The cold had come early, he had worried it would, biting down on Black Rock with wolf-teeth of its own. Snow lay thick now upon the ground, pristine and blinding white in the grey light of late afternoon. The wind was a monstrous thing trying to claw its way inside. Fenris stood in the threshold of the hut’s door, his broad frame the only thing blocking the draft, his naked feet numb against the frozen earth of the stoop.

  “Close the wretched door,” Jorik grumbled from within, his voice brittle as old parchment. “You’ll freeze the marrow from my bones or give Isangrim a wind-cold. And for the love of the Great Mother, give those women some privacy.”

  Fenris huffed and did not move. He stood rigid, his hand upon the frame, his eyes fixed unseeing upon the skeletal branches of the birch trees. He was listening—not with his ears, but with the bond, with that silken thread that bound him to Albi’s mind. From their hut adjacent, Albi sat inside with the wolf-hunter, Beeba. He caught fragments of her thoughts like leaves on a wind; threat, satt, plan.

  Beneath it all, the steady, foreign pulse of Beeba’s words in Albi’s mind, sharp and tactical as a drawn blade.

  …King Wilhelm will not see two choices, Beeba was saying, her voice a low rasp that Fenris heard as clearly as if he stood in the room. Not sátt or war. He will see a knife at his throat. He will think you demand his surrender, not his alliance.

  I do not plan to say it out loud, Beeba, but our offensive war is the only implied consequence should he refuse.

  He will not feel it as a passive implication, is what I am telling you.

  Fenris imagined he could hear the rounded lilt in her voice, the same accent as Albi.

  And what would you have me offer instead? Albi’s tone was patient, probing.

  Not what, but how. You must make sure it is taken as an alliance with no implication attached. The sátt, aye, but not given as a threat. Offer it as a gift. Tell him ‘King Wilhelm you need a shield’, not a leash. Offer him the sátt and a military alliance both. He has threats from the East, some young King ready to make a name for himself—let him see us as the cure of his worries, not a disease at his back or a worry at his temple.

  Fenris felt Albi’s skepticism curl through the bond like woodsmoke.

  The wolves will find it harder to work for the humans than fight against them. We are already demanding they free all their slaves. It will feel like a castration to them, what you are asking. she said to Beeba, the words echoing in Fenris’s skull. He almost smiled, for it was true. Then he heard Beeba’s dry chuckle, the sound of a woman who had learned to laugh at the absurd or die from it.

  Then the wolves will need to grow bigger balls and cocks, now won’t they? Hroth cannot keep the threat of us—of the Hunters, I mean—at bay forever. There have been new recruits at the King’s commands. They are coming in droves. They are pouring in even from the Western Kingdom through King Wilhelm's alliance.

  A hand clamped upon Fenris’s shoulder, gnarled but strong, and yanked him backward. The door slammed shut with a thud that shook snow from the eaves.

  “If you’re going to eavesdrop like a maiden at a keyhole,” Jorik said, his peppered brows drawn together in a scowl, “you could at least do it without letting in the winter wind. Now come. Help an old man set the table before my hands stiffen.”

  Fenris turned from the door, shaking the snow from his hair. When has the Old Warrior become so blazen?

  The hut without the cold wind on his face felt too warm. It was suffused with the heavy, savory scent of stewed hare and root vegetables that had been bubbling since dawn in a blackened iron pot hanging in the hearth. It was Jorik’s new domicile, raised by Fenris’s own hands—stone and timber built snug and tight against the western wall of their own. Hroth had claimed Jorik’s old quarters for his new mate, as it was still close to him, within the longhouse grounds, but far enough to satisfy her, as she had, so far, stubbornly insisted on staying away from him.

  Fenris had labored with axe and adze, with mallet and chisel, to carve out this space for the old man who had become the closest thing to a father he had left.

  The hut was small, but every inch of it bore the stamp of Jorik’s careful, painstaking existence. The doorway was cut just wide enough for a man with a slightly bent back to pass through without turning sideways. Inside, the floor was packed earth covered with thick, woven rushes that cushioned his bad knee and muffled the tap of his wolf-head cane. The shelves Fenris had pegged into the walls were low, within easy reach without stretching or stooping. They bowed under the weight of his studious life: all his twined booklets, his neat stacks of cured vellum scrolls, the hide-bound books containing the Old Stories and the Laws of the Pack, six copies each, done by his own precise, spidery hand. Bunches of drying herbs hung from the rafters above them, filling the air with the smells of mint, chamomile, and bittergrey. On the walls were the cherished items of his former lodging; tapestries of fields and rivers made as birth-day gifts from Hilda over the years, plate-sized wooden tokens with the likeness of each Alpha of Black Rock scoured on their surface. And a cup fashioned from the horn of the first Elk he’d ever killed.

