She spent the day waiting, which she hated.
She waited through the long gray afternoon, in the library, in the garden, on the east stair with her chin in her fists. She waited while the manor hummed with muffled gossip, while wolves she barely knew nodded to her in corridors with a new, wary courtesy, while Soren, bored and bandaged and unusually subdued, tried to teach her a card game and lost three hands in a row because he kept looking at the window. Isolde's words went around in her head like a coin in a drum. He signed the contract in blood.
The worst of it was that Isolde had sounded so reasonable. Not cruel. Not even angry. She had sounded like a woman reading the weather.
They came back at dusk, mud to the knees and gray with fatigue. Ariana watched from an upstairs window as Ka
