Page 1 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers

ONE

The traitor stuck up on the Black Quaystillisn’t dead.

I think I hate him for it, even if my mother would’ve despised me for the thought.

His screams faded to heaving groans hours ago, not long after the fresh flush of dawn bled across the city. That was after we all woke up to the sounds of his shrieks. Now the reek of him up on his blackened pike beside all the other people the High King deems traitors is enough to make my eyes burn.

Just in case any of us dared to go a day without remembering the cost of bartering magic.

You’d think we’d all be used to it by now—the way the mist that never seems to ease carries the stench across the slums of Quayside, downwind from the merchant quarter and Castle Mount looming on the rugged sea cliffs to the east. If I had to, I’d bet all the coin I never seem to have that the mist carries away the screaming, too.

Of course, the nobles and merchants don’t hear the shrieks of the High King’s justice.

We do, though—every peasant walking alongside me to the marketplace. We live on the knife’s edge of thatjustice, with the silhouettes of traitors impaled along the way.

The sight of them stuck up there even in death is a warning,as clear as the skies used to be five years ago before magic dried up and never-ending mists began rolling in from the north across the isle of Eireann and all over our city—Dyfflin. And though the mists are as gray as bone, it’s the snap of the High King’s black-and-red banners in the wind that weighs most heavily on my mind.

The gusts clawing off the sea rip at them, tearing so fiercely that I can barely staunch the hope that one will go tumbling into the churning water past the docks. But even waving over the wattle-and-daub trading post, even nailed through the ribs of a long-dead traitor impaled on the Black Quay, the banners refuse to yield to the wind.

Each stubborn snap is a reminder that the High King answers to no one, let alone the sea and the wind. Not to the mages he banished five years ago, or to the goddesses who once walked this isle. And certainly not to a peasant like me.

My stomach twists, and I knot my hands into fists inside my too-big threadbare cloak as I pass the Black Quay. Like almost everything else on me, the cloak once belonged to my older sister, Finnola.

Now it’s her voice that trembles through me at the sight of the bannered traitor.

Even death is no escape from the High King.

My palms go slick. If Finn were here, she’d be brave enough to rip the High King’s colors off the traitor. Snatch the banner, and bolt before anyone could call for the gardai—then tell the tale over a drink later tonight. She might be just five years older than me, but she’s got the kind of reckless, wild courage I’ve never felt.

She embraces danger—trusts herself enough to fight and conquer it.

Me? I’m pretty sure no fight is worth dying over.

Especially without magic to even the odds.

That might not be the lesson our mother meant to teach us, but it’s the one I learned from her execution, anyway. Survival is the only thing that matters now.

Survivingtogether.

A cold breeze howls off the sea, tearing at the mist clinging to the market edge. For a moment the landscape brightens and I imagine the city the way my mother swore it used to be.

Magic shimmering in the waves beneath the docks, in every blade of swirling green grass beyond the city, every leaf fluttering violently green in a soft, warm breeze. She always told us, you could hold a shimmering black pool of magic in your palms after visiting the mages in their temples and make a wish—and it just might come true.

Now the isle only ever gets colder.

And no one’s seen a mage in the open since the High King banished them and razed the temples five years ago, killing anyone who sided with their failed uprising during weeks of executions on the Black Quay.

I pull the cloak’s heavy hood from my head and draw in a breath. The chilled air makes my teeth ache, even though itshouldalmost be the middle of summer.

I pass more than a few worried glances between families lining up at the grain stalls for bread and flour. One look at the merchants’ tables tells me why: The heaps of rye and spelt and oats are far smaller than they should be at this time of year.

The prices are triple what they should be too.

We’ve all heard the excuses the merchants give us. Nothing will grow in this cold. Raiders are burning the fields and the crops. Then the trading caravans go missing.

There’s an undercurrent of fear rippling across their faces.Everythingis riding on the harvest in four months.

The only thing keeping food on our table with these prices is my father’s weapons stall—but the second my eyes find it in the chaos of the market, ice floods my veins.