  Against the warmest wall, the western one he shared with Fenris and Albi’s hut, he pressed his narrow bed so the heat from their hearth would seep through the stones on colder nights. Beside it sat a sturdy stool and Jorik’s old writing desk, its surface stained with ink and smoothed by years of use.

  This was the den of an elder, a keeper of lore, a man whose family had been taken from him twice over—first by the wolves that had branded him a slave, then by the cruel twist of fate that had seen his Aula die before they could fill a home of their own with the clamor of children. He had no blood-kin in Black Rock. His choice to anchor himself here, to this wall, to this family, was a quiet, deliberate choosing of where he wished to belong for the rest of his days; and Fenris made sure the old warrior knew how much that meant to him.

  A small, leather-hinged door at the rear of the hut led to a lean-to shelter for his grey mare. The space was just large enough for the patient beast to turn around and lie down, and it kept her out of the worst of the weather. The smell of hay, horse, and warm dung sometimes mingled with the herbs and stew, but Jorik had not complained.

  “Plates,” Jorik commanded, gesturing to the rough-hewn table and snapping him, once again, from his idle thoughts.

  Fenris moved to obey, fetching the wooden trenchers from the shelf. The food was Albi’s cooking, which had grown more robust with her pregnancy. A haunch of roasted boar crusted with herbs sat upon a platter beside a loaf of dark bread dense enough to stop an arrow. On Jorik’s bed, piled high with furs against the chill, Isangrim sat in a pool of winter light from the rounded window, his dark, curling hair trying angrily to pull away from the two stubborn braids Albi had made. He was nearly a year old now, and played enthusiastically with a collection of tiny wooden animals that Alfric and Torin had carved for him—a wolf, a stag, a bear, a small hare, and a fox—their surfaces worn smooth by his small, exploring hands and moist by his mouth. He made them jump and dance against the fur, whispering sounds that were not yet words, his brow furrowed in serious concentration.

  As Fenris arranged the table, his mind turned to Hroth, as it often did these days. The secret of the wolf-huntress in his cellar had not kept. Secrets never did, especially among wolves. Within a day of Beeba’s emergence from the cellar, the whole of Black Rock had known that their Alpha had Imprinted upon the wolf-hunter. Hroth had been a fool to think he could cage such a thing in darkness; the pack had smelled the change on him, the softening of his edges, the way his ice-blue eyes tracked the woman’s movements with hunger. Had she not been human, perhaps Hroth could have gotten away from the allegations; but Hroth’s disdain for humans was well-known and the fact he kept one with him, in a seat of cautious respect, at all times, was unexplainable.

  Hroth had kept his vow, though. He had declared the Imprint at his throne in his own hall and had claimed Beeba as his mate before the packs. And Fenris had bent his knee before that throne, in front of the watching eyes of his people, and declared his untesting loyalty to Hroth’s Alpha-ship.

  Not that any of them believe it; and he knew they wouldn’t.

  Beeba surprised them. She was not broken by the Imprint. She had adapted to it as if it were a new cloak to wear; bulkier, perhaps, but somehow fitting, in the same way it had been with Albi. Fenris suspected Albi had more to do with this adjustment than she would give herself credit for. For it was her who had sat with the huntress over many long, dark hours that first month, sharing silence and salted meat out in the open space of the Alpha’s mead hall until Beeba had ceased to flinch at shadows. Albi had told her of her own Imprint, and had been able to show Beeba the good there was in their kind, in a way that Albi knew a hunter trained to see them as monsters would need convincing.

  Now, three moons later, Beeba walked the paths of Black Rock with her chin high, dressed in wolf-skins and dark leather, her black hair braided in the style of the Deep Water warriors. She moved like one of them, too, thought like one of them, and Fenris knew—though Hroth would carve out his own tongue before admitting it—that the Alpha of Skoltha was grateful to Albi and owed her a debt he could never repay.

