22. Aitor
Aitor
The first arrow hit the canvas three feet from Suzana's head and I was already moving — that wet thwack of iron through hide-cloth singing in the tent pole like a plucked string.
The bond snapped me from dream to wolf in a single electric pulse that tasted like copper and ozone.
"Up!" I was shouting before my feet hit the ground. "Up, up, they're inside the perimeter?—"
Toma was already rising. His hand found the short sword before his eyes opened and he was on his feet with the blade drawn in a single motion — the second arrow punched through the tent wall and buried itself where his chest had been a heartbeat before.
"The wards," Suzana said. Sharp. The scent-wards — silent now. Bypassed by someone who knew exactly where they were.
Costel. The knowledge landed in my gut like a fist. Costel knew every ward placement. Had helped set them. Had sat with Dobrin over the maps and marked each position with that careful three-fingered hand.
I shifted. No preamble — just the violence of the change ripping through me mid-stride as I tore the tent flap open. Cold slapped my wolf's face and the world reorganized into scent and sound and the geometry of killing.
Chaos. Tents burning — someone had brought fire. Wolves running in both directions — ours half-shifted, scrambling; Mircea's in full formation, moving with terrible efficiency.
Because they'd been told. Because they knew exactly where to go.
Through the bond I felt Zviad — already outside, already fighting, his silver thread cold and sharp. South side.
Then I stopped dead.
The bond was pulsing. Visible — not to my eyes but to something deeper. The threads radiating outward like heat shimmer, and the enemy wolves were converging on those lines. Every time the bond flared between me and Toma, a half-dozen Mircea wolves adjusted their course.
They could track it.
"Toma!" I sent it through the bond. "They're reading us. The bond — they're using it to find us."
His answer came back grim and wordless. He'd noticed too.
Suzana burst from the tent, a knife in each hand, and the bond blazed like a struck match. An enemy wolf — grey, massive — changed direction mid-stride and angled toward her.
I hit him from the side. Full speed, jaws finding the space between neck and shoulder. Bone cracked. He went down and I was already pivoting — so many more. Thirty, forty.
"Aitor, behind!" Suzana's voice and I spun, caught the lunging wolf on my shoulder instead of my throat. We rolled. His claws raked my ribs — hot, immediate pain. I got my hind legs under him and kicked. Toma finished it with the short sword.
"We need to separate," Toma said. Blood on his face — not his. "They're targeting us as a group. The bond's drawing them in."
Every instinct screamed against it. But I could see it. The four-point constellation was broadcasting our position. Pull apart and maybe the signal dims. Stay together and we'd draw every blade toward Suzana.
"No." Suzana. Firm. "We split into pairs. Toma and I go west, draw them toward the ravine. You find Zviad, take the south approach, push them back toward the tree line."
Orders. Given cleanly, given fast. I loved her for it.
"Go," she said.
I went.
The south side was worse. Bodies on the ground — ours. Wolves I knew, wolves I'd shared fires and bad jokes with. Some stirring. Some not. The berserker surged and I let it rise — let the red thing flood my limbs until vision narrowed and the world became nothing but targets.
Zviad materialized beside me. Blood on his muzzle. His silver thread pulsed once and I felt his assessment: twelve enemy wolves on this flank, six down, the rest pushing toward the center. Toward where Suzana had been.
We hit the next pair like a coordinated strike. I took the bigger one through the shoulder. Zviad hamstrung the second.
"Three more — northwest, coming fast," Zviad said, already shifted back, blade drawn. "Angling toward the bond-line between us."
"Split wide. Ten yards apart. See if they lose the scent."
We broke. For one beautiful, terrible heartbeat the three Mircea wolves faltered. Then the bond pulsed — involuntary, Zviad's thread checking my position, mine answering. The enemy wolves snapped back onto course.
"Can't dim it," Zviad called. Calm. Always calm. "It's automatic."
"Wonderful," I snarled, and met the first wolf mid-leap.
His jaws snapped for my throat. I twisted, took the bite on my forearm — pain white-hot — and wrenched him sideways. Found the angle beneath the skull where pressure meant unconsciousness. He went limp. The second was already on me.
The berserker sang. Each kill flowing into the next. Without Suzana's steady hand on the tether, the red thing rose higher. I could feel myself sliding toward the place where Aitor ended and the wolf began.
Half-change — the worst kind. Too many teeth and claws where fingers should be. Ugly. Effective.
Suzana's thread tugged from across the camp. Then her voice, distant, carrying in a scream that wasn't pain but command.
"DObrIN! Someone get to Dobrin?—"
I ran. Human form — I shifted back because I needed hands, needed to carry, needed to be something more than teeth.
My ribs screamed where the claws had opened them but I was running before the pain could matter, boots hitting churned earth, the fire from the burning tents throwing everything in orange and black.
Three Mircea wolves between me and Dobrin's tent. I didn't slow. Drew the ugly knife — the killing one — and took the first through the throat as I passed. Not a fight. An obstacle removed. Shouldered the second off balance, didn't stop. Zviad would handle him.
The tent flap was slashed open. I could smell the blood before I got inside.
Dobrin.
