Chapter 16: Greyfell Kneels

We rode the south road all day, with forty wolves of Highwater running behind us.

Rhona rode a bay gelding at my side, hooded and silent, until the sun was low.

"The bottles came from a man at the east pass," she said then. "He wore a hunter's coat and he never gave a name."

"Did Corvin pay him?"

"With something. I never saw what." She gripped the reins. "The bottle makes the wolf rise. It also eats whoever drinks it, and Corvin knows."

"Then why does he drink?"

"Because the wolf is the only thing left that makes him feel like the Alpha."

I did not answer.

At dusk the lodge rose out of the black hills, with its east wall broken and its gate standing open.

An upside-down banner hung from the gatepost, and a fire burned in the yard.

Twenty hunters sat around it with their boots up, eating the pack's winter stores.

I rode through the open gate with Ronan on my left.

The hunters looked up and began to laugh.

"Here she comes," one said, wiping his mouth. "The ward-girl."

"I heard she tore down her own wall," said another. "What's she here to do, cry about it?"

I got down from the mare.

Ronan stayed in the saddle, and the forty wolves behind him stayed quiet, and I walked to the gate post alone.

It was an old post, carved with my mother's knots, black from ten winters of frost and ward-burns.

I laid both palms against it.

It was cold under my hands, and then it was not.

The thread I had woven through every post around Greyfell knew me, and it woke.

It lit from the gate outward, post by post, a line of white fire running around the walls.

The hunters' laughter stopped.

The silver in the thread touched the first man's coat, and the cloth began to smoke.

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