  The door opened, admitting a gust of frigid air. Albi stepped inside, alone, her cheeks flushed from the cold. Snowflakes sat whole like perfect ornaments in the silver of her hair before melting in Jorik’s warm hut. She shrugged off her heavy cloak of grey wool, and beneath it, the swell of her belly was just beginning to show—a small, firm rise that changed the way she moved, the way she balanced. Fenris enjoyed feeling the stretch of it in his own abdomen; enjoyed the simple pleasure of knowing he’d been the one who put it there.

  “Hroth has called for Beeba,” she said, her voice tired. “It will be just us for the night meal.”

  Fenris went to her, taking the heavy cloak she folded and setting it up on the fat hook nailed to the wall behind her. His hand lingered at her waist, then slid around to the small of her back where he knew the muscles knotted hard with the strain of carrying. He found the sore spot, a hard nub of tension to the left of her spine, and pressed his thumb into it with slow, circular pressure. Albi sighed, a long, shuddering exhalation, and let her head fall back onto his chest, her weight leaning into him. Through the bond, he felt her exhaustion, and beneath it, the after-echo of Beeba’s final thought, delivered like a parting gift: The hunters have been pushed back South of the river for now.

  Fenris’s chest swelled with a quiet pride. That was Rusk’s doing. The young Warrior had proved himself–to his wife’s proud dismay—after Asger and Vgar’s death, and had taken up the mantle of master hunter. He was as cunning as a fox; and with more the energy. He had used Beeba’s knowledge of the human supply lines—where they cached their silver bolts, how they moved their wounded—to set a series of false trails. He had led the Black Rock hunters in hit-and-run strikes, never engaging the main force, but cutting their wagons, poisoning their water wells, and leaving them besieged in small clusters to starve out in the snow. It was not the way of the wolf, perhaps, but it was the way of survival, and it had worked. Rusk had enjoyed the experimental challenge of it, he’d told them all one night at the tavern; and the wolf-hunters had retreated now to lick their wounds behind the frozen banks of the Deep Water river.

  “Sit,” Fenris murmured against her hair. “Eat and rest this back.”

  They gathered around the table, the three of them. Jorik spoke of the village idly, of the quarrel between Haggatha and Lyris over a breeding sow, of the new well outside that would need digging before the spring thaw. Fenris nodded at the appropriate moments, made the correct sounds of listening, but his attention was split, divided between Jorik’s words and the river of Albi’s thoughts.

  She was planning her leave soon.

  The knowledge struck him like a punch to his gut, though her face betrayed nothing as she broke bread with nimble, pale fingers. She would go to the King, with or without his blessing. She would take Beeba and all the slaves of Black Rock, cross the river, and offer the sátt to the King of the South.

  She thought of it as a necessity, as inevitable as winter. She did not think of the babe in her womb, or of Isangrim, who would cry for her in the night. She thought only of chains, and of breaking them.

  Fenris felt his jaw tighten in anger, knew she could feel it too, he said nothing. He did not want even the silent argument of their thoughts. Not here, before Jorik, who was growing now too old to worry about such things. Irritatingly, he'd lost his appetite.

  Then a small sound broke the glum spell. “Mama,” came the voice, high and clear. “Mama… Mama…”

  Isangrim had climbed down from the bed, his wooden wolf clutched in one chubby fist. He toddled across the floor, his steps unsteady but determined, until he reached Albi’s chair. It was his only word, the only one he seemed to need; for in it held everything he could ever need anyway. He raised his arms, a gesture of defiant want, his golden eyes wide and trusting.

  Albi’s planning thoughts scattered like dry leaves. She looked down at him, and her face transformed, the hard lines of politics softening into something tender and fierce. She set down her spoon, reached beneath the table, and lifted him onto her lap. He was heavy now, solid, but she adjusted him easily, shifting her posture to accommodate the new weight of him against her belly.

  “Hey there my big wolf,” she whispered, pressing her lips to his temple. She took up her trencher, still half-full of stewed meat and parsnips, and held it before him. “Now you’re done with play, come and eat. Fill your little belly, and grow strong for me and your sibling.”

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  Isangrim grinned, a gap-toothed, triumphant smile, and plunged his fingers into the gravy, bringing a chunk of meat to his mouth with a messy, gleeful abandon. Albi laughed, a low, musical sound, and curled her finger around the end of his messy braid, twirling the bead at its tip.

