The watcher was a man in his fifties. Lean. Weathered, in the specific way of someone who had spent a great deal of time outdoors and had long ago stopped noticing the discomfort of it, his skin marked by decades of sun and travel.
He had known my mother.
Not at Ironpeak. After. In the years between Sera leaving the packhouse and her death, when she had been building whatever fragile life she could manage at Clearwater alone with an infant daughter. He had been a travelling pack healer, passing through Clearwater when I was two years old, and he had stayed three months. He and my mother had become friends quickly, the kind of friendship that forms fast between two people who recognize something true in each other immediately.
He had known she was Vayne bloodline.
Not because she told h
