Chapter 1 — Whispers in Fangshade Forest

Fangshade smelled wrong, and it had smelled wrong for nine years.

Scarlett Everine ran through it with her mouth open, tasting the air the way her father had taught her, and every breath came back the same: wet moss, iron, and under that the sweetish rot of something the forest was digesting slowly and without appetite.

The canopy knotted overhead into a lid. What light got through arrived in thin grey wires that did not fall straight.

Her boots came down on ground that gave. Not loam. Roots, and between them the blood-red fungi that had spread since the balance broke, soft as knuckles under her heels.

Behind her, the drones sang.

It was a clean, machine-made note, and it had been getting closer for two hours. She did not look back.

Looking back cost a stride, and she had counted her strides since the ridge the way a miser counts coins — four hundred to the stream, eleven hundred to the deadfall, and after the deadfall she did not know, because she had never come this deep on purpose.

Her legs had stopped complaining an hour ago. That was worse than the burning had been.

She could have crossed this stretch in a quarter of the time on four legs. The thought arrived the way it always did, uninvited and useless, and she put it down again. Nine years since the last turn. Nine years of the pull arriving at the top of every month and finding nobody home.

An energy bolt cracked past her shoulder and took the top off a sapling. The air went sharp with scorched sap.

Scarlett cut left between two trunks, dropped under a leaning branch, and came up running. Behind her the drone adjusted with a whine, patient as arithmetic.

They wanted her alive. She had worked that out on the second day. Six clean shots so far, each one wide by the width of a hand — herding shots, not killing shots. Whatever the mage-hunters had been told about her, they had been told to bring her back breathing.

Knowing it was what kept her running.

The runes on the bark began to wake as she passed. They did that now. Old marks, cut by somebody long dead into trees that had not been these trees, and they lit when her blood came near them, a slow amber crawl along the grain like a fuse thinking about it.

Under her collarbone the heat answered. Always the same heat, always the same wrongness — magic that had been put into her, not born in her, and it lit for a stone wall and a carved tree and would not light for the one thing she wanted.

Then the howl came.

Scarlett’s stride broke. She caught herself on a trunk, palm skidding on wet bark, and stood there with her chest heaving while the sound went through the trees ahead of her and out the other side.

It was long, and it was low, and it climbed at the end the way a wolf’s voice climbs when it is asking a question.

It was not real.

She knew that the way she knew her own name. The Duskrun had been dead nine years — her father Alder on the frozen creek with his throat open, Sela three paces further on, all of them counted and stacked and burned before the snow melted. There was no pack left in these mountains to answer anything.

And it had been quieter last winter. That was the part she did not let herself hold on to for long. Last winter it had come once a month and been thin, like a sound remembered. Tonight it was in her teeth.

“Not now,” she said, to nobody, and heard how flat her voice had gone. “I don’t have time.”

She pushed off the tree and ran.

The rule was simple and she had made it herself, on the road out of the valley, at seventeen, with her hands still smelling of ash. No pack. No debts. Nothing anyone could put a hand on and take away.

She had kept it for nine years across four provinces, and it had cost her every soft thing she might have had, and it had also kept her alive while everyone who had ever offered her shelter had been found afterwards by people asking questions.

The ground tilted. She heard water.

A ravine — she remembered it from a bad night two years back, a seam in the rock where the river had cut down and never bothered to widen. She had gone around it then. She had had time then.

The drone note doubled. Two of them now, and behind the drones the sound she had been waiting for since the deadfall: boots. Human boots, moving in a disciplined stagger, four or five sets, and one voice calling numbers that were not words.

The tree line broke and the ravine opened at her feet.

It was too far. She measured it in the half-second she had, the way she measured everything, and the answer came back the same as it had two years ago. Too far for a woman.

Not too far for a wolf.

Scarlett reached for it.

She had not done that in front of anyone in years, because of what it looked like. She reached down into the place under the breastbone where the turn was supposed to start, and she opened it, and she let the moon have her — the big pale one, right there over the mountains, fat and close and pouring.

The pull came. It came hard, and it went through her like a hand closing, and it found nothing to hold on to, and it let go.

Nothing. No heat, no break, no ripple down the spine. Just a woman standing at the edge of a drop with her arms out.

She swore once, short, and jumped anyway.

The void took her. For one long second there was nothing under her at all, the river roaring somewhere far below, her hair whipping across her mouth — and then the far edge hit her ribs and drove the breath out of her in a grunt and she was clawing, her fingers dug to the second knuckle in crumbling shale.

She hauled. Her arms shook. The shale came away in handfuls and she found rock underneath and got a knee up and rolled onto her back in the dirt, gasping at the fractured sky.

Behind her, on the far side, a man tried it.

She heard him commit, heard the lip of the ravine let go under his weight with a sound like a jaw unhinging, and heard him scream all the way down until the river took the noise away and gave nothing back.

Scarlett did not look. She rolled onto her front, got her legs under her, and went into the trees on her hands and knees before she trusted herself to stand.

The drones had lost her. It would not last.

She stumbled through a stand of black pine and out into a clearing she had not expected, and her legs finally quit. She went down against something cold and flat and stayed there, cheek to stone, breathing.

It took her a while to understand what she was leaning on.

An altar. Waist-high, older than the trees around it, its face scabbed with lichen. Somebody had cut a ring of shallow bowls into the top, twelve of them, worn smooth, the way a step is worn smooth. And on the front, under the moss she scraped away with the side of her hand, a mark.

A wolf’s head, in profile, with the muzzle open.

Scarlett’s hand went to her throat before she had decided to move it. The pendant had hung there since she was six. Tarnished silver, the size of a thumbnail, the chain replaced twice. A wolf’s head in profile with the muzzle open — the Duskrun mark, cast in a valley three hundred miles south of here, in mountains her pack had never once ranged.

“That’s not possible,” she said.

She put her palm flat on the stone.

The clearing went white.

She stood somewhere else, in daylight, and people stood around her in a ring. She could not see their faces.

She could see their hands, because their hands were what mattered — each one holding the wrist of the next, all the way round, a closed circle of grip. At the centre of the ring something burned that was not fire, and it did not sit in the air on its own.

It was hanging. From all of them. Like a weight in a net.

And one of them, at the near edge of the circle, had a wolf’s head at her throat.

Scarlett came back on her hands and knees with grit in her mouth and no idea how long she had been down. Her ears rang. Her palm, where it had touched the stone, was hot.

She sat back on her heels and made herself breathe until the clearing stopped tilting.

Held, she thought. Not floating. Held.

Through the gap in the pines, the Ironfang Mountains stood black against the paler black of the sky, and near the highest shoulder of them something broke the ridgeline that was not rock — a spire, a broken tooth of one, catching the big moon along one edge.

Eldwynd. She had heard the name in the way you hear names of places nobody goes.

Scarlett got her hand around the hilt of her dagger and used it to lever herself up. The clearing swam once and settled.

Somewhere down the slope the drones found their note again, and under it, thin, the voice counting.

And then, from the mountains — from the direction of the broken spire, from ahead of her instead of behind — the howl came a second time.

It was the same length. The same climb at the end. The same question.

Scarlett stood very still in the dark with her hand on her pendant and listened to a thing that did not exist call to her from a place she had never been.

Then she started walking towards it.