Chapter 7
Freya looked toward the dark window, where the timberline of Eldenridge lay asleep in arrogant ignorance below.
"Let them come," she said softly.
In the subterranean council chambers beneath the Great Hall of Eldenridge, the air tasted of scorched parchment and panic.
Alpha Garrick slammed his heavy, ringed fist onto the ironwood table, sending tallow candles dancing in their bronze holders. Before him lay a crumbling vellum scroll, yellowed by three centuries of cedar smoke and sealed with the crest of a weeping moon.
Beside him, Jaxon stared down at the text, his handsome face twisted into an ugly mask of disbelief.
"Read it again," Garrick snarled, his voice vibrating with an anxious, ragged bass. "Tell me the shamans made an error, Elder Corin. Tell me our entire northern boundary doesn't hang on the neck of that wolfless wretch."
Elder Corin, hunched over his magnifying lens with hands that shook like winter aspen, wiped cold sweat from his wrinkled brow.
"There is no error, Alpha," the old shaman rasped, tapping a withered nail against the archaic glyphs inscribed along the perimeter of the territory map. "The ancestral land-deed of Eldenridge was never granted by imperial decree. It was consecrated by blood treaty with the high matriarchs of the Frost-Crest lineage. Freya’s maternal line."
"That hedge-witch line died with her mother," Jaxon spat, crossing his thick arms over his breastplate. "We gave the girl scraps for three years. She has no rights under pack law."
"The wards do not care for pack law, boy!" Garrick roared, turning on his heir with bared teeth. "Look at the boundary stones! Half the eastern valley is already bleeding frost-rot! The magical barriers protecting our hunting grounds are tied to the bloodline that anchored the original cornerstone. Every seventy years, on the night of the Blood Moon, the covenant must be renewed."
Corin nodded grimly, tracing the glowing red script that had begun to flare upon the parchment as the moon neared its zenith.
"The charter requires one of two things to preserve the territorial wards for another generation," Corin murmured. "Either the surviving daughter of the blood signs the renewal parchment with her living will, binding her life-force to the land’s perimeter... or she must be offered as a total blood sacrifice upon the ancestral altar precisely at the peak of the eclipse."
Silence fell over the vault, thick, suffocating, and reeking of sulfur.
Jaxon let out a short, incredulous laugh that failed to hide the tremor in his throat. "Then this is simple. We sent her to the high scree four days ago. She has no food, no wolf, and nothing for company but a half-dead cripple with iron in his marrow. Send two scouts up the crags. Offer her a warm blanket, a dry loaf, and a bed in the servant quarters. The little orphan will kiss my boots just for the chance to sign."
"She won't," a gruff voice interjected from the archway.
Garrick and Jaxon turned.
Commander Vance, captain of the border scouts, stepped into the light of the torches. His fur cloak was dusted with fresh powder, his face pale beneath his wind-burnt beard.
"What did you find?" Garrick demanded. "Is she dead?"
"Far from it, Alpha," Vance said, his voice hesitant, eyes darting between father and son. "I took a scout squad to the high timberline this morning to recover her body. We didn't find frozen corpses."
Jaxon scoffed. "Then what did you find? A pair of shivering beggars?"
"We found three rogue wolves dead in the ravine," Vance reported, his voice dropping to an uneasy whisper. "Not killed by traps or arrows. One had taken a crushing blow that shattered his heavy armor. Another was dropped instantly in hand-to-hand combat. The third was struck clean through from forty paces away."
Jaxon went rigid. "Impossible. Bowen is a broken stray. He can barely drag his iron brace across the hall without whimpering."
"The cabin has been repaired, Lord Jaxon," Vance pressed on, swallowed by his own dread. "The roof is newly framed with notched larch logs. Smoke rises from the chimney day and night. They have cured game hanging from the rafters. And when my scout crept near the perimeter fence, he didn't see an orphan weeping in the frost. He saw Freya walking the perimeter with her chin high, carrying herbs that burned with lunar light, completely untouched by the cold."
Garrick’s eyes darkened into slits of pure, territorial fury.
For three years, he had kept Freya under his heel, convinced she was a harmless, broken orphan whose lineage could be erased once Jaxon took the Alpha seat. He had allowed his son to humiliate her before the entire assembly, casting her out to freeze as an example of what happened to wolves without teeth.
And now, with the Blood Moon rising in less than twelve hours, the survival of the entire Eldenridge pack hinged on her throat.
"She is mocking us," Jaxon hissed, his fingers digging into the pommel of his broadsword until his knuckles popped. "She took that crippled dog just to spit in my face. And now she sits on my border, thriving while our boundary stones crack?"
"Pride is a luxury we do not have," Garrick growled, stepping toward his son. "If the territorial wards collapse at midnight, the imperial inspectors from the south will know Eldenridge has lost its sovereign mantle. Worse, Lord Vane’s conspirators will realize we cannot secure the northern trade route. They will withdraw their gold and leave us to rot."
Garrick leaned down, his yellowed Alpha eyes locking onto Jaxon's.
"Take thirty elite enforcers," Garrick commanded, his tone dripping with cold, unsparing brutality. "Take the silver shackles and the blood-scribed deed. Ride to the high cabin before dusk settles. If she signs the parchment willingly, bring her back in irons and keep her under permanent guard to anchor our wards. If she refuses..."
Garrick’s jaw tightened.
"...execute the cripple before her eyes. Drag her to the high altar in chains. At the peak of the Blood Moon, her sacrifice will seal the stones forever."
Jaxon’s lips curled into a vicious, triumphant sneer. The humiliation he had felt when Freya walked away from him without shedding a tear flared into a roaring inferno of malice.
"I will put an end to that stray myself," Jaxon whispered, turning toward the door with his heavy cloak billowing behind him. "Let us see how proud the little orphan remains when she watches her pet fall in the snow."
***
High on the northern scree, the sun had already begun to sink behind the jagged spine of the mountains, casting long, bleeding shadows across the white snowfields.
The sky was not turning the soft blue of twilight. It was bruising into a deep, foreboding violet, threaded with veins of angry copper. The Blood Moon was waking.
Inside the small border cabin, the hearth burned with a clear, steady roar.
Freya stood by the split-log table, methodically grinding the last measure of dried winter-orchid sap into a shallow soapstone bowl. Her movements were fluid, deliberate, and entirely devoid of fear. Across the wooden surface lay three small glass vials filled with a dense, shimmering silver liquid—the extracted imperial silver she had drawn out of Bowen’s chest over the last seventy-two hours.
