CHAPTER FIVE THE ROAD TO THE GROVE
M arion discovered very quickly that running as a wolf was not the same as running as a woman.
As a woman, she thought of things.
Where to place her feet. How much breath she had left. Whether the ground dipped ahead. Whether her skirts would catch on bramble or her lungs would give out before pride did.
As a wolf, the earth came up to meet her.
It was mad. There was no other word for it.
Snow, rock, root, frozen heather, all of it passed beneath her paws so fast that a human mind would have stumbled over the first ditch and broken an ankle.
Yet this body knew. It knew how to leap before she saw the fallen branch.
It knew how to land light on ice, how to push off stone, how to lower its head when the wind turned sharp with sleet.
The sensible part of Marion, which had survived years of widowhood, village suspicion and Duncan’s polished threats, wanted to be horrified.
The rest of her wanted to run until the world ended.
Oh God, that was frightening.
She was enjoying it.
Her paws struck the snow and sent white powder spraying behind her. The castle vanished among black cliffs and morning mist. The shouts at the gate died away first, then the howls, then even Georgie’s scent thinned until only the memory of it clung to Marion’s heart.
Mama.
That whisper followed her harder than the wind.
She ran faster.
The Highlands opened in front of her, pale and cruel and beautiful.
Dawn had not fully broken, but the sky in the east had begun to bruise.
Gray at the edges. A thin strip of silver light beyond the ridge.
Snow covered the heather and turned every stone into a crouching beast. Black pines stood in clusters like men gathered to keep secrets.
She could smell every one of them.
Pine sap. Frozen moss. Old fox. Deer hidden far off in a hollow. Smoke from a crofter’s hut miles away. Water under ice. Iron buried in old blood where men had died in some forgotten skirmish and no priest had reached them.
And beneath it all, faint but wrong, came the bitter bite of silver.
Marion’s lips pulled back from her teeth.
She almost tripped at the feel of it. Not the scent. The snarl. It rolled out of her without permission, low and ugly in her throat.
Well, that was new.
She would have laughed if she had a human mouth.
Instead she pushed harder into the wind.
Euan’s heartbeat pulled her east.
It did not sound like other hearts. She knew that made no sense. Hearts were hearts. They beat, they faltered, they stopped. Marion had spent half her life listening for such things with two fingers pressed to a wrist or throat, praying the next beat would come.
But Euan’s heart had a shape to it.
Deep. Heavy. Stubborn as the man himself.
And tonight, too slow.
She lengthened her stride.
Do not you dare, she thought, as if he could hear her. Do not sit there looking noble and ruined while I break my bones learning to chase you.
A faint answering warmth brushed the bond.
Marion’s steps faltered.
Euan?
Nothing came back but that steady, distant beat.
Of course not. He was not speaking to her. He did not know she breathed. He thought she lay cold on the altar while he walked into some ancient grove to pay for a death that had not taken her.
The ridiculousness of it nearly made her furious enough to miss the ravine.
At the last instant her body gathered itself and sprang.
For a breath she flew.
Snow vanished beneath her. Wind hit her belly. A frozen stream flashed below, black water showing through broken ice. Then she landed on the opposite bank with a jolt through all four legs and skidded, claws biting stone.
Marion stopped.
She looked back.
The gap was wide enough to have killed a horse.
Her heart hammered.
Then, because apparently dying and becoming a wolf had destroyed the last respectable part of her, she shook snow from her fur and huffed.
That was when she caught another scent.
Men.
Not wolves. Not clan.
Men.
She lowered her head.
The trail crossed the stream farther down, where the banks dipped. Five horses, perhaps six. Leather. Sweat. Oiled metal. The sour tang of fear badly hidden under discipline. And silver, not old and buried, but fresh. Wrapped. Carried.
Crown men.
Marion’s first instinct was to follow.
Her second was Euan.
The two instincts slammed into each other so sharply she paced in place, paws carving the snow. If Crown men had crossed here, they were heading the same way. Toward the Grove. Toward Euan. Toward a gathering of wolves already half broken by grief and law.
A trap then.
Of course it was a trap.
She should have known. Aldrich would not leave sorrow alone if he could dissect it.
Marion turned in a tight circle, nose to wind. The horse trail angled south, then curved east. They were moving around the ridge, likely slower than she, burdened by wagons or weapons. The silver smoke scent drifted with them, faint but steady.
She looked toward the pull of Euan’s heart.
He was closer than the men.
But not by enough.
For one miserable breath she wished Morna were there. Or Euan. Or anyone who understood war better than a village healer who once considered a stubborn fever and a suspicious mother in law her most complicated problems.
Then she remembered that every time men had understood war better than she did, someone ended up chained, poisoned, threatened, or walking to an execution block.
So perhaps understanding war was overrated.
She bared her teeth at the trail and chose Euan.