On the ground. The old lore-keeper was on the ground and his robes — those threadbare liturgical robes he wore like armor — were dark with blood. So much blood. It pooled beneath him, black in the firelight, spreading with a patience that looked like certainty.
Suzana was there. Hands pressed to his chest.
"He stepped in front of me," she said. Her voice flat. Broken in a place I couldn't reach. "They came for me — two of them, blades drawn, and he just?—"
Two Mircea wolves dead on the ground — Suzana's work. But between them and where she must have been standing: Dobrin. The sword had gone through him from behind and out the front.
"Aitor." Her eyes found mine. Terrified in a way I had never seen her. "He's not?—"
I knelt. My hands joined hers on the wound.
"Old man." My voice sounded like someone else's. "Old man, stay with me."
His hand found my wrist. A ghost's grip. But his eyes found mine with a clarity that had no business being in a body this broken.
"The bond," he whispered. Blood bubbling. "They followed... the bond. Tell them. Tell them it broadcasts."
"I know. I know, Dobrin. Just stay?—"
"Costel showed them how to read it. The old texts. The frequency. He gave them the—" A wet, terrible cough. "—the way to find you. Anywhere. As long as the four of you... are bonded... they will always..."
"Dobrin." Suzana. Her forehead against his. "Don't you leave me. I still need you. You haven't finished teaching me."
"Move." Toma's voice. Blood soaking his shirt. He knelt beside us. "Someone get the healer. Get Magda. NOW."
"Toma. The wound is through the chest. No healer's going to?—"
"Get MAGDA."
I went. Not because I believed but because Toma needed to believe.
Magda was in the wreckage of the healer's tent. She saw my face and gathered her things without a word.
She assessed. "The lung is pierced. Both lungs. I can slow the bleeding but?—"
"Do it." Toma.
"He needs rest. Warmth. Time that I don't think?—"
"DO IT."
I stood outside the ruined tent and watched the camp burn.
Half the structures gone. The supply stores — weeks of careful stockpiling — blazed at the eastern edge.
The scent-wards scattered and useless, the herbs ground into mud by boots that had known exactly where to step.
Costel's boots. Costel's knowledge. Costel's betrayal made flesh in fire and blood and the old man dying ten feet away.
Inside the tent, Suzana was whispering to Dobrin. I could hear her through the torn canvas — soft, steady, the kind of words you say to hold a soul in place.
"You stay. You hear me? You stay right here. I still need you. The bond — I don't understand it all yet. You haven't finished teaching me. You don't get to leave before the lesson's done."
"This is my fault." Toma's voice. Low enough that only I heard it.
I didn't answer. Because the same thought lived in my chest — our fault, the fault of four people who chose love over vigilance.
Zviad appeared beside me.
"We can't stay here," he said.
"I know."
"They'll regroup. And now that they can read the bond?—"
"I know."
"Being together did this," Zviad said carefully. "The bond drew them to us. To her."
"Don't."
"Aitor—"
"I said don't." My hands were shaking. Covered in Dobrin's blood, in the blood of the wolves I'd killed. "Don't say what you're about to say."
He didn't say it. He didn't need to. The bond was a signal fire. And last night — that reunion, that reclaiming — had been a beacon. If they'd been soldiers instead of lovers?—
Dobrin would not be dying.
Toma emerged. Stone-faced.
"We move at first light. Whatever we can carry. Dobrin included — Magda says he can survive being moved if we're careful."
"And go where?" My voice. Still quiet. Still wrong. "They can track us, Toma. Anywhere the four of us go together, they'll follow. We are the map to ourselves."
"Then we figure out how to dim it. Shield it."
"The old texts are in Dobrin's head. And Costel already took what he needed from them."
Suzana emerged. Blood to her elbows. Her face was something I never wanted to see again — not broken, but gone.
"He's stable. For now."
She looked at the bond-threads between us. And then she said the thing none of us had been willing to say.
"We should separate."
The silence was absolute.
"No." Toma. Immediate.
"They track us by the bond. Together we're a bonfire. Apart?—"
"No. I am not losing us because Mircea?—"
"Toma." Her hand found his cheek. "I'm not saying forever. I'm saying we need to be smart about what they've turned us into."
"We move together," he said. Final. "We stay together and we figure it out on the road. I will not let them make us afraid of what we are."
Nobody argued. But nobody agreed either.
The bond pulsed. That warm, terrible, beloved thing. And for the first time since it formed, I hated what it was. What it cost. What it had drawn down upon the people we loved.
Toma felt it too — my hatred, my grief. His eyes went darker. Not gold now. Just dark, and hurt, and carrying something he couldn't put down.
"We'll figure it out," he said again. Quieter. The command stripped away, leaving just the man. "We move. We survive. We figure it out."
The bond was no longer their shelter. It was their vulnerability. Every pulse of closeness that made them strong also made them visible.
Being together — the thing they'd fought for, bled for, defied a succession war to claim — was now the thing that would get them killed.
We would run. We would carry the old man and our guilt and the terrible new knowledge of what we were.
A target. Four hearts bound by threads that bled light into the dark.
And every enemy eye turned toward the glow.