Hroth moved first.

  He came like a wolf launching at the throat of a stag— the sudden, explosive violence of a predator. Beeba, who, Fenris understood then, had held between them like a living shield was hurled aside with a backhand blow that sent the woman crumpling to the stone floor of the dais. Hroth's hands were already shifting as he charged, the fingers lengthening, the nails darkening and curving into claws that caught the torchlight as they reached, stretched, and drove forward for Albi's throat.

  Fenris was faster.

  He did not remember crossing the distance. One moment he stood at the foot of the dais, his legs weak enough to drop him to the rushes, his chest caving inward with a rage so white-hot it had burned clean through to something calm on the other side.

  The next, he was there, his body a wall of leather and bone planted in the narrow space that separated Hroth's claws from the pale column of Albi's neck. His palm struck the Alpha's chest flat and hard, and those golden claws, denied their true prey, found purchase instead in the flesh of his chest, sinking deep, drawing lines of bright red that welled and ran in warm rivulets down his sternum.

  The impact shuddered through Fenris's body like a battering ram striking a fortress gate—through his mid-chest, up through the cords of his shoulders, and down into his planted legs on the stone beneath. It reverberated in his clenched jaw, in the roots of his teeth.

  Fuck you, Hroth, he grinned, and felt none of it’s pain.

  He did not move. Not an inch. Not a hair's breadth. He was as immovable as the mountain upon which Black Rock was built, as old and as patient as the stone that had watched a thousand winters scour its face and never yielded.

  Hroth's face, inches from his own, was close enough that Fenris could count the burst veins in the whites of his wild, golden eyes; could smell the breath reeking of mead and fury and the sour, animal saliva of a beast that has been cornered and knows it.

  "You will never touch her," Fenris said calmly, his voice deathly quiet. It did not need to be loud. It came from a place deeper than his throat, deeper than his chest—the low, reverberation of an Alpha's command, the voice that speaks not to the man but to the wolf beneath it, to the ancient, cowering thing that lives in the marrow of every beast and knows, without thought or reason, the difference between a predator it can fight and one it cannot.

  The claws loosened in Fenris's arm. A fraction. Then another. He did not step back. His pride would not permit that. But the killing intention drained from his limbs, leaving behind a trembling, impotent rage that had no outlet, no way forward.

  It was in that hesitation—that single, suspended breath between violence and its absence—that Fenris felt the feather-light touch of Albi's fingers against the small of his back, gentle as a moth landing on warm stone. And with it, instantaneous and absolute, the force of her vision slamming into his skull dissolving the mead hall, Hroth’s seething face, the guttering torches, and the hundreds of watching eyes on him, in blackness; as if the Great Mother had snuffed the world like a candle flame between her thumb and finger.

  ????

  The howling, ceaseless shriek of a blizzard that had swallowed the world whole.

  The snow drove horizontally, thick as carded wool, turning the air to white and the ground to white, until there was no horizon, no sky, no earth—only the vast, annihilating sameness of the storm, and the small, desperate shapes of the living huddled within it. The caravan had ground to a halt on the mountain road, the humans clustering in shivering knots beneath whatever shelter they could raise: oilcloth strung between stripped pine boughs, furs thrown over trembling shoulders, and the sheer, animal press of body against body, sharing what little warmth remained between them. Infants wailed. Oxen lowed, their flanks caked white, their great heads bowed against the gale.

  Albi stood at the center of it, her white hair indistinguishable from the storm that raged around her, as though the blizzard had birthed her from its own fury. The firm swell of her belly—her only vulnerability, and the secret she guarded closest until she no longer could—was still easily hidden beneath the heavy folds of her cloak. She moved among them with calm, precise authority, directing the able-bodied men to dig, to brace, to lash down what the wind sought to tear free.

  A figure materialized from this white wall of the storm, stumbling toward her—thin, shivering, his lips a bruised and terrible blue. He had pulled the meager protection of his wool coat above his head, and the wind tore at it with greedy fingers. He had to shout to be heard above the gale.

  "M’lady!"

  Albi went to him. She caught him by the elbow and pulled them both off the unprotected road, beneath the heavy, snow-laden boughs of an ancient evergreen whose trunk was wide enough to break the wind. Pine needles shuddered above them, releasing small cascades of white powder.

  "This storm will not last long," Albi told him, her voice steady. "A few hours. The way will be clear again by nightfall. The Great Mother has told me so."