As she ran, the land changed.
The snow deepened beneath the pines. Branches slapped at her sides and shed cold powder over her back. She moved between trunks, fast but quieter now, her body lowering naturally to the ground. The wolf did not like open ridges when enemies were near. It preferred shadow, scent, listening.
Marion would have objected to being instructed by her own animal instincts, but they were currently doing a better job keeping her alive than her human thoughts, so she kept the complaint to herself.
Images struck her as she ran.
Not visions exactly. Memories, but sharper because the wolf carried scent with them.
Euan in chains, rain flattening his dark hair against his face, refusing to lower his eyes in the village square.
The smell of blood and wet wool when she first dragged him into her cottage.
His fevered voice calling her mo chridhe before she had known what the words meant.
His teeth in her throat.
Marion stumbled, not from fear this time, but from the strange heat that rose under her skin at the memory.
Terrifying, yes. Painful, yes. But now, with the bond fully alive inside her, she could feel what she had not understood then.
It had not been violence alone. It had been recognition made brutal by fever and poison.
That did not excuse it.
She was still going to scold him.
But the memory no longer belonged only to pain.
She ran on.
Another came.
Euan sitting stiffly near her hearth while Georgie placed a chipped cup of broth in his large hands and informed him that if he spilled it, Mama would be cross.
He had stared at the child as if she were some tiny creature from legend.
Then, with that grave Highland seriousness of his, he had promised not to offend the soup.
Marion’s throat tightened around a sound that could not become a sob because wolves did not have time for such nonsense while sprinting through frozen woods.
Georgie loved him.
That had happened when Marion was too busy fearing the bond, fearing the change, fearing every knock at the cottage door. Her daughter had looked at a man everyone called beast and decided he was safe because he was gentle with wounded things.
Children always knew.
Or perhaps Georgie knew because she was Marion’s child and had been born with the same terrible habit of seeing past what the world shouted.
Marion slowed at the edge of a clearing.
Standing stones rose from the snow ahead.
Old stones. Older than the castle, older than the road, older perhaps than any law that had sent Euan to die. They stood in a broken circle on a low hill, each one marked with claw scars worn smooth by weather. In the center, the snow had drifted untouched.
No birds called there.
Marion did not like it.
The wolf did.
Her paws carried her forward before she fully decided to go. The air inside the stones felt different. Still, but not empty. Listening again. Everything in this cursed Highland seemed to listen.
She stepped into the circle.
The bite at her neck flared.
Marion froze.
For an instant she was no longer in snow. She was on the altar again. Euan bent over her, his face destroyed. His hands on her cheeks. His mouth against her cold lips.
No.
Not now.
The memory shifted.
She saw him walking from the cavern, held by his own warriors, though none seemed willing. Georgie fighting against Tavish’s arms. Morna shouting. Euan not turning back because if he did, he would break.
Then another image, strange and blurred.
The Sacred Grove.
Black trees. Torchlight. A silver axe.
Euan kneeling.
Marion came back to herself with a growl that shook snow from the nearest stone.
She lunged out of the circle and ran.
The forest thinned.
Now the land sloped down into a valley where mist gathered white and low. Beyond it rose another ridge, and beyond that, if her bond and blood told true, lay the Grove.
Euan’s heartbeat sounded clearer now.
Too calm.
She hated that calm.
He was probably apologizing to everyone. Giving instructions. Making his death tidy for them. How like him to make even grief orderly.
Her paws pounded harder.
The silver scent thickened.
So did something else.
Ravens.
Marion heard their wings before she saw them. A rush of black bodies lifted from the trees ahead, cawing harshly into the gray dawn. One swept low over her path, and she almost snapped at it.
It veered away, clever bird.
Beyond the ravens, the ground climbed.
Marion burst from the tree line onto a rocky rise and stopped so suddenly snow sprayed over her front paws.
There, far below in a hollow of ancient black trees, torches burned.
The Sacred Grove.
It was larger than she expected, older than any place had a right to feel. The trees grew in a near perfect circle, their branches twisted together like fingers. At the center, between shafts of torchlight, she saw figures gathered.
Wolves.
Warriors.
Elders.
And a man kneeling before a black stone.
Even from the ridge, even with the wind and distance and her own heart hammering, Marion knew him.
Euan.
Her body went cold.
A flash of silver rose above him.
The axe.
Marion’s vision narrowed until nothing existed but that blade and the bowed head beneath it.
Behind the Grove, half hidden among the trees, a darker movement stirred. Horses. Men. Smoke canisters strapped to saddles. Crown steel catching dawn.
Aldrich’s trap had arrived.
Marion dug her claws into stone.
For one beat, fear tried to catch her.
Then Euan’s heartbeat slowed again.
Absolutely not.
Marion lowered her head, gathered every new and wild part of herself, and sprang down the ridge toward the torches.