Arielle's POV
We rode out at dawn.
Not on horseback. Wolves don't use horses. We ran, forty of us in wolf form, moving through the mountain passes in the gray pre-light of early morning with Lucien's black shape at the front and my white one just behind his left shoulder, where I had positioned myself without thinking and where he had not told me not to be.
The Silvercrest border was three hours at pace. We covered it in two.
I had trained for this. Months of Lucien pushing me to my limits in the training yard, in the underground chamber, on the mountain ridge at full moon. I had killed shadow spirits and driven away feral wolves and dismantled the Shadow Queen's centuries-old contract with nothing but what the forest had given me.
But I had never fought in a real pack battle.
I did
