THE COSTLY MISTAKE

The letter that brought me back to Ashford land didn’t use my name. It used my trade. Sickness spreading along the northern border. Six dead in Millrow, more in the outlying farms. We require a healer with experience in wasting fevers. Payment triple standard rate, travel provided. I read it three times before I answered it, sitting at the small table in my cabin in Hollow Pines with a cup of tea gone cold beside me, and told myself the geography didn’t matter. Northern border could mean a dozen territories. I’d built a career, over five years, on being exactly vague enough about my past that nobody asked the wrong questions, and a request for a healer wasn’t a request for Isla Rourke. It was a request for whoever I’d become since — Mara Fenwick, unremarkable, competent, careful never to stay anywhere long enough to be truly known. I didn’t let myself think about which pack held that stretch of border until the wagon carrying me north crossed a boundary marker I recognized from memory I’d spent five years trying not to keep. By then it was too late to turn back. Six people were already dead. Ashford Hold looked the way it always had from a distance — stone walls built into the mountainside like they’d grown there rather than been raised, smoke rising from a dozen chimneys against a sky the color of old bruises. I kept my hood up the entire ride in, told the driver I preferred the shade, and spent the last mile rehearsing a version of myself steady enough to walk through that gate without falling apart. The gatekeeper didn’t recognize me. Neither did the two guards who escorted me to the hall where the sick were being kept. I let myself believe, for the length of that walk, that five years and a different name might actually be enough. Roman proved me wrong before I’d finished lowering my hood. He was standing at the far end of the sickroom, deep in conversation with a man I didn’t recognize, dressed plainly, sleeves pushed up like he’d been doing physical work rather than simply commanding people to do it — and something about him stopping mid-sentence, going utterly still, told me exactly what had happened before he even turned around. “You’re the healer they sent.” His voice hadn’t changed. That was the worst part, somehow — five years, and the specific low register of it landed in my chest exactly the way it always had. “Mara Fenwick.” “That’s right.” He crossed the room slowly, and I watched every step of it, watched the particular controlled way he moved that I remembered from a lifetime ago, and told myself I still had a chance to hold this together as a stranger’s introduction. That chance ended when he stopped an arm’s length away and looked at me properly, fully, for the first time. Whatever he’d expected to see, it wasn’t this. I watched the recognition land — not gradually, but all at once, the specific violence of a man realizing the ground under him has shifted without warning. “Isla.” I didn’t answer right away. There didn’t seem to be a version of the moment where denying it would have worked, not with him looking at me like that, not with five years of buried certainty rearranging itself across his face in real time. “I go by Mara now,” I said, which wasn’t an answer either, but it was the only thing I could manage. “You go by whatever you like.” His voice had gone flat, controlled in the specific way that told me he was furious and refusing to show it in front of his people. “You’re still the woman who stood in front of my entire pack and told me you didn’t want me. Changing your name doesn’t change that you’re standing in my hall five years later like it’s nothing.” “It wasn’t nothing.” “No.” His jaw tightened. “It nearly cost me my authority over this territory. Do you have any idea what the six months after that ceremony looked like? Elders questioning whether I could hold this pack at all, if my own mate wouldn’t stand beside me. Blackwood scouting our borders like wolves circling something wounded.” He said it quietly, but each word landed with the precision of something he’d rehearsed alone, many times, in the years since. “I built this pack back up stone by stone after you left. I am not interested in whatever brought you back.” “People are dying, Roman. That’s what brought me back.” I kept my voice as steady as I could manage, though my hands had started to shake at my sides. “I didn’t ask to be sent here. I didn’t know it was Ashford land until the wagon crossed the border marker, and by then six people were already dead and I wasn’t about to turn around because it was inconvenient for both of us.” Something flickered across his expression — not softening, exactly, but a recalibration, like he was weighing the sickroom full of suffering people against five years of a fury he clearly hadn’t finished with yet. “Treat them,” he said, finally, low. “That’s the only reason you’re still standing in this hall instead of back on that wagon. When the sickness is handled, you leave. We don’t speak beyond what the work requires.” “Understood.” He held my gaze a moment longer than the exchange required, something unreadable moving behind his eyes, before he turned and walked back toward the man he’d been speaking with when I arrived — a lean, watchful figure who’d been silent through the entire exchange, observing with an attention that felt, even from across the room, considerably sharper than simple curiosity. I didn’t know his name yet. I would learn it soon enough, and learn exactly how much reason he had to watch that reunion as closely as he had. For now, I turned toward the row of cots lining the hall’s east wall, toward six more patients showing the early signs of the same wasting fever that had already killed six others, and made myself focus on the only thing in that room I still had any right to touch. The sickness didn’t care about five-year-old wounds. Neither, I told myself, walking toward the first cot, could I afford to. I was wrong about that within the week.