Chapter 5: The Yard

A week after the ball, the training yard was full of sweating warriors and the smell of cut grass.

Rosalind crossed the far edge of it with a basket of clean bandages on her hip, heading for the clinic.

Forty young wolves stood in ranks in the middle of the yard.

Dalton stood in front of them with Edmund at his shoulder, and Jessamy sat on the viewing bench in a white coat with the circlet on her head.

Hamish Wescott leaned on the fence rail near the gate.

He had been there since sunrise, watching, and he had not said a word to anyone.

Dalton drew a breath and lifted his chin.

"Pack," he said. "Down."

It was the Alpha command, the one that came out of the chest and went through the bones of every wolf who heard it.

For twenty years it had dropped a yard full of warriors to their knees in one breath.

The ranks did not move.

A few of the younger wolves glanced at each other.

One shifted his weight from foot to foot.

Dalton's face went hot red.

"I said down."

Nothing.

A warrior in the second row coughed and looked at the ground, embarrassed for him.

Edmund's eyes cut to the Alpha, and then, slowly, across the yard to the far edge, where Rosalind stood.

Dalton's hand had started to shake at his side.

He turned, searching, and found her across forty yards of open grass.

For a moment he did not look like an Alpha at all.

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