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“I know. We’ll get her sorted.”

I liked her in them.

Kestria pulls the loose shirt higher through her belt. “I’ll miss being able to carry half my dinner in it.”

I untie the herbs from the sack and give them to Mel. Birdie watches them go, then returns to her bread.

While Mel strips a few leaves, Kestria looks at Keer. “What’s happening at the border?”

“It’s quiet.” Keer glances at the tables behind him.

“How quiet?”

“Graw’s wolves have stopped pushing it. Even the places they’ve been testing for years.”

Axan wipes crumbs off his good hand. “Hardly any fresh scent.”

Keer leans forward and keeps his voice down. “I think they’re running with the Wardens.”

Wolves with Wardens. I don’t know what to do with that.

Kestria looks from him to Axan. “Have you seen them together?”

Axan shakes his head. “No.”

Kestria looks back at Keer. “Then we don’t know.”

Keer taps the table once. “The prints were together on that trail.”

“They were. That’s all I saw too.”

Mel sets the leaves beside the pan and looks at me. “Have they been coming after you?”

“Three wolves came with moonbright.”

Keer turns toward me. “Graw’s?”

“I don’t know whose.”

Kestria shakes her head. “I didn’t know them either. They had little packets in their mouths. One bit into his arm with it.”

I push my left sleeve up past the old wound. I’ve never done that for a wolf before.

Birdie leans closer, but Mel draws her back by the waist. “How did you treat it?”

“Water.”

Mel frowns at what’s left of it. “Just water?”

“It doesn’t poison me the way it does a wolf. The Gulon—”

I look at Keer, then at the other wolves passing behind him. One slows near the next table, and my ear turns that way. “When the hunters began coming to our dens, my father—”

Kestria lays her hand over mine. “Rauk. You don’t have to tell that here.”

I stop with my sleeve still pushed up past my elbow, and she eases it down over the old bite.

You wouldn’t have to tell anyone about your family, or this place.