  The man shook his head, his teeth chattering so violently the words came out in fragments. "That is not—not why I have sought you, m’lady. There is an old woman. At the rear of the caravan. She has collapsed. Her hip, I think—she cannot walk. She is asking for you, if you've the heart to spare her the time."

  Albi searched the man's face, lined and raw with cold, and felt the thrum in her chest—that deep, resonant pulse she was learning to recognize as the guidance of the Great Mother, urging her to follow. She nodded, and followed him back into the teeth of the storm.

  Heavy footsteps crunched in the snow behind her. She turned. Beeba had materialized at her shoulder. The hood of her cloak was drawn up against the gale, but it could not contain the thick, dark crown of her hair—a dense, defiant halo of tight coils that spilled from the wool's edge and held the falling snow like a living net. Her dark face was set in the grim, watchful mask she wore whenever Albi ventured beyond arm's reach, her amber eyes sharp beneath the frosted brow. The two women leaned into the wind together, their cloaks snapping behind them like dark pennants as they followed the man.

  The rear of the caravan was a graveyard of abandoned carts and broken wheels, half-buried in drifts that had risen past the knee and were climbing still. They found the shelter—a pitiful, trembling thing of staked hide and fraying rope that shook with every gust as though it might tear free at any moment—and ducked inside. The sudden absence of wind was so profound it made Albi's ears ring, the silence rushing in to fill the space the howling had occupied.

  The old woman lay upon a pallet of damp straw, her right leg angled wrongly from the joint at her hip, the bone clearly displaced beneath the thin, papery skin. Her breathing was wet and labored, each inhale a rattling, drowning sound that spoke of fluid gathering in the lungs. But her eyes were sharp, fevered, burning with a desperate purpose.

  Albi knew her.

  This was Ugla. The midwife from the Alpha's longhouse, when it had belonged to Fenris and not Hroth. The woman who had delivered Isangrim into this world with her own two hands. The woman who had been kind to her—who had warmed broth and brewed tea for her on those cold mornings when Albi would return from her courtyard walks with Isangrim swaddled and mewling against her chest. She had been a close friend of old Jorik, the grey warrior who had slipped Albi secret coins and called her his sweet one when no other wolves were listening.

  "Ugla," Albi whispered, kneeling beside her in the straw. "Your hip is broken."

  "A small pain, child—"

  "I will build you a stretcher. I will carry you myself if I must. There are healers in the south, very good ones, for your leg and your lungs, you will be strong again within a fortnight—"

  "That is not why I have called you here." The old woman's hand shot out with a speed that belied her ruin, her fingers—gnarled, liver-spotted, trembling—closing around Albi's wrist with a grip like iron. Her nails bit into the skin. "Let my Lord do what He wishes with me. My lungs are full. I can feel the water in them rising with every breath. If I will not see the dawn after next, then let me go with it. Let me go to my daughter."

  "You will—"

  "Listen to me now, child." Ugla's grip tightened, her voice dropping to a raw whisper that carried more force than any shout. "I cannot die with this thing inside me. It has eaten me alive. It is a wolf with no end to its appetite—it has gnawed at my bones long after finishing what heart and soul I had left. I must speak it. I must speak it before my Lord takes me, or I will wander in darkness forever." The tears came then, cutting bright tracks through the grime on her hollowed cheeks. "I beg of you, child. I beg of you for forgiveness. I beg of you."

  And then the old woman's trembling hand released Albi's wrist and rose, slowly, to press against her cheek.

  And the Great Mother spoke through her vision like a spear driven through the base of Albi's spine, seizing her by the root of her skull, wrenching her consciousness from her body with such violent force that her eyes rolled back until only the whites remained. The shelter vanished. The storm vanished. The cold, the wind, the straw, the dying woman's rattling breath—all of it torn away like a curtain ripped from a window, revealing the scene that had festered behind it for years.

  She stood in a room she did not recognize. Stone walls, sweating with damp. A rush-strewn floor, the rushes old and blackened. A single torch guttered in an iron bracket, throwing shadows that flinched and crawled. The air was thick with the smell of tallow, and sweat, and blood. Before her, a woman lay crumpled on the cold ground. She was naked, her body a map of bruises and bite-marks—the imprints of teeth upon her breasts, the purple flowering of fists upon her ribs, the dark, terrible smearing between her thighs where blood had dried and blood still wept. She was young. Too young for the condition she was in—a girl, truly, with the soft, unfinished features of someone who had not yet seen her fifteenth summer. She wept without sound, her mouth open, the sobs emerging as wet, suckling gasps, the hoarse and broken remnants of screams that had long since exhausted themselves into silence.

