The great hall of the longhouse, usually a cavern of shadows and whispered councils, was a teeming pit of noise and fear. Fenris shouldered his way through the press of the congregated pack, Albi a pale, silent presence at his elbow. The air was thick with the greasy smoke of torches, the sour reek of unwashed bodies, and beneath it all, a new and terrible scent: the cloying, sweet-rot stench of corrupted blood.

  All of Black Rock seemed crammed within the rough-hewn walls. Warriors stood like grim sentinels, their faces hard, axes and spears gripped in white-knuckled hands. Their women clustered together, voices a low, anxious hum. Children, too young to understand but old enough to feel the dread, whimpered and were hushed. The human slaves kept to the edges, their eyes downcast, their fear a silent, palpable current. Even the elders had been fetched, their withered forms propped on benches, their clouded eyes seeing the truth in the air if not in the detail.

  In the center of the crush, on a stretcher of hastily-lashed pine branches and a stained deer-hide, lay the cause of the uproar.

  Vgar. Asger's younger brother. A solemn, pensive young man of little patience; a man who never learned to rest was now laying perfectly still and forever frozen on the trampled rushes.

  Fenris didn't need to ask the manner of death. He saw it. The wound was a blackened, ugly pit over his heart. But it was the flesh around it that told the true tale. From the puncture, like some foul, metallic spider, a web of livid, purplish-black veins spread out across the pale skin of his chest. The skin itself was puckered and gray, decaying while the body was still fresh. The smell—that sweet, sickly, unmistakable reek—was the smell of silver poisoning the lifeblood of a Skoltha. It was the smell of a murder most foul, a weapon meant for one thing only.

  Kneeling beside the body, one hand clutching his brother's stiffening fingers, was Asger. The big man's frame, usually a mountain of strength, was crumpled, folded in on itself by a grief so profound it was a physical force. His shoulders trembled with a terrible, silent vibration of pure agony. He made no sound.

  A space had cleared around them, as if the crowd feared the contamination of such raw sorrow. Into this void stepped a woman, thin and pale as a winter reed. The mother, Yglr, a woman who had only recently left her solitary hut to share her eldest son's hearth with Haggatha. Her back was curved from a lifetime bent over smaller things that needed tending, her face a map of old hardships. She moved with a ghost's quietness, her eyes fixed on her younger son's ruined body. She did not weep. She did not reach out to touch him. She simply stood, her hands hanging limp at her sides, her expression hollow, as if the shock had scooped her clean of any feeling at all. Jorik, his own face ashen, moved to her side. He placed a gnarled, steadying hand upon her bent back, a silent pillar for a woman who seemed ready to crumble into dust.

  A hunter stepped forward—Torvald, his face gaunt with exhaustion, a crusted gash running from temple to jaw.

  "Alpha," he said, his voice a dry rasp. "It happened at the Black Pools. At the foot of the eastern ridge. We had our elk quartered, ready for the trek back. We were setting up our camp for the night." He swallowed hard. "They came from everywhere. The trees, the rocks... a swarm. Fifty of them. Maybe more."

  "Wolf-hunters," Fenris said, the word dropping into the hushed room like a stone.

  "Aye, Alpha. But not starveling brigands. These men moved together as one. Knew to flank. Knew to aim for the heart first." Torvald's eyes flicked to Vgar's corpse and away, as if the sight burned. "We killed a many of em'. I reckon we killed them all. But the first shot... it took Vgar. He was down before he could even smell the wind of them."

  Another hunter, even younger than Torvald, whose hands still shook even as he held them, added, "Asger......wouldn't leave him. Made this stretcher with his own hands. Dragged him the whole way back up the mountain at a near sprint. Wouldn't let any of us take a turn for it. Nearly dropped twice for the weight of it, his legs gave way—"

  "Do not child me, Freki." Asger spit. Fenris moved to Asger's side then. The heat of the big man's fury and despair radiated from him like a forge. Fenris placed a hand on his shoulder. The muscle beneath was corded iron.

