Chapter 4
Petra vaulted lightly down to the snow. She turned back and looked up at the rim of the crevasse, where Bran and Kael were staring down in paralyzed, absolute terror.
"Bring your knives," Petra called up to them, her voice calm and carrying effortlessly against the howling gale. "There is enough meat on this shelf to feed forty wolves through the thaw."
***
They did not stay three for long.
The northern barrens were the dumping ground of the southern confederacies. Every year, packs like Jericho, Red Oak, and the High Valley purged their ranks of the broken: elders whose joints were too swollen to run border skirmishes, omegas who had failed their reproductive trials, and runts born without the full fire of a fighting wolf. They were pushed past the boundary stones with their bonds severed, left to starve or tear one another apart in solitary madness.
Petra found them in the dead hollows. She found them shivering beneath overhangs, gnawing on dry lichens, waiting for death to grant the mercy their kin had denied them.
She did not demand submission. She did not bare her fangs and force them onto their backs, claws pressed against their soft bellies until they wet themselves in terror—the ancient, brutal dogma that Alpha Wyatt and Elder Corin insisted was the holy order of the goddess.
When she found a former border guard named Vane, whose hind legs had been crushed by an elk’s hoof and cast out by the Red Oak pack to die of gangrene, Petra knelt beside him in the snow.
Vane had bared his yellowed, broken teeth, snarling with the blind desperation of a dying beast. "Finish it, witch. Don't play with me."
Petra did not strike him. She laid her bare hand against the shattered, inflamed joint of his hip.
The silver frost flowed from her skin. It did not freeze him; it numbed the searing agony in his marrow, drawing out the rotting heat of the infection into a crystalline husk of black rime that sloughed away into the dirt. With it came a quiet, resolute warmth—not the parasitical pull of a pack bond, but an open expanse of raw vitality.
"You can stay here and feed the crows," Petra said, looking into his wild, fevered eyes with irises of solid silver-ringed ice. "Or you can stand up and carve your own iron. In my camp, no one bows. We hold the frost together, or we freeze alone. Choose."
Vane had stared at his healed leg, weeping silently until the tears froze into pearls against his sunken cheeks. Then, he had crawled to his knees, not to bare his throat, but to press his forehead to the stone before her boots.
Within two months, the basalt cavern beneath the northern peaks had transformed.
It was no longer a makeshift shelter; it was a fortress carved from glacial stone and dark cedar timber hauled from the frozen gorges. Fifty exiles lived within its halls. They were no longer the mangy, trembling husks who had been hunted by Jericho’s border patrols.
Fed on the rich, frost-preserved meat of ancient beasts that only Petra could fell, their hollow chests filled out with lean, corded muscle. Their coats grew thick, heavy with the silver-sheen of the deep north. Most terrifying of all was the quiet.
Normal wolf packs were noisy, chaotic hives of dominance posturing, growls, and submissive whining. But Petra’s camp moved with the eerie, coordinated precision of a winter storm. She taught them to breathe the frost. She taught them to mute their scents, to walk across crust-snow without leaving a print, to move as ghosts through the whiteout.
They called her the Lady of the Rime. When she walked through the central cavern, draped in a mantle fashioned from the Khar-Ursa's white hide, her silver-frosted hair bound back with cords of sinew, even the most battle-hardened old wolves ceased their work and looked upon her with a reverence that skirted near holy terror.
She had not saved them by bringing them into a fold. She had made them understand that the fold was a slaughterhouse, and they were the wolves who had broken through the fence.
One evening, as Petra stood upon the northernmost cliff, gazing toward the distant, hazy blue line of Jericho’s valley, Bran stepped to her side. His coat was sleek now, his cataract-clouded eyes sharp and clear, a hunting bow of hardened spruce wood slung across his broad shoulder.
"The wind smells different tonight, Alpha," Bran said softly.
Petra smiled faintly. "I told you not to call me that. I am no one's master."
"You don't take our blood, Petra. That makes you the only Alpha worth bleeding for," Bran replied simply, his gaze following hers to the south. "The scent from the valley is changing. It isn't green anymore. It smells of wet soot and dead roots."
Petra closed her eyes, letting her consciousness expand.
Without the parasitic brand of Jericho choking her spine, her senses reached across leagues of mountain rock. The Primordial Frost inside her tasted the air of the southern basin.
Bran was right.
The valley of Jericho was suffocating.
***
In the grand ancestral hall of Jericho Pack, three hundred leagues south of the Razor Ridge, the air smelled of burning sage and panic.
Alpha Heir Wyatt slammed both fists onto the great oak table, the impact rattling the brass flagons and cracking the aged varnish.
"Explain it to me again, Corin," Wyatt snarled, his golden-amber eyes flashing with Alpha dominance. "And this time, do not quote the third stanza of the Moon-Mother's lament. Tell me why my warriors are hunting field mice because the herds have vanished!"
Elder Corin sat at the high seat, looking older than his seventy winters. The rich velvet mantle he wore seemed two sizes too large for his shrunken frame. His knuckles, swollen with an unseasonable damp chill that had settled into the valley three moons ago, clutched an ivory walking stick.
"The spirits are unsettled, Wyatt," Corin said, his voice straining to maintain the detached authority he had commanded for four decades. "It is a test. The gods demand greater devotion."
"Devotion does not fill our granaries!" Wyatt roared.
He spun away from the table, pacing the flagstones like a caged beast. Beneath his leather tunic, his broad shoulders were knotted with tension. He had not slept properly in forty nights.
Every morning brought a new disaster.
The Great Equinox had passed, which should have brought the balmy winds of the southern sea and the blossoming of the valley's vast apple orchards. Instead, the frost had refused to lift. A strange, bitter cold had seeped out of the earth itself, turning the spring rye into black, putrid mush before the shoots could break through the soil. The river that fed their mill had slowed to a sluggish, gray trickle, choking on unseasonal slush.
Worse—unforgivably worse—was what was happening in the birthing dens.
A fortnight ago, the ceremony of the First Moon had been held for nineteen young wolves who had turned sixteen winters. Wyatt had stood at the altar, blade in hand, ready to welcome them into the collective mind of the pack.
