Chapter One
Calista
I spent my whole life believing Selraya had forgotten me… until the day she gave me to a king.
Over the ridge, I hazarded a glance at the white-capped sea, the ominous crash reminding me I belonged to a male I’d never met and a future I had never chosen.
The tide gnawed at the cliff like it wanted to swallow our whole camp.
I could almost picture the black knife of a ship cutting toward our cove, its prow carved into a wolf’s head and its sails the gray of a winter sky.
I imagined the beastly Fae moving along the deck like shadows, Frostcrag’s banner flaring behind them, white claw on frost-blue.
Today was my twentieth birthday, the day I was to be offered as a peace bride to the Alpha King of the Wolvryn Courts.
The Savage King.
I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my focus toward the shoreline below.
Smoke still threaded the air from last night’s raid.
Nets that should have been drying pale and salt-stiff lay slumped in heaps, their cords fused together.
The floats were blistered. Little bone hooks, carved by my father’s hands, lay cracked in the sand.
My fingers curled into fists, nails biting into the faint crescent the goddess had branded into my palm.
Damned southern raiders. They would never stop coming for us.
Not unless someone stopped them. Not unless he did.
Selraya knew Hollowcrest could not keep enduring this. We were the ones the other courts called moonless and hollowborn, the wolves that never emerged. The names were meant to shame us into silence, but they had only taught us to endure quietly and fight with what little we had.
If this marriage gave us protection, then I would do my duty.
If standing beside a king meant my people could sleep through one night without waking to smoke and screaming, then I would endure that too. I didn’t have to like the path Selraya had chosen for me to walk it.
Still, I trained every day, and this morning would be no different.
Frost filmed the yard stones, a thin white breath over the gray. The practice posts rose from the packed earth like a row of jagged teeth. After years, they were splintered, scarred, and stubborn. Just how I liked them.
I set my stance, rolled my shoulders, and breathed into the quiet until the whispers that had chased me from bed finally fell away.
Peace bride.
Wolfless.
Chosen.
Offering.
My fingers found the familiar weight at my back. The twin crescent blades slid free from their sheaths with a soft kiss of leather. They were forged of plain iron with linen wraps, no gilding to pretend I was something I wasn’t.
“Again,” I called into the empty yard.
I crossed the crescents, caught the wooden practice sword pegged to a post, and ripped it free.
It clattered to the ground. I pivoted, hooked the inner curve of a sickle behind the rough post, swept my leg, and let my weight carry through to a low crouch.
I rose and reset. The crescents flashed dull in the half-light, twin moons waxing and waning in my hands.
When my heart began to race ahead of me, I sheathed one blade and unlooped my rope belt. It looked like nothing. Just a braided cord with a plain iron ring at one end and a needle-weight at the other. But it sang when the ring left my fingers.
I threw on an exhale. The ring arced, whistled, and dropped around a jutting branch of the tree.
I yanked. The line went taut, and the branch bowed low, right where a male’s head would fall.
I stepped through, turned as if moving past an opponent’s shoulder, and let the bind slide into a figure-eight over air that could have been a throat.
“Hold,” I whispered, and pulled until my arms trembled.
In Hollowcrest, strength was earned in inches. We had no wolf to lend us heat. No easy rush of the goddess’s elra. Just rope, iron, and the kind of stubbornness born from surviving without what everyone else took for granted.
I unwound the line, shook out my hands, and rubbed the numb sting from my fingers.
Wind slipped through the broken fence, thin and nosy, carrying the smell of buckwheat porridge from the kitchens at the manor on the hill.
Our cottage sat on the edge of the property, a gift from Alpha Dorian when I had been chosen last year.
Some said it was proof Selraya herself had seen me at last.
Perhaps she had. Or perhaps the goddess simply had a cruel sense of timing.
I threw again and caught the narrow rung I’d aimed for. I felt the line through my forearms, my ribs, and across the brand on my shoulder blade. But most of all, I felt it in the small, stubborn place inside me that refused to yield simply because fate had decided my life for me.
I might not have chosen this path, but I would choose how I walked it.
I drew in a breath and tipped my face to the sky, smoke still burning at the edges. The dawn light had not yet broken through the clouds, but it would. Maybe Sel was still deciding which face she would wear when it did. Gentle Sel, the healer. Or Raya, the truth-keeper, the punisher.
I tied the rope back around my waist and drew the second crescent. Together, they steadied me. I traced the pattern again: disarm, then finish.
On the last pass, I misjudged my pivot and the heel of my boot skidded on the frost. Thankfully, instinct caught me before I hit the ground, the right crescent biting the dirt and holding me steady.
The jolt ran to my shoulder, and pain surged across the brand again, that old ache that never truly left.
Every Hollowcrest bore the mark, a reminder of what we were not. Wolvryn children were meant to be born with a faint crescent-shaped birthmark, what the elders called Sel’s kiss. Ours was burned into us instead.
I hissed, swallowed the flare of temper, and reset my feet.
A low horn murmured from the watchtower. That sense of dread settled low in my belly. It was not the familiar wail for raiders or the frantic peal for fire. It was three long, steady notes. Visitors.
My stomach dropped.
