Page 60 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

By the time I've tied off the last stitch, the Drakfell wolves who survived are kneeling. Not all of them willingly, but enough that the ones still standing read the room and lower themselves to the churned ground with the resigned compliance of animals whose fear just changed owners.

Eirik moves among them with focused calm. The wolves he fought an hour ago are the wolves he'll need to lead tomorrow, and the transition from enemy to alpha requires presence, not distance.

He finds me at the perimeter before he begins.

"Above the snowline." He points northwest, toward a gap in the rock face where the snow turns pristine. "The flowers from your grandmother's records. Follow the runoff channel from the glacier. Northwest-facing slope. You'll find them before the slope levels out."

His voice is rough from the fight, and his body is angled toward me with coiled attention, every instinct telling him to keep the unsuppressed omega in his sight line. He's overriding the instinct with his jaw clenched and his left fist white at his side, and the override is costing him visibly.

He catches my gaze. "Gunnar's patrol swept the upper ridge before the assault. Nothing above the tree line but snow and wind." He turns his head and barks a command at two Northern Pack wolves near the perimeter. They fall in without question. "They'll hold the trail below you."

The assessment is sound. Balric committed his wolves to the border, not the snowline. The ones who ran went east, away from the mountains. I note the exit routes from habit, the same way I noted the boot prints outside my cottage the night this started. Some reflexes don't require a suppressant.

"I'll be here." The words are clipped. The restraint in them is the same quality I cataloged during his first week in my infirmary: the predatory patience of a wolf who wants something badly enough to let it walk away from him because the walking is the point.

He turns back to the kneeling wolves before I answer, because the answer is already in my stride.

The trail climbs through territory that stopped being Northern Pack land an hour ago and started being something else, something that smells different and holds the emptiness of mountains that haven't had a stable alpha in weeks. The snow is deep above the tree line, pristine where the battle didn't touch it, and the air is thin enough to burn in my lungs with the sharp clarity of altitude.

I follow the runoff channel the way he described it: glacier melt tracing a thin, bright line through the snow, catching the afternoon light and throwing it back as something close to silver. The route is where he said it would be. The soil is the color he remembered. Everything he's told me about these mountains has been precisely, unforgivingly true.

The flowers are there.

They grow in clusters along the runoff channel, petals pale and thin as parchment, the same pale color I've stared at between the pages of my grandmother's birth registry for longer than I can calculate.

The pressed specimen in those pages was dead and flattened and drained of everything except shape. I'd spent years constructing the living plant from inference and description, a woman who can identify every compound in her pharmacopeia but had never seen the source material for the oldest formula in her family's records.

They're smaller than I imagined. The petals are translucent where the light passes through them. The stems are short and thick, adapted for altitude: close to the ground, resistant to wind, drawing nutrients from volcanic soil that's black as char and loose on the surface.

I kneel. The snow soaks through the fabric at my knees, and the cold registers without mattering. My fingers find the nearest cluster, and the petals are soft, yielding, alive in a way that the pressed specimen between my grandmother's pages hasn't been for generations.

The quiet devastation I expected doesn't arrive as devastation. It arrives as a gap closing. A woman touching a plant her grandmother recorded in a margin note and finding it growing where a wolf told her it would be. In soil he described from memory. At the altitude he specified. On the slope he mapped for her while she leaned across her worktable and forgot to maintain the mask because the information mattered more than the hiding.

The flowers are just flowers. They might mean something larger, later. My grandmother's records hold questions I haven't finished asking, and these petals might hold answers that will take years and careful study and the access I've never had to the territory my family's knowledge came from.

Later. All of it later. Right now what matters is that I'm kneeling in snow in a territory his knowledge mapped for me, touching petals he named from memory, and the wolf who gave me this is below, rebuilding what his uncle broke.

I stand. My knees are wet and my hands are steady.

The ground below is still. From the snowline I can see the clearing where the fighting ended, the churned mud and the wolves moving through it with purpose rather than violence. The wounded have been moved.

Northern Pack fighters are organizing the Drakfell wolves who surrendered, and the absence of resistance confirms what the stress markers told me at the war council: Balric's pack wasn't loyal. They were afraid. The fear is gone, and the wolves it held in place are looking at the man who ended it with the wary attention of animals assessing whether the new authority is worth following.

Eirik stands at the edge of the clearing with blood still on his hands. The Drakfell wolves are behind him, organized, quiet, waiting. He's finished with them for now, and the direction of his attention has turned toward the snowline, toward me.

The expression on his face has stripped away territory and victory and strategy, and what's left underneath is bare and unmistakable: the woman coming down from his mountains is the reason he wanted the mountains back.

The descent takes less time than the climb. The two wolves Eirik posted on the trail step aside as I pass, and I cross the field toward the one wolf in the world whose hands I haven't treated yet.

I stop in front of him. His hands hang at his sides, and the red drying on his skin darkens in the cold air with the slow coagulation that tells me the exposure has been long enough to thicken but not long enough to crack.

"Let me see your hands," I say.

He lifts them. No hesitation. The same reckless immediacy he's brought to everything since I pulled the first suture through his shoulder: giving without being asked, showing without being ready, putting every unguarded thing about himself within reach because he's never learned that transparency is a liability.

What separates Eirik from every wolf I've treated is that they calculate the price first. Eirik pays it and finds out what it was later.

I take his hands in mine. I turn them over, assessing the skin for lacerations, checking the knuckles for fractures, running my fingers along the metacarpals with the calibrated pressure that distinguishes examination from touch.