Claimed by the Wolf King

The iron wall had stood at the edge of Everfell for as long as anyone could remember, black and cold even in the height of summer, and Princess Seraphine Thorne had grown up believing it was the only thing standing between her kingdom and total annihilation. She was nineteen years old and had touched that wall exactly once, at the age of eight, when her nurse had turned her back for the length of three heartbeats. The iron had been freezing despite the June sun, and it had hummed faintly beneath her palm, like something breathing on the other side. She had screamed. Her nurse had come running. And that night, over her mother's frantic scolding, her father had sat at the edge of her bed and told her, in the low, careful voice he used for things he considered absolute truth, that the Blackwood was not a place. It was a mouth. And mouths existed only to swallow things whole. Eleven years later, Sera sat in a swaying carriage two miles from that same wall, dressed in blue silk chosen specifically to photograph well beside the banners of Wren's Hollow, and she had still never seen a single tree of the forest her entire life had been built around avoiding. "You're doing the thing again," said Marguerite, her lady's maid, without looking up from the embroidery she was pretending to work on. The carriage lurched over a rut in the road and she caught the hoop before it could slide off her lap. "The staring-out-the-window thing. Your mother used to do it too, before state visits. It means you're thinking about running." "I am not thinking about running," Sera said. "There is nowhere to run to. That is rather the point of this entire arrangement." Marguerite's mouth twitched, but she had the sense not to smile outright. Seven years in the princess's service had taught her exactly how far she could push before earning a glare sharp enough to cut glass, and this morning, with Lord Ashby's betrothal contracts sitting in a leather case at Sera's feet like a coiled snake, was not a morning to test the boundary. Sera looked back out the window. The land here had gone wilder than it was allowed to be closer to the capital, hedgerows unclipped, fields gone gold and heavy with grain nobody had bothered to harvest early, the mountains beyond wearing a haze of blue mist that made them look painted rather than real. Somewhere past that haze, she knew, the wall curved north and east in a great black scar across the landscape, and beyond the wall was the Blackwood, and beyond the Blackwood, if the stories were even half true, were things that did not officially exist in any treaty her father had ever shown the court. She had asked him once, years ago, whether the wolves were real. Not the campfire kind, with fur and fangs and appetite, since those obviously existed, the same as any wolf in any forest in any kingdom. She meant the other kind. The kind that walked upright when it suited them. The kind the old border ballads sang about in verses nobody performed anymore because they made the youngest listeners cry. Her father had not answered. He had simply refilled his wine and changed the subject to her upcoming lessons in Ashby dialect, and Sera had understood, the way she understood most things about her father, that silence was its own kind of confession. "We'll reach the crossing point by midafternoon," Marguerite said now, setting the embroidery aside entirely. "Captain Voss says the eastern road adds two hours but keeps us well clear of the tree line. You'll want to eat something before then. You barely touched breakfast." "I wasn't hungry." "You're never hungry the week before a diplomatic visit. It's why I've started hiding pastries in my sleeves like a common thief." Marguerite produced, with a flourish, a small paper-wrapped bun that had clearly been through several indignities in transit. "Eat. Ashby will want to see color in your cheeks, not the complexion of a woman about to faint at her own betrothal signing." Sera took the bun if only to stop the conversation, and ate it in small, joyless bites while the carriage rattled on. She thought, not for the first time, that there was a particular cruelty in being raised to rule a kingdom and then discovering, piece by piece as she grew older, that ruling had never once been on offer. Her father would rule until he died, and then her husband would rule in her name, and the space allotted to Seraphine Thorne in the actual governance of Everfell would remain precisely as large as it had always been: decorative. Lord Corvin Ashby was not cruel, at least. She had turned that fact over in her mind so many times it had gone smooth as a river stone. He was not cruel, he was not stupid, he did not drink to excess or raise his voice or treat his servants poorly. He was, by every reasonable measure, an acceptable husband. He also looked at her the way a merchant looked at a promising shipment, pleased, calculating, already mentally tallying the profit, and something in Sera's chest curled up small and cold every time she imagined a lifetime of being looked at that way. "There," Marguerite said suddenly, pointing. Sera followed her gaze. Ahead, where the road began its long curve toward the eastern crossing, the tree line had crept closer than she'd expected, the outermost fingers of the Blackwood reaching down from the higher ground to shadow the very edge of the path. She could see, even from this distance, that the trees there grew differently than any forest closer to the capital: taller, darker, closer together, their canopies knit so tight that the ground beneath them looked like dusk at midday. "It's closer than the maps show," Sera murmured. "The maps are drawn by men who've never left the capital," Marguerite said, not unkindly. "Don't stare at it. Captain Voss says it's bad luck to look too long." "Captain Voss says a great many things are bad luck. Yesterday it was whistling indoors." "Captain Voss has kept every procession he's led safely across that border for eleven years, Your Highness, so perhaps his superstitions have earned some credit." Sera didn't answer. She was still looking at the trees, at the strange dark hush of them, and she could not have said, even under oath, why the sight sent a shiver skating down her spine that had nothing to do with cold. It was another hour before the ambush came. She would remember it later only in fragments. The c***k of something enormous striking the lead carriage, the scream of horses, Captain Voss shouting orders that dissolved into chaos before he could finish them, Marguerite's hand gripping hers so hard it left bruises. Men on horseback, unmarked, wearing no colors she recognized, cutting through the guard detail like a blade through silk. The carriage tilting. The horrible, endless second of weightlessness as the wheels left the road entirely and the world outside the window became sky, then trees, then nothing at all. She woke to the smell of pine and blood and the sound, close and impossibly wrong, of something large moving through underbrush that should have been empty. Her wrist throbbed. The carriage lay on its side a dozen feet away, one wheel still spinning uselessly in the air. Marguerite was gone, thrown clear, or worse, and Sera could not make herself finish that thought. She was on her back in a bed of ferns, staring up through a canopy so thick it swallowed the sun whole, and the black iron wall, the one thing standing between her kingdom and everything her father had ever warned her about, was nowhere in sight. She had crossed it. She was inside the Blackwood. Somewhere above her, a branch cracked. Sera went very still, the way prey goes still, and understood with a clarity that felt almost peaceful that everything she had been taught to fear her entire life was, in this exact moment, standing very close, and watching.