Beneath The Blood Moon

The Turned Wolves

"Fifty of them," Zayn said. "Out of four hundred we just freed."

Sofia was already moving toward the courtyard before he finished the sentence, boots loud on stone, her mind already running through what fifty turned wolves meant for the fragile peace they'd bought in the pass with two covenants and half of Zayn's remaining strength, a peace that had lasted, apparently, less than two weeks.

Garen was on his knees in the courtyard when they arrived. Mid-twenties, heavy through the shoulders, one of the Stone Crest wolves freed in the pass, blood on his shirt that clearly wasn't his own.

"Whose blood," Sofia asked, kneeling across from him on the cold stone.

"Not mine." His voice scraped, red-rimmed eyes, hands shaking with the fine tremor of muscles running on cortisol and too little sleep. "Voss came to the camp three nights ago. Not to fight. He brought food. Medicine. Some of the freed ones are sick, the compulsion withdrawal, their bodies don't know how to be their own yet, and he brought help. And a deal."

"What kind of deal."

"Loyalty for protection. He told them the crown can't hold the north. That you're a girl with a stolen title and a king compromised by the bond." His jaw worked, clearly struggling with what came next. "Fifty listened. Maybe more by now."

"And the blood."

"I tried to stop them. Three of them jumped me outside the supply tent when I argued. I got out. Barely. Ran here."

Zayn arrived a step behind Sofia, still pulling a jacket over his shoulders, hair not quite managed, the scar above his eye white in the morning light. He assessed the courtyard in two seconds, Garen on the ground, blood on a freed wolf's shirt, and his jaw did the tight version, the one that meant anger he didn't intend to waste on expression.

"How many," he said.

"Fifty," Sofia said, standing, her knees carrying wet cobblestone grit. "Voss is turning the freed wolves."

"We go to the pass," she said.

"No."

"Those wolves know me. I freed them. If Voss is offering protection and we're offering nothing—"

"You walk into a camp where fifty wolves have been turned against you, wearing court robes, and—"

"I'll take the apron off," Sofia said, and something in her tone, flat, immovable, made him stop mid-sentence.

This was new, the specific friction of two people running toward the same problem from entirely different angles. He wanted to contain the threat. She wanted to face it directly. Both instincts correct in their own way, both incompatible with each other, and the courtyard was going to be where they figured out which one won.

"Together," she said. "Not me alone. Not your warriors without me. Together."

A long beat. Garen looked at his hands, clearly wishing he were somewhere else entirely.

"Together," Zayn said, the word coming out tight, but it came out.

They fought about it on the road, not shouting, the contained, clipped kind of argument that happens between two people who refuse to raise their voices because twenty riders behind them would hear it, and volume would be an admission the disagreement had gotten personal, which it had about three miles back.

"You're not walking into the camp first," Zayn said.

"They won't respond to soldiers. They'll respond to me."

"You don't know what they'll respond to. Voss has had nine days and medicine and no throne attached to his offers."

"So I wait at the tree line while your warriors go in first and prove every word Voss said about the crown?"

"I didn't say that."

"You said I'm not going in first. That means soldiers go first. That means Voss was right."

His jaw went tight, the muscles in his neck working visibly. "That wasn't using your past against you. I'm stating that two weeks of experience does not prepare a person for—"

"For what. Walking into a bad situation? I walked into yours. In a grey dress. With flour on my collar." She turned her horse closer, cutting the distance between them to something private, something the riders behind them couldn't overhear. "You didn't think I was prepared then either. You rejected me because of it."

Silence, the worst kind, the kind where the other person knows you're right and is deciding what to do with that knowledge.

"That's not fair," he said finally.

"No," she agreed. "But it's accurate."

The smoke from the pass camp reached them a mile later, scattered, disorganized, nothing like the military precision of Mordain's fires. Zayn spoke first, quiet, looking at the tree line instead of her.

"I dream about the winery," he said. "The blades. Your hands in the dark, tearing your dress for bandages. Every night, the same sequence. I can't lose you because someone talked fifty wolves into doing what I couldn't do fast enough in a winery."

"You won't lose me," she said. "Side by side. Like the pass. Like the gorge. Like the back room. You don't get to protect me by keeping me behind you."

"Side by side," he said, like pulling a tooth.

They crested the last ridge before the camp, and what they saw stopped both horses at once. The camp wasn't just divided anymore. Smoke was rising from the eastern cluster, the wrong kind of smoke, fast and acrid, the kind that meant pitch, not cookfire, and screaming had already started somewhere inside it, carrying clear across the distance to where they sat frozen on the ridge.