Chapter 5
Not a single wolf had awakened.
The teenagers had knelt upon the stones, weeping and bleeding, but the sacred sparks had simply failed to ignite. Their beasts remained comatose, buried beneath a dead, hollow silence that Wyatt could feel vibrating like a tombstone in the back of his own mind.
Jericho was dying from the root up.
"The wards are failing, too," Beta Kenneth spoke up from the lower bench, his weathered face dark with grime from a double shift on the perimeter. "The border stones along the northern ridge cracked last night. The blue runes turned to chalk. The scouts say the permafrost is creeping south down the gorge at a rate of five leagues a week. If this cold hits the lower valley by midsummer, our herds will starve before the first snow even officially falls."
"We excised the curse!" Wyatt shouted, turning on Corin, his voice dropping into a desperate, hollow register. "We did what the mirror commanded! I took the silver tooth myself! I dragged her to the bluffs! I severed her!"
The name was never spoken aloud in the council hall—it had been struck from the pack ledger by Corin’s own quill the night of the equinox—but the ghost of her lingered in every corner of the room.
Petra.
Wyatt’s chest seized with an old, familiar ache that he had tried, with every ounce of his warrior's pride, to drown in cedar tea and training bouts.
For twenty years, she had been a shadow in the scullery. Quiet. Obedient. Her scent had been nothing—a blank space in a pack where every individual’s identity was painted in loud, fragrant strokes of musk, pine, and iron. He had grown up with her cleaning the mud from his boots, binding his cracked ribs after territorial fights, handing him warm water with downcast, reverent eyes.
She had loved him. He had known it. Every wolf in the manor had known it. She had looked at him as if he were the sun itself, even while the other pups shoved her into the dirt and stole her winter blankets because she lacked a wolf to push back.
And when Corin had dragged the shattered ancestral mirror into the council chamber, revealing the dark prophecy of annihilation—*the scentless ruin that would lay Jericho to waste*—Wyatt had hardened his heart.
He had told himself that an Alpha must make the cuts that save the limb. He had told himself that her death was a small, gentle thing—a quiet sacrifice to ensure the glory of the great oak.
He remembered the feel of her cool, smooth neck beneath his fingers. He remembered the tears on her cheeks, and the terrible, gentle whisper that had shattered his sleep every night since: *I won't fight, Wyatt. I promise. Keep them safe.*
He had murdered her for this pack.
And this pack was rotting in his hands anyway.
"The mirror did not lie," Corin insisted, his voice trembling as he tapped his ivory cane against the slate. "The girl was the anchor of the curse! If the blight continues, it is because some of her dark residue remains unpurged upon the mountain! A witch’s death leaves rot upon the earth where she expires!"
"She wasn't a witch, Corin!" Wyatt snapped, lunging forward until he was leaning over the elder’s chair, his teeth inches from the old man's face. "She was a scentless, harmless girl who didn't even have the teeth to bite a hare! She washed your robes! She stoked your hearth!"
"Then why does the northern wind taste of silver and slaughter?!" Kenneth interrupted, his voice cutting through the Alpha's fury like a wet whip.
The hall went dead silent.
Wyatt pulled back, his nostrils flaring. "What did you say?"
Kenneth stood up, unrolling a sheepskin map across the scarred oak. His calloused finger stabbed a point high in the jagged crags of the northern bluffs, well past the old boundary markers.
"Three of our out-patrols have vanished in that sector over the past ten days," Kenneth said quietly. "No distress calls. No sound over the mind-link. Just... snuffed out. Yesterday, our trackers found what was left of Captain Garret’s squad at the entrance to the Black Gorge."
"Were they butchered?" Wyatt demanded, dread curling like acid in his gut.
"No," Kenneth swallowed hard. "That's the madness of it. They weren't torn apart by rogues. Their throats weren't ripped. They were found frozen solid inside blocks of blue river-ice, standing upright, their weapons still sheathed. Their horses had been led away, unhurt. And carved into the stone above their heads was an old glyph."
Kenneth dipped his finger in a spill of dark ale on the table and drew a crude mark upon the wood: a circular crest resembling a cracked moon surrounded by jagged frost-spikes.
"It is the mark of the Pale Sovereign," Kenneth whispered. "The rumors have reached the low villages, Wyatt. The rogues are not fighting each other anymore. They aren't scavenging like mangy dogs. Someone has gathered them. Someone has broken their madness, armed them with hardened steel, and forged them into a host. They say there is a warlord sitting upon the northern throne who commands the blizzard itself."
Corin’s face drained of what little color it had left. His liver-spotted hands shook so violently that the ivory cane slipped from his grip, clattering loudly across the flagstones.
"The Fenrir..." Corin muttered, his watery eyes staring into the dark rafters. "No. It is impossible. That blood died three centuries ago. The ancestors took them down into the salt... they were bound..."
Wyatt ignored the old man's senile rambling. A cold, furious clarity settled over him.
If there was an army gathering in the north, it was the cause of the blight. It was the source of the unnatural winter that was strangling Jericho’s crops and freezing the spiritual marrow of their young. Some rogue warlord had taken advantage of Jericho's weakened borders to establish a foothold, siphoning the valley's ancient leylines to feed their dark arts.
This was a threat he could strike. This was a monster he could run down with iron and fang.
"Kenneth," Wyatt barked, his voice ringing with the full, unquestioned authority of the Alpha Heir. "Sound the assembly horn. Mobilize the Iron Vanguard. Twenty of our finest heavy fighters, full silver-mail and wolfsbane-dipped blades."
"Wyatt, wait," Corin gasped, struggling to rise from his seat. "The omens—the mirror—"
"Damn your mirror, old man!" Wyatt turned on his heel, his heavy wolf-fur cloak swirling behind him like smoke. "Your mirror told me to kill a loyal girl, and look what it brought us! Frost at our gates and starving children in our streets! I am done listening to the dead."
He marched down the length of the ancestral hall, his boots ringing like hammer blows against the slate.
"I will ride to the Black Gorge," Wyatt proclaimed, his eyes burning with amber fury. "I will find this shadow-king of the crags, I will rip his frozen heart from his ribs, and I will hang his head from our northern gate before the new moon. If the gods want blood to break this winter, they will have his."