  "Asger," he said, his voice low, "I am so sorry, my brother."

  Asger didn't look up. His voice, when it came, was shredded, barely human. "He is my brother, Fenris. My mother's last. My charge." A shudder ran through him. "I should have smelled them. I should have heard them. I should have.....protected him."

  "They were here, too," Fenris said, the words for Asger alone. "In the eastern valley today. They shot Albi. She lived, but only just. I could not protect even my own mate from the wolf-hunters cunning. I am Vgar's Alpha and could not protect him from the risk. I am your Alpha and could not protect you from the grief of this. His death is a heavy guilt that I shall carry to my grave-mound. We shall carry his death together upon our shoulders. You are not alone with his weight, Asger."

  Asger's head jerked up. His eyes, bloodshot and swimming with tears, fixed on Fenris. The raw grief in them hardened, sharpening into a blade of pure, undiluted pain.

  It was Torvald who delivered the final blow, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial growl. "Alpha...they stank of more than human filth. They carried another scent on their skins. Musk. Wet stone. Rotten fish."

  A collective inhalation swept the hall. The Deep Water scent.

  Asger surged to his feet with a force that made the onlookers stumble back. The sorrow was gone, burned away, leaving only a white-hot rage.

  "He speaks the truth of it, Fenris. This is Hroth," he spat, the name a curse that sizzled in the air. "I knew it the moment it was all over, the rotten stench of their death in the breeze. A host that size doesn't slip past Hroth's sentries like mist. He has eyes on every pass, ears on every wind. He saw them. He allowed them. There is no other explanation to save his life anymore."

  Fenris met his fury with a cold, simmering resolve of his own. The attack on Albi could have been dismissed as a lapse; a reckless mistake, a misjudgment of a shadow creeping through the trees. This was a declaration. An army of wolf-hunters, reeking of a rival pack's air-scent, armed with silver, striking his men at their camp.

  This was war.

  He reached out and seized Asger's forearm in a warrior's clasp. Asger's other hand, huge and calloused, locked around Fenris's wrist, their grip a bridge of iron and shared vengeance over the body of their dead.

  "We will have vengeance for Vgar," Fenris vowed, his voice cutting through the murmurs, cold and clear as winter steel. "On my blood, on my breath, I swear it to you, Asger."

  He pulled Asger closer, until their foreheads were almost touching, their breath mingling in the space between them.

  "We go to Hroth, We go to remind him that the wolves of Black Rock are not prey to be hunted in our own forests. He will answer for the blood on his land, and we will hang his pelt from our gates."

  ????

  They flowed through the pine-scented twilight like a single, many-bodied shadow, a current of grey, black and tawny fur rippling down the mountain's stony ribs. Twenty wolves—the gathered muscle and tooth of Black Rock. At their head ran Fenris, a beast of darkness made solid, his shoulders a rolling topography of muscle beneath the pelt. Beside him, Asger moved with a contained violence, every tendon coiled tight. His rage was a palpable thing, a scent that clung to him like the sharp, metallic tang in the air before a storm breaks. The others fanned out behind, a disciplined wedge of fur and fang, their silence heavier than any war-cry. It was the quiet of a snare being drawn tight.

  Behind them, Black Rock lay shrouded in the pre-dawn grey, its palisade spikes black teeth against the lighter sky. Its safety rested in the cunning of old Jorik and the restless energy of the younger warriors left behind. Rusk had been named Alpha in Fenris's stead, and the young wolf had bristled at the command, his pride stung by the perceived safety of the post. His mate, Elka, had said nothing, but her eyes had spoken her relief when she pressed a quick, fierce kiss to Fenris's brow in the torchlight of the yard.

  A quieter, more stubborn war had been waged in the gloom of the bedchamber hall. Albi had stood before him, still pale from her ordeal, the bond between them thrumming with her fierce, silent defiance. He could feel the ghost of the silver's poison in her side— a persistent cold ache and reminder of mortality that had etched itself into her flesh.