  And before her stood Hroth. Younger. Leaner. His golden hair freshly braided and threaded with rings of hammered gold. His jaw was smooth, his eyes bright and hard with a blue cruelty that was almost beautiful in its clarity, the way a winter sky is beautiful before the killing frost. He was adjusting his breeches with one hand, lacing them with the unhurried ease of a man who had finished his supper and was tidying the table. The other hand extended downward, a single finger pointed at the broken girl on the floor.

  "This is the only use of your kind," he said, and his voice was conversational, almost pleasant. "Whimpering sluts with wet holes to fuck." He looked up–at Albi– at the woman Albi inhabited now. In the wet reflection of Hroth’s wide eyes she saw Ugla looking back at him–younger but grey-haired–her smooth midwife’s hands pressed over her mouth in a horror so complete it had turned her to stone. "You see what becomes of her, midwife. You will be delivering my bastards from her womb come winter." Hroth spat upon the crumpled woman. The gob of it landed on her bare shoulder, and she flinched as if struck by a brand. "Every night and every morning," he continued, his tone shifting to something bored, ruminative, "until I tire of her. And then—" He drew his thumb across his throat in a slow, deliberate line, and smiled. The smile did not reach his eyes. Nothing reached his eyes except the fire-light that reflected Ugla’s mirrored reflection.

  "But you can end your daughter's suffering." Hroth produced a rolled leaf from behind his ear and lit it from the wall-torch, inhaling slowly, the smoke curling around his words. "You can buy her freedom. You have heard, I am sure, the hymns they sing of Ygrid the Beautiful and Fenris the Honorable." The rolled leaf glowed orange as he drew upon it, and his lip curled around the smoke. "You know she is heavy with pup and due to birth within two moons. It makes me—" He snarled a smile, the expression grotesque, lupine, "—sick, to hear my people sing songs of their love. In my own halls. They weep at the beauty of it." The smile died, replaced by something cold and flat and bottomless. "I will not have it. You will take the next cart to Black Rock. You will grovel and beg on those old knees of yours to make yourself midwife to the Alpha's bitch. And you will make certain that neither she nor the pup survive the whelping." He let the words settle, watching Ugla's face through the veil of smoke. "Do this, and your slut daughter walks free. Refuse—" He gestured lazily toward the girl on the floor, who had curled into herself, her knees drawn to her chest, her body shaking in small, helpless spasms. "—and I will make what you have witnessed tonight look like tenderness."

  The vision shattered.

  Albi gasped and wrenched Ugla's hand from her cheek as though the old woman's skin were a hot coal. Her eyes were wide, wild, her chest heaving. The shelter rushed back in around her—the straw, the hide walls shuddering in the wind, the stink of illness and old wool. Beside her, Beeba had gone rigid. Not from the vision—she had not seen it. But from the look on Albi's face. The dawning horror. The confirmation of something Beeba had carried in the way of mates bonded to monsters: the vague, suffocating knowledge of cruelties committed in rooms she was not present for, sins she sensed through the bond like a foul taste at the back of the throat that would not wash clean. She had known about a mid-wife’s daughter named Celene. She had known, in the terrible, imprecise way of an Imprinted mate, that Hroth's jealousy of Fenris ran deeper than politics or pack rivalry, that it had roots in something rotten and obsessive. But she had not known the precise shape of the blade he had forged from it. Now, reading Albi's shattered expression, she did. And the color left her face like tide retreating far from a shore.

  "Tell me," Albi whispered, her voice shaking. "Tell me what you did, Ugla."

  The old woman's eyes closed. The tears came, shuddering sobs of a woman who has held poison in her throat for years and can now wretchedly vomit it forth. Her whole body convulsed with the force of it, her broken hip be damned, pain forgotten in the face of a suffering far older and far deeper than bone.

