"Come in, dire-daughter. Mind the sleepers. They're yours now, or they're mine, and we're about to find out which."
I stepped into the seat of the Circle with Dain at my shoulder and the moon a thin edge of light through the smoke-hole above, and I saw the Warden plain for the first time in her own house, and the plainness of her was the worst of it. An old woman in a plain grey robe, standing among hundreds of sleeping wolves laid in rows on the stone, and every one of them, I could feel it the moment I crossed the threshold, every one of them ran a cold wire back to her, and the wires crossed and knotted at her feet in a shape my dire-blood could nearly see, a spindle, a loom, four hundred years of leashed strength wound onto one tired frame.
The smell of the room was the thing I had n