  If you do not take me with you, I will never forgive you. It was a weak threat and a lie the moment she'd thought of it. They stood in the hall outside their chamber so as not to disturb Isangrim, still laid asleep inside.

  You are still weak from death, Albi. Go and rest. Let me handle this.

  You know I can handle it. She'd argued, and read through him just as easily as he had her.

  What will happen to Isangrim, should we both fall, Albi? He needs you more than he needs me. The words leaving his mind were like stones hurled at her; a clean, sharp wound of hurt flashed through the bond, bright as a knife catching the light.

  She saw in him the other truth beneath that one. He could not afford the distraction of her. He could not march to a potential fight with a part of his mind forever turned backward, worrying after her safety. That is how she would keep him safe, and the only way; by staying behind. His focus needed to be a honed blade, single-edged and unyielding, meant for his pack and the enemy ahead, not divided by the tender, terrifying vulnerability he carried for her. Leaving her was a brutality, but it was the first duty of an Alpha: to carry the heaviest burden alone.

  The forest began to change. The crisp, thin scent of pine and high stone gave way to a heavier, wetter smell. The air grew thick, carrying the rich, muddy perfume of swollen earth and the cold, clear scent of running water. They were leaving the domain of rock and wind for the realm of river and mist. It was a border not just of land, but of history.

  Once, two centuries past, all the wolves of Skoltha howled as one from the high, wind-scoured fastness of Black Rock. Their unity was shattered by the corrosive poison of a pack turning upon itself. The Alpha then was Hrolfr, a ruler of stone and ice, whose law was the knuckle and the fang, whose justice was a throat torn out. His challenge came from the lowest rank: an omega named Bodolf, his brother, who was slight of frame but fierce of heart, and who raged silently against the pack's brutal ways.

  Weeks before the ordained combat, the Great Mother's will manifested in a mystery. Bodolf was blessed with an Imprint. The change it wrought was not gentle. It remade him, forging his righteous fury into a terrible, newfound strength. When the Challenge was made, it was a slaughter. Bodolf, transformed, broke Hrolfr's reign upon the rocks of the village square before the mead hall, and did so without so much a claw-scratch from the Alpha.

  But to live under the rule of an omega elevated by an Imprint was a fate worse than exile for Hrolfr. He would not bend his neck. Gathering those loyal to him, he turned his back on the mountain and led his followers down into the rich, treacherous riverlands; land that had been a natural buffer between the wolves of Skoltha and the humans beyond. He purged it of human settlements along the way. There, amidst the fog and the rushing water, he founded the Deep Water clan, its very name a rejection of the high, dry stone of his birthright. Bodolf, seer and savior, was Fenris's ancestor. Hrolfr, the proud exile, was Hroth's. Their animosity was older than their memories, baked into the very stone of the mountains and the silt of the river, a legacy of betrayal that tainted the air between them.

  Fenris caught the smell on the slight of a passing breeze. Musk. Wet stone. The faint, lingering taint of carrion. It was the smell of Deep Water's wolves.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  They did not announce themselves. One moment, the woods were a tapestry of shadow and silence, broken only by the soft pad of Fenris's pack. The next, they were there. Sleek, otter-dark shapes slid from behind mossy boulders and thick-grown hazel, silent as smoke. A dozen. Then more. They fell in alongside Fenris's wolves, matching their loping stride for stride, their yellow eyes glinting in the gloom. It was not an attack. It was an absorption.

  The rage that boiled from Asger and the others was a scent of its own—hot, coppery, violent. It hung in the air like a challenge. The Deep Water wolves smelled it. Their ears flattened. A low, warning rumble vibrated from the throat of the largest sentry as it shoulder-checked one of Asger's hunters from his position in the back; a tawny male named Egil.

  It was all the spark they needed.