  "I went to Black Rock," she said, when the sobs had subsided enough to permit speech. Her voice was a ruin, scraped raw, barely audible above the muffled howl of the blizzard beyond the hide walls. "I offered myself to Fenris's household. And Jorik—kind, good Jorik—had accepted me. I was a midwife with many years of service. I told him I was fleeing the cruelty of Deep Water, and it was not even a lie, so he could not smell the truth of why I was really there. He called me a refugee and gave me a warm bed and food from his own plate. He whispered that there was something in my face that reminded him of his wife who had passed long ago." She drew a wet, shuddering breath. "And Ygrid was all the songs sung her to be. She was not like the wolves of Deep Water. She did not carry hatred for humans the way so many of them did. She was... she was kind to me. She would take my hand and press it to the swell of her belly and say, 'Feel this, young Ugla'—though I was grey and old with years—'do you feel him? He is strong. He is Alpha already.'" Ugla's face twisted, the memory a blade she was driving deeper into her own chest with every word. "She would sing to the babe in her belly. She knew it would be a boy—there was no doubt of it, she told me it fiercely, no doubt at all this was the son of Fenris wriggling in her womb—and she would sing to him beautiful songs, and I would sit beside her and smile. And all the while I was counting the days." Her breathing hitched, the fluid in her lungs gurgling with the effort. "I found where they stored the grain for winter. The deep cellar, where the damp creeps in and the winter runs too long to dry the stores properly. I knew what I would find there, for every midwife knows it. Ergot. The black fungus that grows on rye when the grain sours. In small measure, it quickens a slow labor, brings the contractions to a lazy womb with a lazy babe. But in larger doses..." She swallowed, the sound thick and clicking in her throat. "It tears the womb apart. The contractions come violent, one upon the next, with no rest between. The body cannot endure it. The mind cannot fathom the pain and will render the woman unconscious. The bleeding starts, and once it starts, it does not stop." She opened her eyes. They were red-rimmed and haunted, "I harvested it. Little pocket by little pocket, in the weeks before her time. I dried it and ground it fine and mixed it with honey and warmed wine, so she would not taste the bitterness beneath the sweetness. And I waited. And when the first true pains began, she cried out for me. It was her first. She knew not what to expect. She sent all the other midwives away in her anguish—Go, go, leave me be, I want only Ugla—and I came to her, and I knelt beside her bed, and I gave her the drink. I told her it would ease the labor." A sound escaped Ugla then, small and terrible. "She drank it from the cup I tilted to her lips. And the sweet child... she thanked me." The old woman's voice splintered. "She thanked me, and I... it was almost too much to bear, child. Almost. But not enough. God forgive me, not enough. For my Celene I would endure any hell." The blizzard screamed beyond the walls. Inside, there was only the wet rasp of Ugla's breathing and the silence of Albi's rage, building like pressure behind a dam. "When the pains came upon her—the true pains, the ones I had made—she screamed, child," Ugla's eyes were open now but seeing nothing in the shelter, staring instead into a room years distant. "She screamed until her voice broke and she could only gasp and clutch the furs, and I’d give her a leather strap to bite but it snapped between her teeth. I called for the other midwives. I needed them there, so that suspicion would not fall on me alone. They came running. They saw the blood—there was so much blood, child, soaking through the furs, pooling on the stone—and some of them fainted where they stood. Others wept and pressed cloths to the wound and prayed to the Lord, to the Great Mother, to both. None of them understood what was happening. None of them had seen ergot-poisoning before. They were too young to know." Her gaze hardened, turned inward to the darkest place. "And then came the babe from that pouring of blood. When his head crowned, I—I turned him. I reached in and twisted him within his mother so the cord would wrap his throat. To strangle him before he could draw his first breath."

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  Albi's hand had risen to her own belly. She was not aware of it until later.

  "But he was strong." Ugla's voice cracked with something that was not grief alone but a terrible, unwilling awe. "Gods help me, he was so strong. He was an Alpha, just as she had said. He came out blue and silent, the cord wound tight around his little neck, and I fell away from the bed and watched as the other midwives cut it free. As they turned him over and struck his back. As they breathed into his mouth. As they brought him back to life." Her lips trembled. "I did not know. I did not understand. Not then. Not what I had truly done. Not the depth of it."

  "Did they try to save Ygrid?" Albi's voice was ice—not the cold of winter, but the cold of the void between stars, where nothing at all can live.

