Mira woke to the sound of bones grinding back into place.
The noise lived in her dreams now. Snaps and wet crunches, the hiss of pain, the rumble of a wolf’s growl held tight between human teeth. She shoved her blankets back and swung her legs over the side of the bed before her eyes were even fully open, already reaching for the linen wrap she kept tied to the bedpost.
“Come,” she muttered to no one, to everyone. To whatever poor bastard her pack had dragged in while the moon was still high.
The cabin was cold enough that her breath fogged in the air. She crossed the plank floor barefoot, toes numbed by the chill, and shouldered open the curtain that separated her sleeping nook from the main room.
The hearth was low, banked to coals. Blackened kettles sat waiting. The long, scarred table in the center of the room was empty for once, its surface scrubbed bare clean last night. Shelves along the walls held jars and bundles of dried herbs, clinking glass vials filled with tinctures, clay bowls, bronze instruments that glinted in the firelight.
It was the only room like it in the Ashridge territory. The only place where every wolf, no matter their rank or their sins, could lay bleeding and know they would not be turned away.
Mira cinched the linen wrap around her waist, the ties biting into the soft flesh of her hips, then grabbed a clean apron from a peg. Her fingers had the motions memorized: knot behind her back, dark hair twisted into a rough knot at the nape of her neck, curls quickly pinned before they could tumble into her face. She splashed her hands in the basin, the water icy, and scrubbed.
By the time the old bell clanged outside—once, twice, three times, the urgent ring that meant a warrior down—she had stoked the fire, set water to boil, and laid out her tools.
She didn’t bother with a cloak. She crossed the small front room in three long strides and threw open the door.
A thin dawn smeared pink and gray across the sky, mist clinging low between the pines that fenced her clearing. The air tasted like frost and wood smoke and iron.
They were almost to her threshold.
Two of them, staggering up the stone path with a third slung between them, his weight hanging limp. All three in human form, though the scent of wolf was thick and wild, fur just beneath the skin. Blood, fresh and hot, rode the air on the breeze.
“On the table,” Mira called, already stepping back, leaving the door wide.
The warriors grunted acknowledgement.
Ede, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, his dark beard stuck with bits of pine needle, ducked his head as he passed her. “Mira.”
“Don’t say anything until I look at him,” she snapped. Then softened it, because Ede had carried enough bodies to her door in the past year. “Please.”
Yara came in behind him, wiry and quick, her hair in a knot of tight braids. She was panting, sweat dripping off her temples despite the cold. Her forearms were smeared with blood to the elbow. The wolf between them barely seemed to breathe.
They heaved him onto the table and stepped back, faces tight.
Mira blinked.
She knew him. Not his name—she’d never bothered learning every newly-made warrior’s name—but his wolf, the feel of him. Toren. He’d been part of the scouting party who’d brought her half a dozen injured pups after they’d run into a bramble pit last summer. He’d sat on this very table, laughing and wincing at the same time while she dug thorns out of his ass.
Now his chest was raw meat.
The wound slashed from his left shoulder to his right hip, deep and jagged, torn instead of cut. Claws, then. Not steel.
Mira moved to the table, hands hovering over the pulsing crimson. “What did this?”
“Rogue,” Ede said. “Big one. Scent was wrong. Not Ironclaw. Not any of ours.”
At the mention of the rival pack, something in her stomach flinched. She kept her voice steady. “Did it bite him?”
“No.” Yara shook her head hard enough that a few braids slapped her cheek. “We pulled it off before it could latch. It—” Her throat moved. “It had strange eyes. Like… milky. I don’t know.”
Strange eyes meant nothing good. Old magic. Sickness. Possession. Or just some freak who’d lived too long alone in the deep wood.
Mira shoved the thought aside and leaned over Toren, listening. His breathing was shallow but steady. His heartbeat thudded against her palms when she lowered them to his ribs, a heavy drum.
Her wolf stirred under her skin, anxious, pacing.
Easy, she soothed it silently. We’ve lost enough.
“Yara, stoke the fire. Ede, strip him.” She didn’t glance up. “You know the drill. Pants too. You’ll have to get used to a little cock in the mornings.”