  Fenris watched them, the firelight dancing on their faces, and said nothing of his protest to the plans he had seen in her mind, though they were ravenous creatures caged behind his closed mouth. There would be time for that later.

  Thank you for waiting. Albi’s thought reached him, and he caught the sheepish, sweet smile on her tired face.

  ????

  Outside, the strong wind carried the soft snow up against the wood and leather-hung doorway, a sound like dry bones rattling, but within the small hut the air was thick with warmth and the heavy, sweet scent of mother's milk.

  Albi lay upon the piled furs, her body a landscape of soft curves—her breast exposed, the nipple dark and distended, glistening with the wax and wane of Isangrim’s idle hunger. He would suckle with a steady, rhythmic pull, his small mouth working and making soft, wet sounds that would become lost in the crackle of the dying flames. Then he would become distracted by a phantom noise or smell, a thought of something building excitingly in his small mind, and release with an attempt to make conversation with Albi; Mama and other babbling, incomprehensible sounds that she would pretend to understand with serious astuteness, though Fenris could feel the laughter she held back.

  Then the babe would place himself back at her breast, satisfied with his own explanation, and the milk would let down in a warm rush into his mouth; a sensation that began in her spine and radiated outward, not quite pleasure or pain, but a deep, biological satisfaction that made her eyelids heavy with calm. Her fingers, long and pale, moved through the dark, curling silk of his hair, over and over, a monotony of love that bordered on meditative prayer.

  Fenris lay behind her, his chest pressed to her back, his thigh tucked beneath her hip; content to dwell in the sensations of her body. His hand rested upon the swell of her stomach, where his child grew—a firm presence beneath the skin. His palm moved in slow, sweeping arcs over the taut flesh, feeling the subtle heat of creation, the way her body had already begun to shift its center of gravity. His other arm was trapped beneath her neck, numb and pins-and-needles, but he did not move it. He would not disturb this peace, this small, fierce domesticity that had been carved out for them.

  Eventually, the suckling slowed. Isangrim’s mouth went slack as his heavy eyes closed and failed to reopen, a thread of milk breaking between his lips and her breast, pearl-like in the firelight. His breathing deepened, settling into the rhythm of deep sleep. Albi waited, patient as stone, until she was certain, then lifted him—heavier now, solid with the weight of his year—and carried him to the small cot Fenris had built from willow branches and stuffed with goose down, set close enough to the hearth that the warmth would reach him. She laid him down with a gentleness that belied the strength in her arms, covering him with a scrap of fur, and returned to the bed.

  She turned, facing Fenris now, her body pressed the length of his, belly to hip, breast to chest. Through the bond, her thoughts came, clear and sharp as a blade drawn from a sheath.

  I am tired of you assuming how I feel, she sent, her mind-voice soft yet sharp, weak but unyielding. I think of Isangrim. I think of the babe in my womb. I think of them every moment. But Rusk’s victories against the Hunters are smoke, Fenris. They are not enough. And I must do something. We must stick with our plans.

  Fenris felt the words like a cold draft. He laid his hand back upon her stomach, his thumb tracing circles.

  The wolves of Skoltha have never been so at risk, she continued, when his blank mind failed tiredly to come up with a response. I must go. I must go. Please understand, Fenris. I must go.

  Fenris sighed, his breath stirring the silver hair at her temple. His hand drifted upward, leaving the swell of her belly to close upon her breast—soft now, supple and warm. I will come with you, the thought was heavy with finality.

  Albi shook her head, a minute movement against his shoulder. You cannot. Beeba and I must go alone with the caravan.

  It is an unnecessary risk, Fenris argued, his fingers tightening around her breast, not in anger, but in fear. You need an escort. A wolf escort. At least one, and let it be me. What if you are attacked on the road south? What if you are taken? What if they do not wish to entertain you, as you claim. What if—

  Any wolf-presence will be seen as a threat, she interrupted, her thoughts sharp as flint. If we come down the mountain with wolves at our flanks, they will think of us all as hostages who have come not to speak our mind, but to speak what we were commanded. Our words will be devalued and our intentions suspect. They will believe our goal is freedom and not peace. So we must come to them already free. Two women alone, seeking parley with the gift of their freed people at our backs. Not a pack that can be seen as another war-party.

  And Hroth? Fenris asked, his mind-voice sour. Surely he cannot be happy with Beeba’s leave.

