Chapter 5
They were drinking. They were laughing.
"Drink deep, Ronald," I whispered. My voice stirred the dust at my feet, carrying across the dead canyon in waves of quiet thunder. "Drink until the cup runs dry. The bill has come due."
***
Four miles south, the Great Hall of the Sunriver Pack was blazing with forced light and defiant brass horns.
Alpha Ronald sat upon his elevated dais of polished mountain granite, clutching a silver-trimmed goblet with fingers that still bore faint, white tremors.
The march back from the northern border had been humiliating, and Ronald despised nothing on earth more than being seen off-balance. At the stroke of midnight, when that unnatural, concussive wave had exploded from the exile line, his own knees had betrayed him in the mud. He had dropped like a slaughtered ox, gasping for air while Astrid vomited dark bile onto her ermine cloak and Torin screamed over shattered spear-splinters.
Yet within twenty minutes of turning their backs on the smoking trench, the acute, blinding agony had receded.
It had not vanished—it had settled into a dull, thrumming cramp coiled behind Ronald’s sternum, like an unswallowed stone. But Ronald had immediately seized upon that easing as proof of his own invulnerability.
*Phantom recoil,* he had declared to the council elders while washing the mud from his face in the anteroom. *A severed mate bond always lashes the Alpha who swings the blade. The Moon Goddess tests the master’s resolve when an unworthy soul is torn out by the roots. And the border stones? Brittle granite weathered by three centuries of frost. The expulsion of her toxic presence merely cracked what was already rotting.*
He had insisted on the banquet. He had demanded the heavy oak doors be thrown wide, the tallow chandeliers lit to full blaze, and the wine cellars drained of their finest reserves. Three hundred high-ranking warriors, elders, and noble matrons filled the tiered benches in their velvet tunics and winter pelts, their voices pitched slightly too loud, their laughter ringing with the brittle, frantic energy of beasts trying to convince themselves they had not smelled a predator in the dark.
Beside Ronald sat Lady Astrid.
She had washed the foul bile from her lips, dusted rice powder over her chalk-white throat, and changed into a gown of pure white northern silk threaded with freshwater pearls. Yet her knuckles were bloodless where she gripped the arm of her gilded chair. Underneath the heavy musk of her wolf-lily perfume, Ronald could smell the sharp, metallic tang of her lingering nausea. Her inner wolf was silent, curled tight against her ribs in an uneasy, defensive ball, but Astrid smiled through stiff, painted lips whenever an elder raised a cup in her direction.
"A toast!" Elder Orson bellowed, rising from the central bench.
The old wolf was half-drunk, his beard glistening with grease from roasted boar, his yellow eyes wide and desperate for normalcy. He raised an iron tankard high into the smoke-filled air.
"To Alpha Ronald! And to the Lady Astrid of the Northern Marches!"
The warriors pounded their heavy fists against the oak tables, making the platters dance, though their answering roar carried a nervous, hollow edge.
"Let the northern ridge tremble as the dead limb is cast off!" Orson shouted, his voice echoing off the vaulted rafters. "Let the pariah’s dying spasms shake the dust from our stones! Tonight, the Sunriver Pack has purged the blight from its hearth! Tonight, we enter our pure-blooded dawn!"
"To the Alpha!" the hall chorused. "To the Pure Blood!"
Ronald smiled, lifting his goblet. He forced a surge of Alpha dominance to radiate from his shoulders, pushing the golden aura outward to smother the lingering anxiety in the hall. It was a familiar, intoxicating exercise of absolute power, and he drank deep of the spiced wine to wash away the memory of kneeling in the mud before a wolfless girl.
"You see, Astrid?" Ronald murmured, leaning toward her as the roar subsided into the clamor of feasting. "A momentary convulsion. A pariah’s parting curse, nothing more. A true Alpha bends the land to his will; he does not cower because a border stone cracked under pressure."
Astrid offered him a tight, porcelain smile, though her fingers dug into his velvet sleeve with frantic urgency. "Of course, my Alpha. It was only... the cold. When she touched the silver line, it felt as though someone poured graveyard dirt directly into my lungs."
"Her taint leaving our air," Ronald dismissed smoothly, though a dull, rhythmic throb gave a sudden kick behind his own ribs. "She was an empty vessel, soaking up bile for twenty years. When I severed the thread, the poison had to discharge somewhere. It is done. By sunrise, your father’s heavy lancers will cross the southern ford, and our reign will be uncontested."
He lifted his goblet to take another draught.
Then he stopped.
Ronald stared down into the polished silver cup.
The spiced blackberry wine, which had tasted rich and heavy with cloves only moments before, had changed. A thick, dark film floated on the surface, separating into iridescent, oily rings. When the liquid touched his tongue, it carried no sweetness—only the flat, gagging flavor of rusted nails and stagnant ditch-water.
He set the goblet down with a sharp clatter. "The vintage has turned."
"What?" Astrid blinked down at her own chalice. "Ronald, this is the 742 private reserve from the crypt cellars—"
Before she could finish, a heavy pewter platter crashed against the flagstones in the second row.
The sound cut through the laughter like a blade.
Beta Torin sat rigid on his bench. The roasted venison had tumbled into the dirt between his boots. The Beta’s massive shoulders were locked in a horrific, trembling spasm, his head tilted back toward the cedar rafters as his breath hitched in wet, rattling gasps.
"Torin?" Ronald called out, his voice sharp with Alpha authority. "Control yourself. You are in front of the northern envoys."
Torin did not drop his eyes in submission. He could not.
He slowly raised his right arm, extending his hand into the torchlight.
The Great Hall fell into a suffocating, dead silence.
Torin’s palms—pierced and torn when his silver-tipped spear had shattered against Sariyah’s chest at the border—were no longer wrapped in clean linen. The bandages had dissolved into a slimy, gray mush. Beneath the wet rags, the flesh of his fingers had turned the color of scorched slate. The skin was drawn so tight across his knuckles that it had split open in long, bloodless fissures, weeping a thin, watery fluid that smelled of ancient rot.
"Alpha..." Torin wheezed, his teeth clicking together in rapid, uncontrollable bursts. "It’s... it’s spreading. It went past my wrist. Now my shoulder... my shoulder feels like it’s packed with river ice."
Ronald’s breath caught in his throat.
*River ice.*
The exact words Sariyah had whimpered year after year, huddled in the drafty alcove of his bedchamber while three hearth fires raged around her.
*“Ronald, please... the blankets don't stop it. The frost is inside my ribs. It won't let me breathe.”*
He had called her an attention-seeking weakling. He had kicked her blankets aside and told her that only broken things shivered in a heated manor.
