Northbound
? Ivy ?
The word follows me down through the lower hall. Luna.
It moves in broken whispers against stone, carried between wolves who have only just remembered how to breathe. I don’t feel powerful. I feel cold enough that my bones ache.
Nora catches my wrist before my knees give way.
“Ivy.”
I try to answer, but the room tilts before I can make sound. Firelight stretches too long across the floor. Ansel is still on one knee in front of me, shaking, his claws gone, his face wet. Blood spots my hand where it drips from my nose.
“Chair,” Nora says.
No one moves quickly enough. Roman does, but he waits until my fingers catch his sleeve. I don’t realize I’ve reached for him until the wool is in my hand and his whole body stills.
“May I?”
I nod once. His arm comes around me, firm and careful, and the world stops falling for just long enough to be carried through it. He lifts me as if I weigh nothing, which I hate noticing almost as much as I hate being grateful for it.
The hall blurs as wolves move back. Someone says Luna again, quieter this time, like a prayer they’re afraid to finish. Roman’s chest is solid against my side, and his coat smells like snow, smoke, and iron.
“Give her air,” Nora orders.
The whispers die. The quiet hurts less.
He crouches in front of me while Nora checks the bleeding.
Nora kneels beside me and tips my face toward the firelight. “Look at me.”
“I’m looking.”
“You’re close enough.” She presses a cloth beneath my nose and keeps two fingers around my wrist, careful of the mark. “Your hands are cold. Ears ringing?”
“Yes.”
“Can you breathe through it?”
I try. It takes a moment, but I manage.
Roman’s eyes stay on my face as if focus alone can keep me upright. “You’re with us.”
The question rises before I can stop it. Am I?
Ansel is somewhere beyond Roman’s shoulder. The wounded rider groans on the table. The missing have names now. Tobin. Lysa. Brenna. Harl. Being with them isn’t the same thing as being safe.
My stomach twists. “I didn’t mean to make him kneel.”
Roman’s face changes. Nora’s hand pauses.
“I didn’t want to force him,” I say, louder when panic finds the crack in me. “I wanted him to stop hurting himself.”
“You stopped him,” Roman says. “You didn’t break him.”
“How do you know?”
His gaze holds mine. “Because I know what that looks like. That wasn’t what you did.” I want to believe him.
Nora moves the cloth away, checks the blood, then presses it back beneath my nose. “He’s shaken, not broken.”
“You said every panic I steady has to go somewhere.”
“It does.”
“Into me.”
“Yes.” Her voice is plain, though gentler than before. “That’s why you’re cold and shaking. That’s why your nose bled. You caught the force of the room when you reached for him.”
Roman’s jaw tightens. Nora glances at him. “Don’t make this your fault before she has room to understand it.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Dane appears beside the bench with a cup in one hand and a blanket in the other. “That is, unfortunately, true.”
Nora takes the cup and passes it to me. “Broth. Salt and honey. It’ll help.” I make a face.
“It isn’t meant to be romantic.”
“It succeeds.”
Dane settles the blanket over my shoulders without fuss. “You scared half the hall.”
“I’m sorry.”
He looks at me as if I’ve said something stupid. “I didn’t say that part was bad.” Roman glances at him.
Dane shrugs. “They were about to tear each other apart. She stopped it.”
“She paid for it,” Roman says.
“Yes,” Nora agrees. “Which means no one turns her into a symbol before she can feel her fingers again.”
Dane looks toward the hall. “You heard the healer. Work.”
Several wolves suddenly become interested in their assigned tasks, and the pressure of their attention lifts.
Ansel moves, and my eyes find him before I can stop myself. Carr has one hand beneath his arm, but Ansel is standing on his own feet. His face is pale, his eyes red, and his breathing remains rough but steady. When he looks at me, he bows his head.
It isn’t a deep or theatrical bow, only enough to close my throat.
Nora follows my gaze. “You can’t carry every feeling in this room.”
“But he’s hurting.”
