Page 59 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

"I heard that too." He turns the pin on the anvil, examines the edge, returns it to the fire. "News moves fast in a fortress this size. Especially when it involves the pack healer fighting in wolf form and sitting at Stellan's war council the next morning like nothing changed."

"It doesn't change my work."

"Didn't say it did." He pulls the pin from the coals, orange and willing, and sets it back on the face. Three strikes, each one precise. "Changes you, though, but more than that it changes how everyone perceives you."

I don't answer. The fire pops in the coal bed, and the sound is intimate in the forge's close air.

My left hand drifts toward the hollow of my throat before I catch the motion. Not to cover the bonding site. The skin is uncovered. The hand goes there out of years of guarding, and the habit hasn't learned yet that the guarding is finished.

"Signe." Leif's hammer rests on the anvil. He looks at me with the steady, unhurried gaze of a wolf who grew up beside me and has never once pretended the fortress is kind to the people who keep it running. "We've been surviving in this fortress since before either of us had calluses worth counting. You've been better at it than me. Better at it than anyone." He sets the hammer down. "But surviving isn't living. And you've been so busy with the first one, I don't think you noticed the second one was waiting."

The words land with weight. Not like a blow. Like a stone I've needed to swallow for years and couldn't find the angle that would let it pass.

"The wolf who showed up bleeding on your doorstep," Leif says. "He's reckless and he talks too much and his bracket work is a disgrace. But he's the first wolf I've seen walk into your infirmary and make you forget you were wearing the mask." He picks up the hammer. "That's all I've got."

He goes back to the hinge pin. The rhythm resumes.

I sit with the stone until the fire burns it down to something I can carry. Then I stand. I leave the forge without saying thank you, because Leif doesn't need the words. He needs me to walk out and do the living he's talking about.

The hammer's rhythm follows me through the stone. It'll follow me tomorrow, across the border and into the mountains and wherever the living takes me next.

Dawn finds us on the northwestern ridge with the Drakfell border visible through the tree line. Gunnar suggested I remain at the fortress. I suggested Gunnar concern himself with the wolves who can fight and leave the ones who can't to the healer who'll be treating them regardless of where she's standing. Stellan didn't intervene, which was its own answer.

My field station sits on a flat slab of granite fifty strides behind the front line with my kit spread across the stone and my hands ready. The battle is fast, ugly, and exactly as one-sided as the stress markers predicted. Eirik's combined force hits Balric's perimeter with the coordinated efficiency of wolves who've been running Gunnar's patrol formations and fighting under Stellan's authority. Silvery mist erupts across the tree line as Northern Pack wolves transform mid-stride, the seamless dissolution of human forms into wolves who hit the ground running without breaking pace. The mist catches the early light and scatters it into brief, cold rainbows that disappear as fast as the bodies that produced them.

Balric's defenders break in minutes. The stress-depleted wolves are the same as the ones I treated in the infirmary after the attack and can't hold a line against rested, fed, disciplined fighters, and the retreat begins before the initial charge has finished forming.

The sound of combat carries back to me in fragments: snarls cut short, the impact of bodies on frozen ground, the bark of wolves coordinating through pack-link in the language that lives beneath language.

I treat three wolves in the first hour. Claw wounds, a dislocated shoulder from a mid-stride collision, a bite that missed the artery by a margin I measure with my fingers and find adequate.

The injuries are clean and tactical, inflicted by wolves fighting to hold ground rather than to kill. The restraint tells me Eirik gave orders that make medical sense: disable, don't destroy.

The Drakfell wolves he's fighting are wolves he intends to lead. Dead wolves don't follow anyone.

I'm suturing the shoulder wound when the sound changes.

The forest falls silent with the sudden totality that means either the fighting has stopped or the fighting has reached the point where sound can't keep up. My hands don't pause on the suture. My ears track the silence and parse it for information as precisely as my fingers parse wound margins for depth.

Then I hear it. A single snarl, deeper than the others, carrying a resonance that dwarfs anything in the Northern Pack's roster except Stellan. The snarl cuts off.

The silence that follows is finished.

I tie off the suture and move toward the tree line.

The clearing opens below the ridge in a natural depression between two stands of old-growth pine, the ground churned to mud and snow by the passage of wolves. Northern Pack fighters ring the perimeter in both forms, some still in their wolf form, others already back in human shape and breathing hard with the heavy exhaustion of wolves who know the fighting is over.

Balric is on his back. He's human, which means he transformed at the end, and the choice tells me he wanted to die in the form that held the blade that killed his brother. His hand is open at his side, fingers curled around nothing, reaching for a weapon that isn't on the ground beside him. The reach is frozen in place, and it will stay frozen, because the wolf standing over him has already stepped back and the stepping back is the only eulogy Balric Valdisson is going to receive.

Eirik stands in the center of the clearing. Human. His hands are red to the wrists with blood that isn't his. The dark hair is matted with sweat and pine needles, and his chest heaves with the breathing of a body that has spent everything it had and is standing on the dregs.

The death is plain and ordinary. A man on the ground who killed his brother for a territory he couldn't hold, and a man standing over him who crossed the distance that had haunted him since a night in a council hall when three steps were too many.

The three-step gap is closed. I can see it in the line of Eirik's shoulders, the way the tension has finally left the place between his shoulder blades where grief and fury have been wound together since the night he bled into my doorway. The tangle isn't gone. It's loosened into something he can carry without the carrying consuming him.

He doesn't look at Balric's body. He looks up, toward the ridge, toward me.

I hold his gaze long enough to answer the question he hasn't asked. Then I turn back to the wounded wolf on my granite slab and finish the suture, because the living come first and the dead can wait.