  "They tried." Ugla nodded, the tears streaming freely now, cutting tracks through the grime on her wasted cheeks. "God bless their sweet souls, they tried. They packed the wound. They pressed. They pushed. They held her and spoke to her and begged her to stay. But she was paler than snow, child. Paler than your hair. The life was running out of her faster than they could push it back, and there was nothing—nothing—that could have held it in. Not after what I had given her." The old woman's voice fell to a whisper so faint it was barely distinguishable from the wind. "She died with the name of her mate on her lips. She called out for him. Over and over. Fenris. Fenris. Fenris. And I could think of nothing except that I must bring him to her. That perhaps, if I could do that—if she could see his face before she went—she might forgive me from wherever she went beyond her death. That it might undo some small measure of what I had done to her." Ugla closed her eyes. "But I was too late. I reached him too late. And he reached her too late."

  Beyond the hide walls, the blizzard howled, but inside, the only sounds were the wet, drowning rhythm of Ugla's lungs and the slow, deliberate exhale of Albi's breath.

  "How I prayed that would be the end of it." Ugla's voice was barely a thread now, fraying with each word. "But the babe lived and Hroth had told me the boy must die. For Celene. For my daughter's life." Her mouth worked around the words as though they were shards of glass she was chewing. "So I took the milk of the poppy. Just a drop, no more than would sit upon the tip of a pin. And I pressed it to the babe's trembling lips, into his gums, so that every breast offered to him would taste of bitterness and poison. So he would refuse to suckle, and would starve, and he would feel no pain from it." She covered her face with her hands, but the words kept coming, muffled and relentless. "And it worked, child. Every wet nurse they brought, he turned away. He was dying. Growing thinner by the hour, his little cries growing weaker, and I felt—gods forgive me—I wanted it done quickly. I pictured Celene. I pictured her walking free from that cell, from that monster, into the sunlight. I could taste the end of it." Her hands dropped. Her ruined eyes found Albi's. "And then Hroth sent you. As a jest. A wet nurse for the dying pup. A human girl with milk in her breasts, sent by the very wolf who had ordered the murder, to nurse the child whose death he had commanded of me." A sound escaped her, somewhere between a laugh and a sob—a terrible, fractured sound that belonged in no human throat. "Oh, the depth of his cruelty knew no mercy, child, because your scent soothed the boy. Your milk was clean. I watched you save the babe I had tried to kill, and I—" Her voice faltered. "I said nothing. I said nothing for all those months. I stood in that household and watched you cradle him and sing to him the way his mother had sung before he was born, and I said nothing." She was shaking now, her entire body trembling upon the straw, the broken hip grinding with each tremor, but the pain did not reach her face. There was no room for it.

  "And then the brute came to me. The one with the long hair—Hroth's man. He found me that evening by the palisade while I paced, trying to understand, trying to comprehend what was happening, while you nursed the babe in the Alpha's chamber. He whispered to me with a smile on his face—a sneering smile, child—that Hroth had known I would fail. That he had expected it." Her hands rose to her mouth, pressing hard against her lips, but it was not enough to contain the wail that tore from her—a sound so raw and broken it seemed to come not from her throat but from the marrow of her bones. "He told me Celene was already dead. That she had been dead before I ever reached Black Rock. That Hroth had slit her throat the morning after I departed, because he had never intended to free her. She was the leash, and once I was gone, the leash was no longer needed." Her hands fell away, and her face was a ruin of grief and self-hatred, the features collapsed inward as though the skull beneath had given way. "And he gave me her eye, child, the brute. Cut from her head. He pressed it into my palm while he smiled, and he told me I had a son still living in Deep Water, and should I ever speak of this, I would receive his eye as well." The old woman stared at the ceiling of the shelter, at the hide that bucked and shuddered in the storm, seeing nothing of it. "It is her eye that follows me. In every dream. In every waking hour. Celene's eye, watching me through the dark, seeing all the evil I wrought to save her. Judging me for the monster I am, child. It is not the work of a midwife to take the lives of those she shepherds through labor. A midwife is the first hands to hold a new life, and I—I used those hands to murder. I am a monster." Her gaze found Albi's face, and in it was the most naked, abject pleading Albi had ever witnessed, "And this guilt—Lord help me—this guilt has been my only companion these long years. Is there anyone, on heaven or earth, who could forgive a monster such as I?"

  ????

  The mead hall rushed back. Fenris's vision swam, the torchlight fracturing into blades of amber and shadow. His chest was heaving, great shuddering breaths that rattled his ribs, and from somewhere deep inside him the wolf was rising. He could feel it clawing at the underside of his skin, his jaw lengthening, his teeth aching in their roots, the bones of his hands beginning to crack and shift.

