Page 58 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

"Their adrenal response during treatment was erratic, the pulse and sweat patterns of wolves who've been flinching from their own leadership since the coup."

The table goes still. I continue.

"The wolf who targeted the infirmary was young. Narrow through the chest, joints still loose the way they are before a wolf's frame finishes filling out. He attacked with speed but without tactical coordination, the pattern of a wolf trained through fear rather than discipline."

I let the assessment settle before I finish it.

"Most of the wolves I treated showed the same underdeveloped build. If Balric's sending his least experienced wolves at fortified borders, it's because he can't afford to lose the ones who know how to fight. The young ones he's spending don't know how to fight as a unit."

Eirik's left fist closes on the table, visible and deliberate. I read it as I've been reading it since the first morning he sat on my worktable and refused to get off: he's holding back something too large for language.

"His pack is breaking," Eirik says. The words come out low, stripped of everything except the grief, and the grief has teeth. "My father held them together because they trusted him. Balric holds them together because they're afraid of what happens if they don't follow. That's not a pack. That's a cage with a lock."

"Fear is a deteriorating adhesive," I say. "The stress markers confirm it. He's running a pack on threat response, and threat response has a biological shelf life. The adrenal system burns out. The wolves stop responding to the stimulus. He'll lose cohesion within months, possibly sooner."

Eirik looks at me. The grief recedes behind something sharper. "You're terrifying at a war council. Has anyone told you that?"

"I've never been invited to a war council."

"Stellan's loss." He says it to me, but loud enough for Stellan to hear.

The recklessness of needling the Northern Pack's alpha in his own great hall is so thoroughly Eirik that my mouth nearly betrays me. I redirect the twitch into clinical neutrality before it becomes anything Gunnar could catalog.

"We don't have months," Stellan says. He ignores the comment as he's been ignoring Eirik's mouth since the day the wolf arrived. "He'll attack before the cohesion fails, because he needs a victory to justify the cost."

"Then we go now." Eirik's gaze finds mine. The communication that passes between us doesn't require language or pack-link or the medical terminology I've used to frame every other exchange we've had. It's simpler than that. He's asking. I'm answering.

Eirik turns back to Stellan. "While his wolves are injured and underfed and running on a fear response that's already failing. While the young ones he's throwing at borders are still recovering from the wounds Signe treated with more care than their own alpha gave them."

Stellan looks at Gunnar. Gunnar nods once.

"You'll have Northern Pack wolves at your back," Stellan says. "Allied border. You take the territory and hold it, or I absorb Drakfell into my authority. Your choice."

Eirik doesn't negotiate. He accepts with his whole body, leaning forward, jaw set, the territory he's been carrying on his shoulders since the night he ran suddenly real beneath him. It isn't gratitude. It's weight.

His gaze stays on mine a beat longer than the discussion requires. What I read there isn't about territory or politics or the tactical advantage of an allied border. The want in his face is unguarded, and the unguarded quality is what makes it land. He isn't reclaiming Drakfell for the pack or for the border or for the strategic calculation Stellan just outlined. He's building the place he intends to take me.

I don't name the observation. Naming it would require acknowledging that the woman who burned a suppressant last night is already restructuring her future around a wolf whose scent is rewriting her baseline chemistry.

The healer in me has a clinical explanation for the restructuring. The woman in me doesn't believe it anymore.

The meeting breaks before the explanation can settle into anything I'd have to name. I leave the great hall with the war still shaping itself behind Stellan's eyes, and I walk the corridor toward the only place in this fortress where the air doesn't carry expectation.

The forge sits in its perpetual amber heat, and Leif is at the anvil the way Leif is always at the anvil. The hammer falls with the rhythm I've been hearing through fortress stone for years, constant as respiration, reliable as the grinding I used to do with my own hands in a mortar that's sitting empty on a cottage hearth.

He doesn't look up when I enter. This isn't discourtesy. Leif has known me long enough to understand that I don't come to the forge for conversation. I come because the heat and the sound and the smell of worked iron are the three things in this fortress that have never required me to perform.

I sit on the stool by the quench trough and watch him draw a hinge pin from a bar of stock. The strikes land in the same place each time, the precision of repetition so deep it's become instinct rather than skill.

His weight settles into each strike with the rooted patience of a wolf who has done this long enough that the anvil feels like an extension of his arms. The work is its own kind of stillness: the body committed, the mind somewhere the metal can't follow.

"We're marching on Drakfell at dawn," I say.

"I heard."

The hammer rises and falls. The metal takes shape.

"I burned the suppressant."