General Maren

Maren put me on the ground three times before the moon had even cleared the eastern tower.

"Again," she said, the third time, not even breathing hard, while I was still working out which parts of me had hit the practice-yard dirt and in what order. "You're watching my shoulders. Good instinct, wrong target. Watch my weight."

"I am watching your weight."

"You're watching where it is. Watch where it's going." She circled, unhurried, a woman with all night and no doubts about how it would end. "You've spent nine years reading a room to survive it. This is the same skill wearing armor. Stop thinking of it as different."

I got up. My whole left side had opinions about that decision.

The fourth time, something changed.

I don't know how to describe it any better now than I could that night — I wasn't faster, wasn't stronger, hadn't grown claws or fur or any of the nine hundred things a wolf-blooded fighter would have reached for. What happened was smaller and stranger: for one full second before Maren moved, I knew which way her weight was going. Not guessed. Not read it off her shoulders the way she'd taught me an hour ago. Knew it the way you know your own hand is about to close before you close it.

I stepped where she wasn't going to be, and put her on the ground instead.

The yard went very quiet.

Maren lay in the dirt for a second longer than the fall required, looking up at me with an expression I hadn't seen on her yet — not anger, not even surprise exactly. Something closer to recognition. Like she'd been waiting to see if a rumor was true and had just gotten her answer.

"Do that again," she said, getting up slowly, brushing dirt from her sleeves without taking her eyes off me.

"I don't know what I did."

"Neither do I. That's why I want to see it again." She reset her stance. "Come at me. Same as before."

I tried. Whatever had happened, it didn't happen twice — I read her shoulders, same as an hour of drilling had taught me, and hit the ground a fourth time for my trouble, ordinary and explicable and entirely unremarkable.

Maren stood over me, considering, in a way that made me feel like a puzzle she'd just found one real piece of.

"Wolfless," she said, half to herself. "Nine hundred years of council record on wolfless omegas in this kingdom, and not one entry describes a girl who can read an opponent's next move before the opponent's own body commits to it." She offered me a hand up. "You're not going to tell Aveline about that. You're not going to tell the council. Not until we understand what it is, because right now it looks less like a gift and more like a question somebody with power could turn into a weapon aimed at you."

"You think it's dangerous."

"I think everything unexplained in a palace like this is dangerous until you decide who gets to explain it." She hauled me upright. "Again. Tomorrow. Same time. Tonight you sleep."

I was three doors from my rooms, arm aching, mind still turning over the second where I'd known, when a page caught up to me at a near-run — a boy of maybe fourteen, out of breath, Blackpine's colors still dusty on his travel cloak.

"Message for you, my lady." He said my lady like he wasn't sure it was the right title yet and had decided to guess generously. "From Blackpine. I was told to give it to no one else."

The seal was Kane's, not Torren's — his own mark, not the pack's.

I opened it in the corridor, under a wall sconce, because I was not going to give whatever was inside a private room and time to matter more than it deserved.

Sera —

My father's petition isn't about blood law. It's about him losing standing with the other packs the day the council recorded what your bond cost me. He needs it to be about you being ineligible, because if it's about anything else, it's about him choosing his own pride over his own son, in front of everyone, and he can't survive that story being true.

I know I don't get to ask you for anything. I'm asking anyway. Don't let him win this on a technicality he invented to save his own face at the cost of yours. I'll say so publicly if it comes to a hearing. I don't know what that's worth to you. Probably nothing. I'm saying it anyway.

— K.

I read it twice. Folded it once. Did not, notably, feel the thing I might have felt reading it three weeks ago — the old hungry hope, the maybe.

What I felt instead was colder and more useful: the first real crack of daylight showing under a door Kane Blackpine had spent nine years keeping shut, and the distinct, satisfying knowledge that he was going to have to stand in a council chamber and say all of this out loud, to his father's face, in front of the King who'd taken what he threw away.

I tucked the letter into my sleeve and kept walking toward my rooms — and found Maren already waiting outside my door, torch in hand, none of the practice-yard patience left in her face.

"Change of plans," she said. "Torren petitioned to move the hearing up. Tomorrow, noon, not next week." Her eyes went to the letter-shaped bulge in my sleeve, and she didn't ask what it was, which somehow made it worse. "Whatever you're carrying, girl — decide fast what you intend to do with it. You won't have three weeks to sit with it this time. You'll have one night."

To be continued — Chapter 8: The annulment hearing convenes at noon, and Kane Blackpine is called to testify first.