  He is not happy, Albi admitted, and the images of Beeba’s scowl with some earlier memory of an argument with her mate flashed before Fenris’s eyes from the bond. But he knows it is the only way. He knows it, even if it breaks his teeth to say it, as it does yours.

  Fenris closed his eyes. She had the right of it. His teeth were clenched now. He felt her hand then, slipping beneath the loose linen of his shirt, her cool palm flat against the heat of his chest over his heart. The sensation of her skin against his, the tickle of her fingers through the hair there, seemed to draw the poison of anger out of his veins.

  When will you leave? he asked, his thoughts ragged with a pathetic, weak emotion. How long will you be gone?

  There is rumor of days of warm wind coming, she said, her hand trailing lower now, over the ridges of his stomach, to the tie of his breeches. before the blizzard that will arrive from the north. It is a small window that we must take advantage of. And as for how long... Her fingers found him, pressing wantonly against the hardening length of his cock through the rough wool. I do not know, my Alpha.

  Fenris grew still, half-hearted even as his body betrayed him, rising to her touch. You are trying to distract me from my anger, Albi, he accused, his mind-voice rough, with your….sweet words and touch. I am not so weak as you believe.

  Albi’s lips found the hollow of his throat, her breath hot as she pressed them against his skin; then cool as she inhaled his scent into her nose. All this energy you wish to use to fight the inevitable, her thoughts were soft, husky with intent, can be better spent somewhere else. Give me your anger, Fenris.

  Her fingers worked the tie. He did not know how to fight both sensations at once; that at his neck, and that of her hand which gently curled around him inside his trousers now, skin to skin, warm and firm. You cheat. He groaned, a sound that was part defeat, part surrender. He kissed her then, with a passion that held the taste of his anger, his tongue sweeping into her mouth, tasting the salt of her, the concentrated sweetness of her pregnancy.

  He pulled back enough to look her over. The embers gilded her skin where they showed through the parting of her shift, painting her in shades of bronze and shadow. Her eyes that held him were desperate and sorrow-filled, weighted with guilt at the pain she was causing in him. She wanted him to see it, to rage against it, to punish her for the leaving she intended, with a violence that would absolve her. It was there in the set of her jaw, the challenge in the tilt of her chin; hurt me, her body begged of him, as I will hurt you.

  Fenris reached for her with hands that trembled not from weakness, but from the iron control required to deny her.

  He found the hem of her linen, rough-spun and worn soft by countless rough-washings, and drew it upward over her head. The fabric caught for a moment on the silver fall of her hair, then released, leaving her completely bare in the dim, russet light. Her breasts were heavy, even when soft. The scent of her was overwhelming and sharp with the acidic bite of her sadness.

  He moved over her with solemn deliberation. He knows he is being asked to commit an act of mercy disguised as selfishness. He pressed his face to the hollow of her throat, inhaling deeply, letting her essence fill his lungs—a balm against the terror coiling in his gut. His lips traced the ridge of her collarbone, the hollow above her breast, and when he took her nipple whole into his mouth, the taste of her milk was a strange, rich comfort. He licked at it, around it, with a slow, savoring drag of his tongue that made her breath hitch, but when her fingers pulled at his hair, a provocation, an urge for him to bite, he resisted. He released her breast with a wet sound that was loud in the quiet hut, and moved his mouth to her ribs, her belly, her hip—and every other soft curve but where she burned like a holy fire only for him.

  He pushed away the rough fabric of his trousers, expelling his heavy erectness before her.

  She arched up to him, offering herself, her hips rising to meet him in invitation; that twisted knot of her guilted sadness beneath it. She was wet with her need for him to savage her, to tear at the guilt in her flesh with teeth and thrust. She wanted his anger, his possession, his rough reclaiming of what she was stealing away. She wanted to be punished for her courage; for her desire to end everyone else's suffering at the expense of his.

  He would not give her that satisfaction.

  He would make her suffer, too.

  When he entered her, it was with a slow, steady pressure; shallow, just his tip, a teasing invasion that made her whimper—a low, frustrated sound in the back of her soft throat. She tried to pull him down, to force him deep with the arch of her spine, but he held her hips pinned with the weight of his large hands, his fingers digging into the flesh of her thighs against her, hard enough to restrain and not to bruise the soft cream of her skin. He moved in shallow, maddening strokes that brushed the entrance of her but denied her depths, refusing the friction she craved, denying the lustful violence that would let her believe she was being forced into submission rather than choosing it.