  Egil snarled and whirled, teeth snapping at the sentry's flank. The sentry lunged. And the clearing exploded into chaos. Snarls ripped the air. Black and grey and tawny fur tangled with otter-dark sleekness. Fangs flashed, finding purchase in shoulder and haunch. The wet thud of bodies colliding, the sharp yelp of a wounded wolf. It was not a battle of strategy, but a sudden, brutal brawl, fueled by Black Rock's grief and Deep Water's territorial arrogance.

  Fenris, a vortex of darkness in the center, threw a smaller sentry aside with a wrench of his shoulders, his jaws closing on empty air where a throat had been. He tasted the hot, foreign blood of another wolf on his tongue as he grabbed onto another. The rage was a red haze, but his purpose was a cold, clear core within it.

  A howl cut through the cacophony.

  A pure, undeniable command that shook the leaves from the trees. Every wolf, Black Rock and Deep Water alike, froze; mid-bite, mid-snarl and mid-step. Heads turned.

  From the tree line, a wolf emerged. He was massive, fur glistening gold even in the dull light. He was larger, even, than Fenris; built heavier, thicker through the chest and shoulders. His eyes were not yellow, but a pale, glacial blue.

  Hroth.

  He paced into the center of the clearing, his gaze sweeping over the combatants with a disdain that was colder than violence. The fighting ceased. Deep Water wolves slunk back, heads low. Fenris's pack gathered around him, bristling, panting, blood matting their fur.

  Fenris did not wait. The Change took him in a ripple of agonizing transformation—bones grinding, flesh reforming.

  He stood a man now, tall, naked and bleeding in the clearing; lines of steam rising from his heated skin in the chill air. With his breath heaving, his eyes locked on Hroth.

  The massive golden wolf did not change. He sat back on his haunches, a king observing a supplicant, those ice-blue eyes unreadable.

  "Hroth," Fenris spat, his voice raw from the fight. "Explain yourself. Why has the Alpha of Deep Water traded his honor as a wolf of Skoltha for a human's domesticated bitch?"

  He regarded Fenris for a long moment, those pale blue wolf-eyes unblinking, before the transformation rippled through him, a smoother, more controlled unfurling. The dense gold fur seemed to melt into his pale, scarred skin.

  In his man-form, Hroth was burly, thick-necked and broad-chested, built like a barrel of ale. His skin was the pallid white of a riverfish's belly, marked with old scars and blue-inked tattoos that coiled around his arms. His hair was a shock of dull gold, shaved close on the sides but left long on top and tied back in a complex knot. A full, braided beard, the same pale gold, covered the lower half of his face. His eyes, now human, retained their glacial, unsettling blue. Two immense black wolves, each nearly as large as Hroth had been in his wolf-form, emerged from the trees to flank him, their yellow eyes fixed on Fenris.

  "Hello, my brother of Skoltha," Hroth said, his voice a deep, rolling bass that held a thread of lazy amusement. "It has been quite a long time."

  Fenris's anger, already a hot coal in his gut, flared at the condescension in the title. "Your sentries greeted us with their teeth. Your land reeks of wolf-hunters and their silver bullets. Explain yourself, now, or we shall take this as a provocation of war."

  Hroth smiled, a slow, wide stretch of his lips that did not reach his cold eyes. He gestured casually at the circle of tense wolves, his own outnumbering Fenris's by half again.

  "I thought you knew me better than that, brother. You come here in rage, why? If you had come to speak nicely, you would know I have more disgust for the wolf-hunters than you. I've been spreading their entrails up and down my river for three years, trying to keep their stink off our borders. Perhaps it is true the matter has, embarrassingly, gotten out of hand. I should have asked for your help, perhaps, but I do have such a sickening sense of self-pride. Here I thought you were coming to thank me, at least validate me, for my efforts. I have lost a lot of my own wolves over this mess. You smell the truth of it on me, Fenris. I am open here for the sniffing. Or has the high mountain air dulled your nose?"

  Fenris could smell it. Beneath the river-musk and wolf-scent, there was the acrid, recent tang of human blood on Hroth's skin, and the older, iron-rich scent of many such kills. It was the smell of a guardian, not a conspirator. The realization was a cold splash against his rage, confusing his purpose.

