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Neither of them had looked up.

She should have sensed Blaidd's presence like she always had before. But this time, she didn't seem to be aware he was there. Jealousy had burned like acid and he had to turn away before he eviscerated his brother.

The fire popped loudly as his mood plummeted.

Blaidd dragged a hand over his stubble, unease settling into his bones like the cold outside. The snow howled faintly beyond the cave mouth, restless and relentless, and suddenly a barrier between him and Fae.

Something was wrong, and he needed to get home now. But going out in this weather was madness.

Suddenly, for an unsettling reason he couldn't quite pin down, he was afraid that by the time he reached home, he would understand exactly how much he had already lost.

Chapter 7

The gifts lay arranged on her worktable, carefully wrapped in colourful scarves that her friend Reya had woven for her in exchange for the cabinet she had made for her bedroom.

Fae stood over them with her hands folded, the familiar ache in her shoulders an old friend. Four weeks of stolen hours—before dawn, after dusk, with fingers stiff with cold and burning wrists—had gone into the box in the middle. She lifted the lid once more, running her thumb along the carving.

Fenrir, jaws wide, about to swallow the sun.

She had taken her time with every line and every curve. The wolf was all power and inevitability, the sun caught mid-vanish between his teeth. She had sanded it well and then applied a layer of beeswax before running a soft cloth over it one final time. Now the gift was ready for wrapping.

For the takumi who would hopefully accept her as an apprentice to learn Sashimono.

Her future teacher, hopefully.

Beside the box sat the rest of it: glass jars of preserved fruit sealed with wax, jewel-bright and fragrant; bundles of local tea wrapped in linen and twine. Simple things from a foreign land which her little wildone had advised her to prepare. Offerings that conveyed I come to learn, not to demand.

Nervousness made her chest feel tight.

Leaving meant abandoning everything she knew—the mountains, the rhythms, her friends and siblings, even the pain that had become so familiar, she wondered how she would cope without it. Cold, insistent anxiety crept in as she pondered this adventure into the unknown.

You are not wrong, her wolf murmured, a warm brush against her mind. Change always bites before it frees.

She heard the front door open and the tinkle of feminine laughter.

Fae exhaled, readying her walls for the battle ahead, and walked back to the main house.

She took the back door, through the kitchen, and met them at the stairs.

Bowen and Eira stood in the hall, fresh from the cold, their faces sharp with a mixture of curiosity, disdain, and something she couldn't quite grasp, other than it had nothing to do with kindness. Bowen's mouth, so like Isolde's, twisted when he saw her.

"So," he said lightly. "Running off to play apprentice now? What about your duties? Are we meant to take those on for you?"

Eira's gaze swept over her clothes, her hands, the faint dusting of wood shavings still clinging to her sleeve. "I don't know what the Goddess was thinking, matching you with father," she added. "And now, you are leaving your pack. Leaving him."

Rowena drifted in behind them, with delicate steps and soft smiles, leaning against the wall, but her eyes conveyed her glee. "I am sorry if my coming here did this," she said gently, her voice at odds with the malice in her eyes. "You have nothing to feel jealous about, Fae."

Normally, Fae would have let the jabs slide past her skin. She would have absorbed them, folded them away to be taken out and added to her pile of self-recrimination.

But not today.

She did not even look at Rowena.

"Your lack of proper upbringing is showing," she said calmly as she moved to straighten a painting on the wall, her voice level as still water. "You should know how to address the lady of the house."

The silence that followed was flavoured with shock, as if one of the tables suddenly grew teeth and bit them.

Eira stiffened. "Don't speak to her like that..."