She talked for four hours.
Nessa and I sat across from her in the holding room while the afternoon light moved across the stone floor and the compound settled into its post-confrontation rhythm outside the small high window, and Cira talked with the particular precision of someone who had been storing information for thirty years in a place where precision was the only thing that kept it intact.
The Hollow's name — his original name, before whatever happened to him at the edge of death and beyond it — was Aldric Vane. Alpha of the Vane Pack, dissolved three hundred and eighty years ago when its Alpha went into the northern wastes pursuing a rival and came back alone and changed. The pack had not survived what came back. The wolves who remained had reorganized themselves around the new th
