Page 36

She pressed one hand flat against my shoulder to keep me down and used the tip of her knife to scrape along the wound.

She’d learned how to kill us. She was using her training now to save me.

Every stroke of the blade burned. I snarled, and she didn’t stop. She scooped a handful of snow from the frozen ground and packed it into the wound, and the fire along my ribs hissed and dulled. Then she tore a strip from the hem of her red cloak with her knife and pressed it hard against my side.

“Stay with me.” Her voice broke. “Conan, do you hear me?”

Yes. But she couldn’t hear me.

I looked up at her. Her face was white, her braid coming loose, my blood on her hands. Behind her, the fighting still raged across the meadow, steel and snarls and screams, and she kneeled there on the open slope with her back to all of it. Every operative below could see the red. Any one of them could have taken her.

She could die not knowing.

I could die not telling her.

My wolf’s grief rose so hard in my chest that I couldn’t breathe past it. Two days she’d been in my arms, and I’d kept silent. I’d told myself I was protecting her. That she had enough to carry.

She deserved the truth. What she was to me, and what it meant. That she owed me nothing. The bond was mine to carry, not hers. Whatever she chose to do with it, the choice belonged to her.

If we made it off this ridge alive, I’d tell her. Everything.

Swear it, my wolf said.

I swear it.

The burn along my ribs eased to a dull ache. I dragged myself up onto all four legs. Ruby rose with me, one hand in my fur, and together we climbed back to the crest of the ridge.

The fight raged on below us. Wolves and operatives tangled in the frost. A gray soldier’s horse reared and screamed at the smell of wolf. Then the Crown lines began to move forward at last, slow and orderly, steel raised.

Down below, a tent flap opened.

A woman stepped out and into the meadow.

She wore a full-length red cloak with the hood up and stood smaller than Ruby. She walked past operatives, papers in one gloved hand, and she raised the other one.

Every operative near her reacted. Blades stopped swinging. Crossbows lowered. Even the gray lines halted behind her.

Hold, I told the pack. Everyone hold.

My wolves drew back, snarling and bristling. The meadow fell silent except for the ragged breathing of the wounded.

She pulled her hood down. I’d seen that woman once before. Twelve years ago, at Wetherel, while she read a sentence over what was left of my father.

She looked like every storybook grandmother. A gentle old woman with gray hair.

Nothing gentle about her. Every hair along my spine rose.

She unfolded the papers and began to read, her voice carrying across the meadow in the cold air. It rose at the end of sentences, just as I remembered, as if she were telling you something pleasant.

“By the authority of the Crimson Order, the pack known as Lockridge is hereby banned.” Behind her, Mervyn sat his horse among the gray coats and said nothing at all. “Its members will quit this territory, from the Wetherel crossing to the northern ridges, by sundown tomorrow. Any wolf found upon it after that hour will be eliminated.”

Banned. Outlawed. Every wolf on this land made a criminal by an old woman’s voice, and a man representing the Crown who didn’t say a word.

Sundown tomorrow. A day and a half to abandon the only home my pack had, with our dead on the ground behind us.

She lowered the papers and lifted her face toward the ridge. Toward the red cloak at the top of it.

“Ruby, my sweet girl,” she called out warmly, the way a grandmother calls a child in from the garden. “Come out where I can see you.”