Yara snorted and moved to the hearth. Ede groaned. “You say that like we don’t see your patients naked half the time anyway.”
“You don’t usually look this queasy about it,” Mira said, reaching for a clay jar and popping the lid with her thumb.
Under the sharp scents of comfrey and yarrow, Toren’s blood stank of fear and adrenaline. But no rot, no sweet-sick infection. Good.
Ede worked quickly, hands deft from too much practice. Tunic off, shredded leather armor peeled away. Boots tugged, pants stripped. Toren’s body was thick with muscle, his skin crisscrossed with old scars. A few new ones. The gash across his torso wept sluggishly.
“This wasn’t just claws,” Mira muttered, narrowing her eyes. “There’s… something in it.”
“What?” Yara had the fire blazing now, kettles rattling as they heated.
She traced the ragged edge of the wound with her fingertips, close but not touching. The flesh puckered oddly, the torn meat almost… blistered. As if it tried to heal too fast and failed.
Her wolf’s hackles rose.
“Mira?” Ede pressed. “What is it?”
“I don’t know yet.” She snapped her fingers. “Rags.”
He moved, grateful to have something to do. Yara brought her a bowl of hot water, steam fogging Mira’s face.
“This is going to burn,” Mira murmured to Toren, even though he was half-conscious. “You scream, you bite your tongue off, I’m not sewing it back on straight.”
His lips twitched. Barely. But she saw it.
Good. He wasn’t gone yet.
* * *
By the time the sun cleared the bare branches of the aspens, Toren’s wound was clean and sealed with thick, reeking paste. Mira’s arms trembled from holding him down while he thrashed, her back aching from leaning over the table.
She flexed her fingers. Her knuckles had Toren’s blood dried in the creases. She’d wash when she could make herself move again.
“He lost a lot of blood,” she said, turning to where Yara and Ede leaned against the opposite wall, both looking wrung out. “But he’s strong. He’ll live.”
Yara slumped, relief loosening her shoulders. Ede exhaled hard and scrubbed a hand over his face.
“Thank the Mother,” he muttered. His gaze went to Toren’s unmoving body, then to Mira. “That thing. The rogue. Should we be worried?”
“Yes.” Mira didn’t sugarcoat it. She was too tired for that, and they deserved honesty. “If the wound had been a finger-width deeper, he’d be meat on my floor. You say its eyes were milky?”
Yara nodded. “Like it couldn’t see. But it moved fast.”
“Could have been sick,” Ede said. “Rot in the brain. Makes wolves go strange, sometimes.”
“Or cursed,” Yara added in a hushed voice.
Mira’s jaw tightened. “Old wives’ tales for later. Right now, you report to Wren. She needs to know we’ve got a rogue that can nearly gut a seasoned warrior.”
The name still tasted half-bitter, half-soft on her tongue.
Wren, Ashridge’s alpha. Wren, her cousin. Wren, who had held Mira’s hand after the raid and whispered, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry while the smoke of her brother’s pyre burned their lungs.
“Will you be all right alone with him?” Yara nodded toward Toren. “You’ve been up all night. You were with the twins’ mother until moonrise.”
Mira rolled her shoulders. The night was a blur of blood and sweat in her mind. A difficult birthing, a child who had not opened his eyes until Mira smacked his bottom and he’d screamed like a furious little demon.
“I’ll lie down once I’m sure his pulse’s steady,” she lied.
Ede opened his mouth, probably to argue, then shut it. He’d known her since they were pups. He knew where that went.
“Fine,” he said instead. “We’ll report and send someone with food.”
“Bless you,” Mira muttered, already reaching for the blanket folded at the foot of the table. She spread it across Toren’s naked hips and thighs, tucking it in with brisk efficiency.
They left, footsteps thudding on the wooden porch, then crunching on the frost. The door closed with a soft snick. Silence fell.
Silence, save Toren’s slow breaths and the whispering hum of the forest outside.
Mira stood at the table for a long moment, watching his chest rise and fall. Her own wolf was calmer now, some primitive part of it satisfied at having kept one of their own tethered to life.
The oath pulsed faint and warm under her breastbone. Not a physical thing, but an imprint of old magic all the same, the memory of the night she’d knelt under the full moon with Wren’s blood and her own mingled on her palms.
