Chapter 15: The Winter Hold

Nora's POV

The Winter Hold stood above the tree line, a gray stone house with its back against the mountain.

It had one gate, and the old elder walked me through it with Maud on my other side.

She had packed her shotgun, four wool blankets and a tin of her own biscuits.

She had left the goats with a neighbor and told them all to be good.

"I don't care what kind of princess you are," she'd said at the truck. "I'm coming."

Snow blew sideways across the courtyard. Forty people stood in it waiting for us.

They weren't pack wolves, not the way I knew them.

They wore plain wool with no ranks, and the oldest of them had white hair.

A woman in front had a braid of iron grey that reached her belt.

Nobody knelt.

I understood that. I'd have been wary of me too.

"This is the Warden," said the old elder. "She has kept the hold since the night the north took everything."

He turned to her. "Warden, this is the girl."

The Warden looked me over, from the pendant to the borrowed boots.

"She's smaller than I thought," she said.

"She's four months gone with four," Maud said. "She's been on a mountain road since dawn."

She patted the shotgun. "Say that to her face once more and I'll introduce you."

A few of them smiled. The Warden didn't.

"A stone is not a bloodline," she said to me.

"Forty of us have waited twenty-six years. We aren't going to follow a necklace."

"I didn't ask you to follow anything."

"You came to our gate."

"I came because I have four cubs due in winter and a woman in the south who wants them dead."

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