The first wounded reached the healer’s hall eleven minutes after the eastern gate breach.
I know the exact time. I count things when I am frightened. I had been counting since the alarm went off at dawn, and I had not stopped.
The first wolf was an enforcer named Bram, twenty-three years old, with a silver-edged cut across his left forearm that had already begun to heat and discolor in the specific way of silver-contaminated wounds.
I put my hands on it before he was fully settled on the treatment table. The warmth flooded out of my palms. I pulled the silver toward me, absorbed it, released it through the moonlight flooding the hall’s high windows. Full moon, perfect and enormous, the biggest the sky offered, and the gift in my blood responding to it with something that felt less like