Healer of Ashridge, the voice of the old crone, Lyre, had droned in her ears, smoke swirling around them. Do you swear, by blood and breath, by bone and howl, to treat any who come, regardless of pack, of sins, of history?
She had been eighteen and raw with grief, Kellen’s face still burned behind her eyes. The raid had taken half their fighting strength, torn their land like a wound. She’d looked at Wren, at the one person left who remembered nights spent both curled up under the dining table hiding from snarling parents and sneaking into the root cellar for stolen apples. Wren’s eyes had been red-rimmed, jaw set.
We need you, Wren had said. We can’t survive without a healer. I can’t… Her voice had broken. I can’t lose anyone else because we have no one to stop the bleeding.
Mira had swallowed the jagged, cold thing in her chest and said, I swear.
That oath thrummed now, a background chord to her heartbeat. It would pull her feet to the door even if someone staggered in wearing Ironclaw colors, with Ironclaw teeth in their flesh.
She hated it. She was grateful for it. Both could be true.
A log popped in the hearth. Mira blinked, as if waking from a trance, and forced herself to move.
She washed Toren’s dried blood from her arms, scrubbing up to her elbows until her skin glowed red. She stripped her apron and dropped it in the wicker basket near the basin. Her shoulders ached, a dull throb that had taken up residence there months ago and refused to leave.
She caught sight of herself in the bit of polished metal nailed to the wall by the door and almost didn’t recognize the woman who stared back.
Dark, curling hair hacked just past her shoulders—she’d cut it herself last spring with a kitchen knife when it had kept tangling in patients’ hands. Shaved close on one side now, where she kept nicking it with the blade out of impatience. Freckles dusted across light brown skin, more pronounced in winter when her face wasn’t burned by summer sun. Wide mouth. A nose too blunt to ever be called delicate. Eyes a dark hazel-green that usually held dry amusement and now just looked… tired.
“You look like you slept in a bear den,” she told her reflection.
Her reflection grimaced. “You smell worse.”
Someone knocked—a quick, sharp rat-tat-tat on the door. Not a warrior’s heavy thump. Not a frightened villager’s frantic pounding. Familiar.
Mira sighed. “It’s open, Wren.”
The door opened. Wren slid inside, closing it behind her carefully. Even in the chill of the early morning, she moved like she owned whatever space she stepped into, shoulders squared, spine straight.
She wasn’t especially tall, but something about the way she held herself added inches. Her hair—thick, coarse, almost black—was twisted into a single braid that fell between her shoulder blades. A knife hung at her hip, the hilt worn smooth. The pale scar along her left cheek caught the light like a faint crescent moon.
Her gaze swept the room, sharp and assessing, taking in the damp rags piled in a bowl, the paste-covered wound on Toren’s chest, the fine tremor in Mira’s hands.
“Bad?” Wren asked.
“He’ll live.” Mira wiped her hands on a towel one last time and hung it up. “Rogue. Nearly cleaved him in two.”
“I heard.” Wren’s jaw worked. “We’re setting double patrols. I’ll speak to the elders about strengthening the wards along the northern boundary.”
Mira snorted. “We’ve been patching those wards for six months. The elders can barely agree on what herbs to throw in the fire, let alone how to work real magic.”
Wren’s mouth twitched, but her eyes didn’t soften. “They’re what we’ve got.”
“Then we’re doomed,” Mira muttered, but there was no real heat in it. She leaned a hip against the table, folding her arms. “What’s the real reason you came yourself instead of sending a runner? You’re supposed to be sleeping. You looked like a corpse at the moot last night.”
Wren flinched. Mira saw it—a tiny muscle jumping in her jaw, a brief dulling of her gaze. Then it was gone.
“I can’t sleep,” Wren said. “Not lately. Too much to do. Too many… conversations.”
She said it like a curse.
Mira straightened. “Conversations with who?”
Wren looked at Toren again. At the thick, clotted bandage. At the way his fingers twitched as his body fought for life.
“With Ironclaw,” she said finally. The word turned the air cold.
Mira’s throat went tight. “We already have a truce.”
