I do not hesitate. I move.
Helena's training takes over, muscle memory guiding my blade as I close the distance. The wolf is larger, stronger, faster in ways that should make this fight impossible. But he expected a cowering omega, not a woman with silver in her hand and murder in her heart.
My sword finds his throat before he finishes rising.
Blood sprays hot across my face, and he drops, and I am already turning to face the next one.
The battle becomes a blur of motion and instinct. I lose track of how many wolves I fight, how many times I dodge claws that would have opened me from throat to belly, how many times my silver blades find flesh and end another enemy. The defenders fight beside me, arrows raining from the walls, older wolves throwing themselves at attackers twice their size, the adolescents proving that youth does not mean weakness when everything you love is on the line.
I bury a dagger in a wolf's eye and watch him fall. Another goes down when I hamstring him, and Dag's silver sword takes his head before he can rise. The fear is still there, a constant thrum beneath my skin, but it has transformed into something that tastes like power.
I am going to survive this. I will prove that the woman Stellan claimed is worth every drop of blood being spilled in her name.
And then claws rake across my ribs.
The pain is immediate and blinding. I stumble, my guard dropping for just a moment, and the wolf who caught me lungesfor the killing blow. Silver flashes at the corner of my vision, and the scarred warrior is there, his blade buried in the attacker's chest, his snarl echoing off the courtyard walls as he wrenches the weapon free and lets the body fall.
"Still standing, Luna?"
I press my hand against my side and feel blood welling between my fingers. The wounds are shallow, painful but not mortal, the claws having skated across my ribs rather than sinking between them.
"Still standing," I manage.
Through the bond, I feel Stellan's fury spike like a thunderclap. He knows. Somehow, across all those miles of mountain and forest, he felt my pain the way I felt his. And whatever control he was maintaining has just shattered into something primal and terrifying.
The remaining attackers in the courtyard sense the change. I see it in the way their movements become frantic, their coordination falling apart as they realize their strike team is failing. Two more fall to arrows from the walls above. Another goes down beneath a pile of defenders who tear him apart with their bare hands.
The remnants of the attack force flee.
They abandon the assault and run for the treeline, and I watch them go with blood dripping down my side and silver still clutched in my hands. We let them run. We do not have the strength to pursue, and they are no longer a threat.
The silence that follows is broken only by the groans of the wounded and the crackling of fires that someone set during the fighting. I look around the courtyard at the bodies of our enemies, at the defenders who gave everything to protect this keep, at the blood staining the snow in patterns that will haunt my dreams.
Signe appears at my side, her healer's bag already open, her hands reaching for my wounds.
"Let me see."
I let her peel back my ruined shirt and examine the claw marks. Her touch is clinical, efficient, utterly lacking in the gentleness she might show a wolf. But her voice is soft when she speaks.
"You did well."
"I killed them." The words come out strange, detached. "I killed wolves. I'm human, and I killed them."
"You defended your pack." Signe begins cleaning the wounds, and I hiss at the sting of whatever antiseptic she is using. "That is what a luna does."
The bond pulses again, and this time the emotion that floods through is not fury. It is something fiercer, something that burns like pride and aches like relief. He knows I am alive. He knows I fought.
He is coming home.
By nightfall, the last of the fires have been extinguished and the wounded have been tended. A rider arrives with news from the front: Korren's forces are in retreat. The ambush failed when Stellan's wolves turned the trap back on itself, using the high ground Torben secured to rain death on the attackers below. Holger's wolves from Ashwood broke through from the east. Vidar's disciplined fighters from Greymoor held the line when it threatened to buckle.
Korren is dead, and his army is broken. The war is not over, but this battle is won.
I stand on the battlements where I watched Stellan march away at dawn, my ribs bandaged and my borrowed sword still strapped to my hip. The mountains are dark shapes against a darker sky, but somewhere in that darkness, he is moving toward me.
The bond thrums with anticipation, his and mine tangled together until I cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
I chose to stay. I chose to fight. And when he returns, when he sees what I did while he was gone, I will choose something else.
