Forty miles east, I felt the first freed wolf put her hand on the cradle.
I did not know her name. I would learn it later. All I felt, down the bond, riding through the dark with Dain's horse screaming beside mine, was a second wolf's strength come up under Fenna's, and a sliver of the weight roll off my daughter and into a stranger who had been collared her whole life and was now, for the first time, choosing to carry something instead of being made to.
And it did not crush the stranger. That was the thing. A sliver of four hundred years, taken freely, was not a curse. It was a gift. It was her own stolen strength coming home.
I have felt a great many things down that bond in the short time my daughter has been alive. I felt her born. I felt her ring the bell. I felt her nearly crushed
