Chapter 19: The Raid

I ran for my son in a flannel shirt and no shoes.

The healer's cottage sat at the edge of the lodge yard, forty yards across open grass.

The signal fire on the ridge was burning orange, and below it I could hear them coming.

Boots, breath, a bark cut off short.

Bram was ahead of me, already shifting.

His shirt tore down the back.

The last thing I saw of the man was his face, calm and terrible.

Then a copper wolf the size of a horse went over the porch rail and hit the grass running.

"Get Rory!" he snarled, in a voice that was half a growl.

"Get him to the water!"

The cottage door was open.

The healer stood inside with the baby against her chest and a kitchen knife in her other hand.

"They're at the fence," she said. "A dozen of them."

"Give him to me."

"Morven, you can't carry him through a fight."

"I'm not going through it."

I took Rory.

He was warm and heavy and furious at being woken, and the sound of him was the best thing I had ever heard.

I wrapped him in the blanket and tied it across my chest with a belt, tight, the way the healer had shown me.

Then I looked out the back window.

Past the lodge garden, the Kettle River widened into the deep green pool below the dock.

It was forty feet across.

The far bank was dark with spruce, and on it stood three river scouts with their bows up.

"There," I said.

"You can't swim," the healer said.

"I know."

I went out the back door.

The yard behind me was already full of snarling.

A man screamed.

Wood cracked.

I heard Bram's bellow over all of it, a deep roar that shook the windows.

I ran down the bank and stopped at the water's edge, with Rory against my heart and my pulse in my ears.

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