“For now.” Wren dragged a hand over her face. Mira noticed fine lines at the corners of her cousin’s eyes that hadn’t been there last year. “But they’re pushing. They want more trade. More access to our river crossing. They’ve had a poor hunting season, or so they claim. Their alpha sent an envoy asking to renegotiate some of the terms.”
Mira’s nails bit into her palms. “Joren sent an envoy? Here?”
Wren’s lips thinned. “Not him personally. He never leaves their den if he can help it.” Her tone was flat with old contempt. “He sent his niece. Clever girl. Smiles sharp as teeth. I made it very clear that the treaty stands as-is until the next full council. She smiled and said of course, of course, she would tell her uncle. Then she walked out with her nose in the air like she thought the place stank.”
“Probably did,” Mira muttered. “You met in the elders’ hall.”
Wren huffed a humorless laugh. Then she sighed and rubbed two fingers over her temple. “They’re restless. We’re stretched thin. Rogues at the border don’t help. I need you steady, Mir. I need you here and… not dead on your feet.”
“My feet are the only thing that’s reliably alive on me these days,” Mira said. “Everything above the ankles is guessing.”
Wren’s eyes softened this time. She stepped closer, reaching out a hand like she might touch Mira’s shoulder, then thought better of it and let it fall.
“You could ask for help,” she said quietly. “There are girls in the village who’d jump at the chance to learn from you.”
“And what?” Mira shrugged, feeling the old, familiar knot of resistance coil in her ribs. “Take an apprentice? Spend the next five years holding their hand so they don’t kill someone by mistaking foxglove for comfrey? Teaching them to stitch without sewing their own sleeve to a patient’s skin?” She shook her head. “I don’t have time for that, Wren. You know I don’t.”
“You don’t have time not to.” Wren’s gaze flicked to the closed door between the main room and Mira’s sleeping nook, where shadows pooled. “You’re one person. One wolf. What happens if you fall? If some Ironclaw archer gets lucky on your way to the river, or a birthing goes bad?”
Mira’s throat constricted. She remembered Kellen’s face, pale and slack, his chest caved in. The way she’d pressed her hands to the ruin of his ribs and screamed and nothing had happened. No magic. No miracle. Just blood soaking her dress, her fingers slipping on shattered bone.
“What happens,” she said hoarsely, “is what happens every time one of us falls. We mourn. We burn the body. We go on.”
Wren’s eyes darkened. “You know it’s not the same.”
“No,” Mira agreed. “It’s not. But we can’t wish safety into being, Wren. We can only drag each other through by the scruff.”
Wren stared at her for a long heartbeat. Then another. Then she sighed, her shoulders slumping.
She looked very young, then. Younger than Mira by a year, which she was, but weight had settled on her so fast after the raid that she’d seemed older overnight. Now the weight just made her look… tired.
“There’s more,” Wren said. “And you’re going to hate it.”
Mira’s stomach dipped. “That’s a phrase no healer ever wants to hear from their alpha.”
Wren grimaced. “Ironclaw’s envoy brought news. Message was clear: if in the course of this fragile truce, any of their wolves are injured within our territory, they’re to be afforded your care. As a… gesture.” She spat the word. “As proof of good faith.”
The world went very still.
Mira’s heart thudded once, hard. Then the silence roared.
Her wolf lunged at the bars of her ribs, teeth bared. Ironclaw. The pack that had raided their village in the dead of winter two years ago. The pack whose black-fanged enforcers had ripped Kellen’s throat out as he tried to drag a crying child from a burning house.
The pack whose scent still haunted Mira’s nightmares: cold, sharp, like blood on snow.
She managed to make her voice sound almost level. “And you said… what?”
“What could I say?” Wren bared her teeth in a humorless snarl. “I reminded them that our healer is bound by oath. That we do not turn away wolves in need. That we won’t break that, not even to spite them. I also made very clear that if they or we start dragging half-dead enemy warriors back and forth across the border for sport, I’ll personally stuff a torch up Joren’s ass and light it.”
Mira’s shoulders slackened. She would have laughed, at any other time. Wren’s crude promises always had that effect. But right now, laughter felt like a fragile thing. Too thin. It might crack and let something else out.