“They’re all hurting.”
“That’s worse.”
“Yes,” she says. “And true.”
Roman shifts where he crouches in front of me. “Nora.”
She looks down at him. “Say it clearly?”
“Yes.”
My fingers curl around the cup. “Say what clearly?”
Nora sits beside me on the bench and keeps two fingers at my pulse. “Your command steadied him.”
The word makes my stomach dip. “I don’t know how.”
“You felt the whole room,” she says. “Fear, rage, grief, pain. Your power answered all of it.”
Tobin. Lysa. Brenna. The wounded rider on the table. Every frightened face I’d tried to hold in place with names and blankets.
“All of it felt like mine,” I whisper.
“That’s emotional bleed,” Nora says. “You anchored a room in crisis, and your body became the place the surge moved through.”
The hall sounds distant now, as if I’m underwater.
I look at Roman. “Did I hurt anyone?”
“No.”
“Did I make them obey?”
He doesn’t answer quickly, and that frightens me. Then he says, “You gave Ansel enough room to remember himself.”
Nora nods. “Roman can pin a wolf down when he has to. You didn’t pin him. You gave his fear somewhere to settle before it destroyed him.”
“That sounds pretty.”
“It isn’t pretty,” Nora says. “It’s useful, dangerous, and it costs you.”
Dane folds his arms. “Can it be trained?”
Nora looks at him, then Roman, then me. “Yes.”
“Not through the capital,” Roman says.
“Not with anyone who hears rare and thinks owned,” Nora says.
Dane’s mouth flattens. “That narrows the list.”
“Good,” Nora says.
I look down at the broth trembling in my hands. “Female Alpha-born.”
Nora’s fingers stay around my wrist. “Yes.”
“My father.”
“Yes.”
The cup suddenly feels too heavy. For a moment, the hall disappears, and I’m back in the Brooks house with Marissa’s voice cutting through every year I can remember.
Your mother brought uncertainty into this family. Blood better left quiet. No need to invite questions.
“He wasn’t no one,” I say.
“No,” Roman says quietly.
I look at Nora. “My mother knew.”
“I think she knew enough to hide you.” Nora’s expression changes, and for once she doesn’t have a sharp answer ready. “Maybe she hid you from him. Maybe she hid you from people around him. Maybe she knew his name would bring enemies to your door.”
“Why didn’t she leave it for me?”
Nora lowers her eyes for a moment. “Maybe leaving it would’ve gotten you found.”
The words settle under my ribs and stay there.
For years, my mother has existed in my life as an insult other people handed me. Careless. Shameful. Unclaimed. Now she becomes something harder to hold: a woman making choices in danger I still don’t understand, a mother who may have loved me enough to disappear behind a lie.
Across the hall, one of the wounded riders groans. A clerk bends over a list of names near the main table. Roman’s soldiers move through the lower hall with grim speed.
The village is still burning in the distance. Children are still gone. My father’s name can’t become the only thing in this room.
“What happens now?” I ask.
Roman rises slowly, as if he’s making sure the motion won’t pull me with him. “I send riders to the pass first. If the attackers are still near Eastmere, we don’t ride blind into a trap.”
“The missing supplies were there.”
“Yes.”
“Then someone wanted Eastmere weak.”
“Or wanted us to find out only after blood made it obvious,” Dane says.
Roman’s expression turns cold. I force myself to sit straighter. “The second salve shipment never reached the village. The patrol changed the same week. If they knew the storehouse was weak, the route matters.”
Dane turns toward the clerk. “Pull the western-pass copy too. Compare the timing.”
Nora’s gaze drops to my hands, then returns to my face. “Stay seated.”
“I’m seated.”
“You were leaning toward the table with intent.”
“Intent isn’t movement.”
“Not yet.”
Roman’s mouth almost moves, and even with blood in the hall and war at the door, the sight warms me more than the broth.
Then the lower doors open again and another gust of cold sweeps through the hall.
