Lillian confirmed it within the hour.
Four weeks. The timing settled into place with a kind of inevitability that made the room feel very still around me. Mating Night. The river. The night that had started everything else had started this too, and I had not known, all these weeks, that I had been carrying it alongside the wolf and the mark and the ability.
I sat on the edge of the examination table afterward, alone, in the packhouse medical room in the early morning before anyone else was awake. I looked at my hands and I thought about my mother.
Sera, who had left Ironpeak at twenty-two and gone to Clearwater and had a daughter alone. Who had died at twenty-six of a fever that might have been survived with better care, with people who knew to watch for it, with someone beside her who
