with a territorial ban she would immediately get over.

The gap between those two outcomes was difficult to gauge because of whatever was in that ledger

She needed to know what was in it.

She also needed to get it back, or destroy it, within the next few hours before the Keep’s information team got their hands on it.

She ran the options quietly and efficiently while they moved and the soldiers beside her did not speak. They were good, she noted. Professional too, except from the part where they let her trespass. They weren’t watching her with the hungry attention of wolves who had been given something interesting to play with. They were watching her with the flat focus of men doing a job. Duskveil soldiers. She had heard enough about them to know that the pack’s reputation for discipline was not exaggerated.

That made things harder for her. Bored or arrogant guards were exploitable. Disciplined ones required more creativity to deal with.

As they passed through the Keep’s outer gates, and Sara looked through the gap in the canvas at the walls moving past. Black stone, close enough now to see the texture of it, rough-hewn and massive, the kind of construction that had been built to last centuries and had. There were wolves on the walls. More than she expected for a standard morning watch. Duskveil soldiers, she thought, deployed beyond their own territory.

That was interesting. Caius had brought his own people to the Blackblood Keep rather than relying on the royal garrison. It means he didn’t trust the royal garrison. She took note of it.

They stopped. Grey morning light came in, and cold air. Sara stepped out onto a stone courtyard.

The Keep was worse from inside. The courtyard was enormous and completely enclosed, high walls on all sides, a single gate behind them that was already closing. The stones were darker here, slick with moisture that caught the early light and gave everything a dull redness. She looked at the ground and noted that the red was not entirely from the light. It was in the stone itself. Faint, like something very old had soaked into it and never fully dried.

She had heard the stories about the burial ground the Keep was built over. Standing in the courtyard, she believed them.

“Move,” said the soldier to her left, roughly, She moved.

The holding room they put her in was small, stone-walled, with a single iron door and a narrow window too high to be useful for anything except confirming whether it was day or night outside. There was a bench along one wall. No table. A single torch in a wall bracket that gave off more smoke than light.

Sara sat on the bench, crossed her ankles, and began planning escape routes. The door was iron, hinged outward, which meant it couldn’t be forced inward. The walls were solid stone, no seams she could exploit. The torch bracket was bolted.

She had been in worse.

She had also been in considerably better.

She was sitting there running contingencies when the door opened and a Keep official came in with a different ledger, this one blank, and a pen, and the expression of someone who processed trespassers with such regularity that they had long since stopped finding it interesting.

“Name,” he said, settling himself on the other side of absolutely nothing because there was no table, which appeared to mildly inconvenience him.

“Mira,” Sara said. The false name came out without effort. She had been using it for four years.

“Full name.”

“Mira Cole.”

He wrote it down. “Pack affiliation.”

“None.”

He looked up briefly at that, then back down. “Registered packless?”

“Yes.” She wasn’t. She had a forged registration document that would survive basic scrutiny. Deeper investigation was a different problem.

“Territory of residence.”

“Ashfen.”

Another brief look. People who listed Ashfen as their territory of residence were either lying or genuinely unhinged, and the official’s expression suggested he was trying to determine which category she fell into. Sara looked back at him and let him decide for himself.

He wrote it down.

The questions continued for another ten minutes. Sara answered everything perfectly because she had constructed Mira Cole’s history carefully enough that she could answer questions about it in her sleep. Birthplace, registered pack district, reason for travel, point of entry into Blackblood territory.

The official collected his notes and left without telling her anything, She didn’t even ask.

She went back to planning her escape.

She had been sitting there for approximately two hours, long enough for the torch to burn noticeably lower, when the door opened again. This time it wasn’t an official.

“You’ve been summoned,” the individual said.