Four riders enter, two carrying a stretcher. The person on it is small enough that every sound seems to thin.
Nora stands so fast the bench scrapes stone. Roman turns, and Dane swears beneath his breath.
The stretcher comes closer. A boy is wrapped in a smoke-stained cloak, his face gray and his lashes dark with melted frost. One hand hangs over the side, limp and dirty, his fingers curled as though he’d been holding something when he fell.
“Tobin,” Ansel whispers.
Nora is already moving. “Table. Now.”
Roman follows while one of the riders strips off his gloves with shaking hands.
“Found him near the lower watch trail,” the rider says. “Alone. The wagon tracks kept north.”
“What about the girls?” Roman asks.
“No sign yet.”
Nora opens Tobin’s cloak while one of her assistants checks his throat, then bends low and stops. The room waits with her. A second passes. Then another.
“Pulse,” she says. “Weak. He’s alive.”
The hall exhales.
Ansel makes a sound that cuts through me, and the fear rises again, changed this time into hope so raw it hurts. It rushes toward me from every side, and my cup slips from my fingers.
Roman’s head snaps toward me. Nora’s does too.
I catch the bench with both hands. “I’m fine.”
I’m not.
Nora looks at Dane without taking her eyes from Tobin. “Keep her seated.”
Dane is beside me at once. “Already doing it.”
I should argue. I don’t. Tobin is alive on Nora’s table, the riders who found him are still shaking, and the room keeps trying to pour itself into my chest.
Dane crouches beside me, big and steady as a wall. “Look at me.”
I blink. He isn’t Roman. The mark doesn’t warm for him. The world doesn’t narrow around him.
That helps.
“Name five useful things,” Dane says.
“Useful?”
“Yes. Nora does symptoms. I do useful.”
A thin laugh leaves me. “You’re both very strange.”
“Five.”
I grip the bench. “Tobin’s alive.”
“One.”
“The attackers kept north.”
“Two.”
“The missing supplies were at Eastmere.”
“Three.”
“The patrol change matters.”
“Four.”
I look at Roman, standing beside Tobin’s table while Nora works. He’s listening to the riders instead of drowning them beneath his fear.
“Roman listened,” I say.
Dane’s expression shifts. “Five.”
The pressure in my chest loosens by a fraction.
Nora works over Tobin with brisk, furious tenderness. “Stay with me, little wolf. You don’t get to die after making it this far. Very rude. Very inconvenient. I won’t have it.”
Roman looks up at me. Across blood, smoke, fear, and a hall full of wolves calling me Luna, his gaze asks the same question as before.
Where do you want to stand?
My hands are cold. My body is shaking. My nose has only just stopped bleeding. But the ledger pages are still on the table, the names are unfinished, and two girls are somewhere in the snow.
I look at Dane. “Help me to the map.”
“No.”
“Dane.”
“Nora said seated.”
“Then bring me the map.”
He pauses, then his mouth twitches. “That I can do.”
He lifts the nearest map from the table and brings it to the bench as if moving battle plans for a half-frozen woman with blood on her sleeve is perfectly ordinary.
Maybe in the north, it is.
I spread the map over my knees. My hands shake, and Dane sets an ink pot beside me without comment. Roman watches from across the hall. Nora fights for Tobin’s life. The wounded riders give their reports. The wolves breathe.
I lower my finger to Eastmere.
“Show me where the patrol changed,” I say.
Dane points. The mark beneath my sleeve warms again, but I don’t look away from the map. My father wasn’t no one. My mother may have hidden me for a reason. Jace touched my wrist and thought I’d fold. A boy is alive on Nora’s table, and two girls are somewhere in the snow.
I draw one careful circle around the eastern pass, then another around the missing supply road.
The lines cross at an old watch trail no one has mentioned.
Dane’s finger stops on the map.
Roman sees his face and rises. “What?”
I look at the place where the ink circles meet.
“They didn’t run east,” I say. “The old watch trail cuts north.”
The room quiets around the map.
“They’re coming north.”