The festival had been Sora's idea.
I found out later that she'd been planning it for three weeks, quietly, working around the edges of everything else — the fever recovery, the assassin, the Seraphine situation, the berserker training. She'd been organizing it through all of it, because Sora had a quality I'd come to deeply respect: she understood that packs needed something to celebrate, not as a distraction from hard things but as a way of remembering what the hard things were for.
She told me about it on a Thursday morning, six days after I'd come back from the settlement.
"Sunday," she said. "Main courtyard. The whole pack."
I looked at her. "What's the occasion?"
"You," she said.
I put down the report I was holding. "That's not—"
"It's not a ceremony," she said quickly, with th