  You will miss me, she taunted him, her mind-voice ragged, you will ache for me, Fenris, and I will not be here to soothe you. I will be miles away and you will feel each one as a million single man-steps. Or will you not miss me at all? Will you not think of me once? Will you be so filled with anger that you do nothing but resent my absence?

  He growled against her collarbone, a sound of refusal, and thrust again—just as shallow, just as slow, a deliberate antagonism that made her curse aloud.

  This is what I will feel, fierce one. He smiled down at her.

  She thrashed, her palms pushing, beating hard at his chest, her body trying to wrest control from him, but he was immovable. He set a pace that was glacial, savoring the tight, wet heat of her around just the head of him, feeling her muscles flutter and clench in frustration, trying to draw him in deeper. He denied her. He made her feel every inch of the separation she intended to inflict upon them, stretched out into an eternity of shallow, teasing strokes that left her sobbing with need.

  She tried to claw at his back, he caught her wrists and pinned them above her head, holding her there with his iron-strong hold while his other moved down between them. He found the swollen nub of her sex with his thumb and circled it—slow, maddening circles that matched the rhythm of his shallow thrusts. She bucked, her head thrown back, her silver hair spilling across the furs like a river of moonlight.

  If you are doing the right thing, why do you have so much guilt in your chest, Albi?

  I don’t know. A single, frustrated tear began to roll from her cheek. He arched his hips, pressing only a hair more inward, enough to make her breath catch in her throat, and the sadness wane for a moment, before he came away again.

  I might not come back. That is the truth of it. And I shouldn’t leave you or Isangrim. I shouldn’t but I must. I know it will hurt you, and hurt him, but I……I have to. I should. I must.

  He waited until she was trembling, until the bond between them was screaming with her unmet need, a red haze of desperation. Then, he opened the connection between them wide.

  He let her feel exactly what she was doing to him—the tight, silken clasp of her around him, the heat, the wetness. He projected it into her mind with brutal clarity: this is what I feel when I am inside you. Then, through the bond, he forced her to feel her own sensations reflected back through his perception—doubled, trebled, a hall of mirrors of pleasure. He felt her feel him feeling her, and he pushed that sensation back, creating a recursive loop, a feedback of ecstasy that spiraled inward upon itself, intensifying with each circuit until it was a white-hot wire of sensation burning between them.

  She screamed, a soundless gasp, her back bowing off the furs. He felt her climax building from her own frayed nerves alone.

  Only then, when she was weeping with it, when her mind was breaking apart under the weight of the forced sensation, did he give her what she truly wanted.

  He released her wrists, gripped her hips, and drove into her with long, powerful thrusts that seated him to the hilt, as deep as he could go, merging with her so completely that for a moment there was no separation between where he ended and she began. He filled her, possessed her, anchored her, and through the bond, he made her feel that too—the rightness of it, of his claiming.

  It was the forgiveness she cried out to him for.

  Her body seized around him, a flood of heat surging through her blood. Her back bowed, her eyes rolling back, and through the bond he was drowned into a vision that flooded her with the climax—the Great Mother Wolf, massive and silver as moonlight made beast, stood on the cliff of Black Rock Mountain. She lifted her muzzle to the star-wheeled sky above and released a howl from the infinite depth of her chest whose vibration shook the bedrock of the mountain and trembled as a quivering into Albi’s softening body.

  As Fenris spent himself within her—a white-hot rush that emptied him of emotion—he heard the howl.

  Not in the vision, but in the waking world, piercing the snow-heavy silence of the night. Achingly close and rising above the wind outside their door.

  They froze, locked together, his body still buried deep in hers; their chests heaving in unison, skin slick with sweat and seed and the salt of shared effort.

  The sound came again, long and joyful, carrying across the frozen village.

  Albi’s eyes cleared as though she’d woken up from sleep and turned her head toward the sound outside the door. Her lips parted mid-breath, her eyes still glazed with the aftermath of pleasure and vision.

  She knew.

  He felt the knowledge crystallize in her gut.

  "Fenris," she whispered, her voice rough and husky, trembling with the weight of this new prophecy. "That was the Great Mother. She’s given another wolf their Imprint."