  He snarled. The sound was not human. It tore from his throat like cloth ripping, filling the mead hall with the raw, primal fury of his wolf.

  The pack recoiled—benches scraping, bodies pressing back against the walls—in anticipation for the surety that was Fenris’s Change in the hall, and that the space offered before them would be too small to contain it.

  Albi pressed her warm palm to his cheek, and like a dousing of cold water, all the heat of the Change evaporated in a heavy heave of relief.

  Hroth laughed.

  It was a brittle, desperate sound, high and sharp. He moved his clawed hand from where it had punctured the skin of Fenris’s chest and spread his arms wide, his palms up, to the pale faces in the hall.

  "You hear this?" he called, his voice booming off the stone. "You hear these treasonous ravings of a southern-slave cunt? Where is her proof of that which she claims I am guilty of? I see nothing here but an accusation born of ambition, it is her who wants the Alpha-ship for Fenris, not the King. I’ve seen the truth of it in my mate’s memories. It was an idea that came from her wretched ambition and not from the King’s mouth. Ygrid died of child-birth while I was a day's distance away! Wolves of Deep Water, you know this is true. Smell it on me! I did not slay her! Tell me how I could have? You have had time on the road, sister, to spin a disgusting tale of treason!” He turned back to Albi, a smile confident and sharp on his face, “Your accusation is not enough to damn me by the Old Laws. So where is the Witness? That we may smell the Truth upon the skin? For if you cannot, and you will not, it will be your death I demand here now for your treasonous slander!"

  There was movement at the back of the hall.

  A bench scraped against the floor. A figure rose from the shadows near the door—slowly, painfully, one hand braced against the wall for support as the other straightened out a cane. She was old, her body bent like a wind-blasted tree, her leg dragging behind her at an angle that made the watching wolves wince. Her hair was white as Albi's, brittle and unkept like straw. Her face was a ruin of deep lines and sunken cheeks, but her eyes burned with the terrible clarity of the dying who have nothing left to lose and nothing left to fear.

  The hall fell silent as she limped forward on the cane whose head was a point of wolf-bone, each step a small agony, the thud-drag, thud-drag of her passage the only sound in the hall. She passed between the benches, between the wolves who parted for her like water before a stone, and came to stand before the dais where Hroth stood frozen, his laughter dead upon his trembling lips.

  Ugla raised her head to him. She looked upon the golden Alpha with eyes that held only the vast, exhausted peace of a woman who is finally going to set down a burden she has become too weak and tired and old to carry.

  "I am Ulga, the mid-wife of Black Rock. I am the Witness. I witness that you, Hroth of Deep Water, stand here guilty before us of the murder of Ygrid the Beautiful, and for the attempted murder of Isangrim, her son." She drew a breath that seemed to take all the air in the mead hall with it. "I know this because I am the hand that did it. And you are the voice that commanded it of me, at the price of my daughter who you slain. And I will carry this truth into the grave my Lord has already prepared for me. Smell it on me now, so that no wolf here living may ever doubt it."

  Every wolf-man in the mead hall breathed at once; a sharp, searching inhale through the nose.

  Fenris inhaled, too; it was unmistakable, unforgivable in its clarity, and it poured from Ugla in waves, saturating the stale air of the mead hall until even the free-folk from Folkstead, standing along the edges of the hall, and who possessed no wolf's nose, must have smelt it by the way their eyes widened. All who looked upon her only could see it plainly written in the old woman's ravaged face that there was no deception. There was nothing left in her at all, save for the truth.

  The hall exhaled. Benches creaked. Someone—a woman near the back—began to weep, softly, the sound swallowed by the vastness of the silence. Bor's great head fell to his chest. Magnes stood with his mouth open, his great chest still. The wolves of Skoltha looked upon Hroth, one by one, with new eyes, and what they saw there—the flush of guilt beneath his rising fury, the animal desperation of a creature cornered by its own kills—confirmed what their noses already knew.

  Ugla moved with a motion so small that none marked it for what it was. Her left hand, the one that had been braced against her cane, shifted—a tremor, it seemed, the involuntary spasm of a dying woman's muscles. But her thumb found a groove in the wood of the cane, a seam invisible to any eye that was not searching for it, and as she lifted the cane into the air, pointing it at Hroth’s chest, she pressed into that groove.