  Hroth shrugged, the motion exaggerated, theatrical. "But I am feeling forgiving today. I will not let this... provocation... ruin the peace our packs have worked so hard to keep. A peace you have broken by bringing your fury to my doorstep. If I am being honest, and I am always honest, my brother, I do not have the warriors to spare, middling in two wars at once."

  "One of the wolf-hunters killed a warrior of Black Rock," Fenris snarled, taking a step forward. The two guardian wolves at Hroth's side tensed, a low growl vibrating in their chests. "With a silver bullet in the heart. He nearly killed my mate with the same poison."

  At that, Hroth's amused detachment cracked. A single blond eyebrow arched high. "Your mate? I had heard Ygrid died in childbirth. The songs sung in my taverns say Fenris of Black Rock loved Ygrid the Beautiful so deeply that his heart died with her, that he would never love again. The young pups in my village daydream of love as strong as the fabled Fenris and Ygrid. If it is not Ygrid you speak of, then who might it be?" Hroth's smile widened with genuine curiosity, "What she-wolf could possibly have captured your eye again, after the famed beauty of Ygrid once had it caught?"

  "The Great Mother has given me an Imprint," Fenris said, the words feeling like a confession and a weapon.

  Hroth stared. Then a laugh burst from him, a short, sharp bark of disbelief. "An Imprint? On whom? Some deep-forest vixen, then?"

  "On the wet-nurse you sent for my son. Six moons past."

  For a moment, there was only the sound of the river and the wind in the pines. Then Hroth threw his head back and howled a laugh, a full, roaring sound that shook his broad shoulders. One of the huge black wolves at his side let out a soft, huffing breath through its nose, a canine imitation of a chuckle. Fenris's eyes snapped to it. Now, in the dappled light, he could see the detail he'd missed before: the tip of its right ear was cleanly missing. An old, familiar mark.

  Obin.

  Hroth wiped a tear from his eye, his laughter subsiding into wheezing chuckles. "The Great Mother," he gasped, "must be a wolf of fierce and cruel humor."

  "What are you talking about?" Fenris's voice was low, dangerous.

  Still grinning, Hroth reached behind his ear to a pouch and pulled out a small packet of dried leaves and a thin paper. He began to roll them with practiced fingers. "If it is true," he said, not looking up from his task, "if you are truly Imprinted to that bitch, then you must know why it is funny."

  Fenris said nothing. A coldness was creeping up his spine, unrelated to the river mist.

  Hroth finished the roller, lit it with a spark from a flint also in the pouch, and took a long, deliberate drag. The sweet, herbal smoke curled around his head. He held it out to Fenris. "You might want some of this. For what I am about to tell you."

  Fenris ignored the offered smoke. But as he stood there, a strange sensation began to whisper at the edge of his awareness. Through the bond, a faint, familiar pulse. Albi. Her presence, which had been a steady, distant warmth back at Black Rock, was no longer distant. It was moving. Coming closer. A direction, a pull, growing stronger with each heartbeat. If he focused, he could almost feel the rhythm of her wolf-form running, could almost smell the forest flying past her, catch the sharp, foreign scent of them—Hroth's pack—in her nostrils.

  "Speak," Fenris ground out, his attention split between the smug Alpha before him and the approaching storm barreling down the mountain. "Stop this game and tell me what it is you wish to tell me."

  Hroth took another drag, sighed the smoke out through his nose like a contented dragon. "My mother," he began, his tone conversational, "was a mean woman. More feared than even my father, the Alpha. Her hatred for the human slaves of Deep Water was... inventive, shall I say, perhaps even more so than Obin, who has done the stuff out of nightmares. This rage in my mother was sparked, of course, by my father's bad habit of fucking his slaves and getting them rounded with child." He paused, watching Fenris. "Mother would usually take care of it. A pinch of this herb, a cup of that tea. A twist of a neck, a rip of a throat. Problem solved, one way or another, depending on the mood she was in or how hard the slaves pleaded for their lives and promised to never do it again. But... my father had a favorite. A particular slave. White of skin, white of hair, like fresh virgin snow. When she swelled with his child, he hid her. Stashed her in a wolf-hunter's village beyond our borders to keep her from my mother's attention. I didn't know about the babe myself until my father was on his deathbed. By then, my mother was long dead—killed by her own slaves, ironically. He told me the slave's name, Ella or something of the sort, it is of no importance. He said the slave had borne him a little girl by the name of Albiana."