“So… what.” Mira’s fingers curled around the edge of the table until the wood dug into her palms. “If some Ironclaw raider gets clipped by one of our arrows and staggers to our door, I patch him up and send him home?”
Wren’s gaze slid away. “If he makes it to your door, yes.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Mira asked, voice low.
Wren’s jaw worked. “Then I tell our warriors to aim for the heart next time.”
A strange, sharp sound burst out of Mira’s chest. Half laugh, half snarl.
“You should have refused,” she said. “You should have told them to lick their own wounds.”
“And give them the excuse they’re looking for to call us oathbreakers?” Wren shook her head. “They’re itching for a reason to rip this truce apart. You know they are. Joren never wanted it. He signed because he had to. Because we all nearly bled ourselves into extinction two winters ago.” Her voice roughened. “If I give him anything he can twist in the elders’ council, he’ll be on us like a sickness.”
Rage and something like panic tangled hot and wild in Mira’s chest.
“You’re asking too much,” she whispered, hating the plea in her voice. “You’re asking me to put my hands on the same bastards who—”
“I’m not asking.” Wren’s voice cut across hers, sharp and quiet. “The oath is. And you already swore.”
The words hung between them like frost.
Mira’s stomach lurched. She wanted to throw something. Scream. Tear at the scar on Wren’s cheek until she bled. Instead, she inhaled once, slow and deep, then let it out through her teeth.
She could feel the old magic of the oath stirring faintly, as if Wren’s mention had woken it. It didn’t speak. It never did. But it expected.
“Fine,” she bit out. “Fine. Bring me their scum. Bring me their killers. I’ll stitch them up so they can go right back out and do it again.”
“That’s not—” Wren stopped. Sighed. “I know how it sounds. I know. But if one healed wolf keeps Joren from claiming we’re faithless, if one gesture buys us another season of peace…”
She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to.
Peace meant pups born into quiet, not war cries. It meant fields planted, not trampled. It meant old wolves dying in their beds rather than in the dust with their bellies torn open.
Mira hated that she understood.
She rubbed her thumbs along the edges of her jaw until her skin burned. Then she dropped her hands and met Wren’s eyes.
“I’ll obey the oath,” she said flatly. “I always do.”
Wren’s throat moved. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” Mira’s lips twisted. “You’re the one who has to sleep with your conscience.”
Wren flinched as if struck. It was a low blow, and Mira regretted it immediately. But she didn’t apologize. Couldn’t. Not when the image of her brother’s blood that night still painted the insides of her eyelids.
“I’ll… send someone with stew later,” Wren said stiffly. “And bread. Real bread, not the rock-hard shit the elders keep for offerings. Try to lie down at some point.”
“I’ll think about it,” Mira said.
Wren hesitated as she turned to the door. Her hand lingered on the latch. “Mir?”
“What.”
“If—” She swallowed. “If it comes to it… I won’t ask you to forgive them.”
The words were quiet, but they settled in Mira’s chest like stones.
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t trust herself to.
Wren nodded once, as if Mira had replied, then slipped out into the cold.
The door closed with a soft click.
Mira stared at it for a long time. The fire crackled. Toren groaned faintly in his sleep. A crow called once, harsh, from the pines.
Finally, she exhaled and pushed away from the table.
“Food, then collapse,” she muttered to herself. “You heard the alpha.”
She made it to the cupboard where she kept dried meat and stale bread before her knees wobbled. She grabbed the edge of the counter and cursed under her breath.
“You better be worth it, Toren,” she said without looking back at the table. “Because if an Ironclaw ever sets foot in this room, I might start with his balls and work my way up.”
Her wolf stirred uneasily at the thought. Not in protest at the violence. In… something else. Something restless. Like the air before a storm.
Mira shook it off.
She didn’t know that two days from now, she’d have an enemy on that table whose very blood would sing to hers.
She didn’t know that when she touched him, the oath would flare like a brand and something older—something deeper—would rear up in her bones and snarl mine.
She just tore off a piece of bread with her teeth and chewed like it had offended her.
Outside, the wind shifted, carrying with it a scent from the north. Wild. Sharp. Like steel and snow.
She didn’t notice.
Not yet.
* * *