  The sound was no louder than a wasp's flight. A click, a hiss of air through a hollow reed, and then a glint—a hair-thin sliver of brightness, no longer than a woman's finger, arched across the torchlit space between the old midwife and Hroth.

  The needle struck him below the collarbone, just left of center, and buried itself to its full, terrible length. It was a silver dart; Fenris smelled its ripe scent the moment it landed on Hroth’s chest.

  Hroth's mouth opened, but no sound came. His hand flew to his chest, his fingers scrabbling at the entry wound—a pinprick, nothing, a bee-sting, nothing—but the metal was already inside him, already threading its poison through the chambers of his heart and pulsing its wickedness through his veins.

  His face drained of color in a single, ghastly instant, the golden flush of fury replaced by a grey so profound it seemed the bones of his skull were pressing through the skin. He staggered, one step, two, his legs buckling and catching, buckling and catching, his body refusing to believe what his blood already knew.

  Beeba screamed.

  A scream of shared agony—a sound torn from the deepest root of the bond. Her hands flew to her own chest, clawing at the leather of her tunic as though she could dig the phantom silver from her own heart. She doubled over, her knees striking the hard wood of the dais, her breath coming in short, hitching gasps, her face contorted in a mirror of Hroth's dying.

  Hroth dragged himself to Ugla; the mead hall and everyone in it were no longer part of the hallucinatory world playing before Hroth’s glazed eyes. His legs moved with the jerking, graceless momentum of a puppet cut from half its strings, each step a negotiation with the collapse that pulled at him. His hands rose, the fingers curling into fists, reaching for the old woman's throat—the last reflex of a predator who does not know how to die without killing. His eyes were wide, the pupils blown-black in the ice blue that showed the bewildered truth of his death.

  Ugla did not retreat from him.

  She stood rooted to the floor, her ruined body upright with all the strength she had left, and she watched him come with the patience of a tortured woman who has rehearsed this moment in the theatre of her mind for too many sleepless nights uncounted. When he was close enough that his shadow fell across her, she moved again.

  Her cane-head, the wolf-bone tip, was a sheath, and what lay within it was not wolf-bone at all. She twisted the handle and drew the sharpened blade free in a single, fluid motion, and the silver caught the torchlight and blazed like a fallen star.

  She drove it into the side of Hroth's neck.

  The blade entered beneath the jaw and angled upward, sinking to the hilt, and the blood that followed was black—the dark, thick ichor of blood corrupted by the silver that was devouring him from within. Hroth's hands, which had been inches from her throat, fell open. His fingers splayed, grasping at nothing, and a wet, bewildered gurgle escaped him.

  He fell. His knees hit the stone first, the impact cracking the rushes, and then the rest of him followed—slowly, almost gently. He landed on his side, the silver dagger protruding from his neck, a stake marking a grave, and his eyes—still open, still bewildered—stared up at the elderly mid-wife who’d slain him.

  Beeba collapsed at the same moment, her body folding upon the dais as though her strings had been cut in concert with his. She lay gasping, her hands still pressed to her chest, her face grey with the reflected agony of the silver eating through the bond which did not know the difference of one body or another. She convulsed with each shudder of Hroth's failing heart as though the blade had found hers, too.

  Ugla bent above Hroth’s body, swaying on her ruined leg, the black blood on her hands dripping in the torch-light before her. There was no triumph in her face. Only a hollow, scraped-clean exhaustion. She looked like Albi did, in the forest, after she ripped out Obin’s throat.

  She bent, slowly, and pulled the dagger from his neck. The blade came free with a sound like a boot drawn from deep mud, and a fresh rivulet of black blood followed it, pooling in the rushes by her bowed in feet. She held the dagger before her, turning it in the light, studying the silver as though seeing it for the first time. Her lips moved. Fenris could not hear what was said from his distance.

  Then she reversed the blade, pressing the point against her own chest, just above the heart. Her eyes never left Hroth’s. She pressed. Slowly.

  The silver parted the cloth of her dress, then the skin beneath, and Ugla's face did not change, only softened, the deep lines of grief and guilt smoothing away as though the blade were not a weapon but a balm for all her wounds. Her eyes closed. Her lips parted, and her last breath was a sigh in the quiet hall as she folded to the ground beside Hroth, her slack hands still upon the hilt of the blade.