  The name hung in the smoky air. The pulse in Fenris's chest grew stronger, a drumbeat quickening with his own heart.

  "It was easy to find her," Hroth continued, flicking ash. "Even if she hadn’t looked like her mother; half-wolf, as she was, in the human world, she stood out. There were stories about her childhood heroic deeds; how fierce, how strong, how cunning a wolf-killer she was growing to be. She'd done well for herself. Moved up into the eyes of nobility. Caught the eye of a Hersir. When it was his time to rule their little village, the fool went and married her." He took another drag, his icy eyes sharp on Fenris. "This wolf-hunting mess we both have on our hands? It is my fault, in a sense; I can take responsibility for my mistakes. My curiosity got the better of me. I took the damn bitch. I was....obsessive. She is my sister, I do feel it within my grounds to be at least somewhat possessive of her. Anyways. The wolf-hunters, they don't want us, Fenris. They want her. Albiana is quite the prize right now in their Kingdom; the King has granted land and title to anyone who brings her forth. Naturally, when the opportunity arose for me to secure her up on the mountain, well, you understand why I had to give her to you. The more the humans wanted her, the more amusing I found it that they couldn’t have her. You see, this Hersir she married... he wasn't just some village lordling's son who'd taken the Hersir position out of birth-right. I learned this later, and to my savage disappointment. He was the youngest son of their King in the South. And this babe she bore him, a son I believe it was—the babe Obin so efficiently killed, curse him—was a favorite of that court; a royal grandson."

  A wave of pure, undiluted rage—hotter than forge-fire, sharper than a silver-bullet—erupted from his chest at the mention of—

  Finn.

  But it wasn't his rage.

  It was hers.

  He felt it a heartbeat before he saw the consequence of it.

  A blur of white, moving faster than a blizzard's wind, exploded from the tree line behind Hroth's wolves. It was Albi, a streak of fury given form, her eyes blazing with a golden fire he had never seen. She did not hesitate. Her trajectory was singular, absolute.

  Obin, the massive black wolf, had only a second to turn his head before she was upon him.

  Her leap carried the full weight of her momentum and her grief. She hit him like a falling star, driving him from his feet and onto his back in the damp earth. Before the breath was knocked from his lungs, her jaws were at his throat seizing it out.

  It was an execution. An assassination. And Albi had come through with her promise of it.

  A scream of pure, vengeful hatred tore through the bond and into the marrow of Fenris's bones as he sank heavily to his knees, weak and fragile before the enormous white monster that she'd become.

  When the white wolf finally lifted her head, the clearing had fallen into a silence so profound it seemed as if earth and heaven above had stopped its eternal humming. What lay at her paws was a ruin of dark fur and glistening red ruin. Pieces of a thing once called Obin. Her muzzle was painted a bright, shocking red, dripping strings of gore that pattered onto the torn ground.

  Her eyes found Fenris.

  They were not the honey-smoke eyes he knew. They were not even the fierce, golden wolf-eyes he had seen in the forest. These were something else entirely. They were ancient, pitiless things, like chips of amber frozen in a glacier. In their depths, he saw the truth of what she had done, and the cold fact that she would do it again, and again, and again, and again, for the son who had not even a grave mound on which to bring the tufted dandelions he used to love.

  In that moment, he did not see Albi. He did not see his mate, bound to him by the Imprint. He saw only the Great Mother Wolf, drenched in the blood of her Enemy, and the scorching flame of Vengeance in her eyes.