I stepped to the gap in the fencing and looked beyond the frost-silvered fields to the road threading up the cliff like a vein. Distant movement shivered the air. A procession, dark shapes on the pale world, approached as slowly and surely as winter.
I looped the rope around my waist again and made it a belt. The iron ring settled at my hip, dull as a coin. I checked each crescent with a touch for luck just in case it smiled on me for a change and took one last look at the yard that knew all my secrets.
“Again,” I told myself softly.
For them.
For Hollowcrest.
For the family I meant to leave alive and protected when this day was over.
The horn sounded once more. Closer now came the rhythm of hooves, the jangle of harness, and a howl that rolled across frost and stone and into my bones.
I lifted my chin toward the Moonglass Sea. “I refuse to simply become an ornament beside a crown,” I murmured to the wind because it was safer than saying it to a person. “I want this to mean something.”
The sea never answered. So I squared my shoulders, stepped away from the practice post, and turned toward home.
When I reached the rickety gate that separated our cottage from the Alpha’s manor, the front door whipped open and Suri bounded toward me.
My younger sister, all long limbs and big hazel eyes and more stubborn than the barnacles that lined the fishing boats along the docks, skidded to a stop only inches away.
“There’s a scout approaching the back gate,” she blurted, her gaze bouncing nervously between the fence and the cottage door. “Rill sent him to see the Alpha.”
Rill didn’t send runners for nothing.
My stomach dropped harder.
“Ma’s inside?”
She nodded just as a young male staggered through the yard, supported by one of Dorian’s guards. His cloak was torn, his hair wet with sweat, one sleeve dark with blood.
The watch guard lowered him onto a bench only a few yards from our door. The runner’s breath rasped, each inhale a scrape.
“What happened?” I stepped forward, putting myself between the guard and our home. Suri’s hand tightened around mine, keeping me still.
The runner’s eyes flicked to the guard, then back to me. “South ridge. We found… tracks.”
Suri made a small sound. It could have been a gasp. It could have been a growl trapped in her chest. I prayed for the latter.
“And smoke,” the runner added. “From the coast. Another fishing camp. Burned to the ground.”
The same smoke I’d seen from the yard.
Moon’s curses.
“Come on, boy,” the guard muttered. “Let’s get you to the Alpha.” He hauled the runner to his feet and continued down the path toward Dorian’s house.
Suri and I stood at the gate, watching them go.
“Sel, steady my heart,” she whispered. “Do you think the raiders attacked on purpose? It can’t be a coincidence with the king on his way.”
My breath caught at her perceptiveness. “Don’t worry, little fish. Dorian will handle the southerners. We’ll be safe.”
She dipped her head, but even I could hear the lie in my words. Hollowcrest couldn’t withstand much more of this. That was why the king mattered.
That was why this marriage was necessary, despite how bitter the taste of it was in my mouth.
As soon as the two males disappeared from view, Suri turned on me, eyes wide. “Goddess, Cali, I was so worried when I woke up and you weren’t in bed beside me.”
At only fifteen, she was already nearly a head taller than me. I reached up and tucked a wild strand of blonde hair behind her ear, the pointed tip glittering with the steel cuffs and loops most young Wolvryn wore.
“I’m not going anywhere yet.” I gave her a reassuring smile. “And that Savage King would have to drag me to his boat himself before I left without saying goodbye to you.”
A small grin touched her mouth, and she released a breath.
“How’s Ma this morning?” I ticked my head toward the cottage.
The grin vanished as quickly as it had emerged. “I think she knows it’s happening today. She woke unsettled, even more than usual.” Her lip wobbled, the corners tightening. “She called me Mara again. Then she stood by the window and told the curtain to stop staring.”
Oh, gods. Not now. Losing us both on the same day would shatter what little was left of Suri's childhood.
My throat ached as I pulled her in for a hug, her fingers tangling in my hair as she rested her forehead on my shoulder.
Quiet tears soaked into the fabric of my tunic.
"I'm so sorry, Suri. You know she loves you, deep down. You know—”
Before I could finish, the cottage door banged open behind her.
Our mother burst onto the stoop with her dark hair half-plaited and wild in places, apron strings dragging. In her hand she clutched a gaffing hook like a spear, eyes wide and wrong, breath sawing in and out.
“Get out!” she shouted at the empty air. “You’ll not take what’s mine. Go!”
Panic surged through me for an instant. If anyone saw her like this… My head whipped over my shoulder toward the Alpha’s manor. Thank the gods, the guard and the runner were gone.
Suri flinched and stumbled back into me. I caught her by the shoulders.
“Easy,” I murmured, then louder and steady, “Ma, it’s just us.”
She did not hear the words so much as the tone. Her gaze skipped over me to the hedgerow, then to the side of the hut where shadows pooled. She slashed the hook at nothing, quick and dangerous.
“Cali…” Suri’s fingers dug into my sleeve. Fear made her voice small.
I stared at my mother, at the hook, at the panic already building behind Suri’s eyes.
And the truth settled in me all over again, cold and heavy as stone.
This was why the marriage to Frostcrag was so crucial. Not because I wanted to be a consort, and certainly not because I trusted fate, but because this alliance bought Hollowcrest protection and my family safety.
I would not kneel before the Savage King, but I would take what he offered and make it serve my people.