Chapter 37
Gon The forest took the night’s breath and held it. No crickets. No frogs. Just the soft rasp of leather and the dull creak of bowstrings as my men and I slid between pines black as ink sticks. I kept us in human skin—no ears, no tails, no comfort of claws—because the villages on this side of the ridge still prayed to the King who fed them, and men darting through trees like wolves drew gossip faster than blood did flies. Bool-He’s trail was a bruise on the air. Not scent—he’d salted the paths with ash and iron filings to pinch a wolf’s nose shut—but pressure, a wrongness. Where he had passed, the dark felt grainy, as if rubbed the wrong way. “Bae-Seok,” I whispered. He ghosted to my side, bigger than me by a head and quiet as falling snow. The others fanned in a crescent: Min-ji with
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