LYSSARA
The intermediary.
I was already moving before Dravenor finished saying the word because the word contained everything necessary for the decision and the decision had been made before the word completed itself, Zirelle was in the pack house, the Shadow wolves were at Ashfen's eastern boundary, and the gap between those two facts was the specific gap that a woman who had been learning the difference between panic and purpose for eleven months on a cold floor in Ironveil was not going to allow to exist for one additional second.
I crossed the neutral ground's boundary, and I did not look back. Dravenor was beside me.
Not because I had asked him and not because the protocol required it, because the Shadow Alpha's function in its original designation was to be beside the sovereign w
