Chapter 2

The storm ran across the wastes like a starving beast.

I don't know how long I crawled. My nails had torn away long ago, and the blood they left froze to grit the instant the wind touched it. My body had stopped registering pain; all that remained was a single animal compulsion. Crawl. Get away from here. Die far enough out that at least my child lives.

In the last second before my mind slid into the dark, I heard it:

"Moon Goddess above… who throws a girl out into a blizzard?"

When I opened my eyes again, I was in a dim little cabin, the air thick with the bitter smell of herbs.

"Don't move." The voice belonged to a rasping old woman — Elara, the hedge-witch who lived alone at the edge of the Northlands, the only wild healer for miles. "Your body's cold as death. And you — you're still burning through your own power. Are you trying to get yourself killed, child?"

She pressed a bowl of steaming black brew into my hands. I took it, shaking — and went rigid the moment my fingers brushed my own stomach.

"I—"

"Don't fret. You're a stubborn one. So are they." Elara sighed, her gaze gone complicated where it settled on my belly. "Three. There are three lives beating inside you. Child, you've been burning yourself down like a lantern. Keep on the way you are and they'll starve for want of nourishment — and you'll be devoured by your own power before it ever breaks loose."

Three?

My fingers curled without my meaning them to, gouging a deep furrow in the straw. The ashen despair I'd felt when Cassius cast me out was suddenly overtaken by something sharp, something that stung. It wasn't only the will to survive. It was fiercer than that — the near-madness that goes by the name mother.

Shaking, I reached for the pouch I kept against my skin. Inside was the only thing my mother had left me. For nine years I'd never dared open it outside the dead of night. The leather was cold, sour with age. By the fire's weak red glow, my fingertips found the creased sheet of paper. A smear of blood — from where the door-latch had scraped me earlier — brushed the corner without my noticing.

There was no grand incantation. The writing simply bloomed up before my eyes, bleeding through as though surfacing in water, every stroke soaked in cold malice:

"Maeve — never let the Ashmoor pack see the color in your eyes. The first one who wants you dead is almost always your fated mate."

My pupils shrank to points.

The letter trembled in my hand. Before I could turn the words over, the snow on the roof was shaken loose by some force from outside.

Thud.

Low. Heavy. Elara snuffed the fire in an instant. The cabin dropped into dead silence, broken only by the occasional crackle of a dying ember. She didn't dare so much as breathe — only pointed, face bloodless, at the window.

Outside, black shapes stretched long across the snow. The Cleansers — the hounds the Priest Council kept. They crossed the drifts without a single footfall, a company of weightless ghosts.

The man at their head stopped outside the door. "We know you're in there, Maeve. The High Priestess says you won't last the winter. Stop struggling. Come out, and at least we'll make it quick."

Elara clutched at my sleeve, shaking her head, tears running silent down her face.

I looked at her. Then down at my belly. The old me would have trembled to save her own skin — but now a cold, shivering calm took hold of me. I would not pull their fire down onto the woman who had saved my life.

"Thank you," I said softly, meeting those tear-filled eyes, "for letting my children hear this world a little longer."

Then I let go of Elara's hand and pushed myself up, swaying, onto my feet. I crossed to the door and laid my palm flat against the rough boards; outside, the firelight was already licking the wood hot. Even if it cost my last drop of blood, I would put myself between them and it.

I was about to push the door open and meet the death waiting for me — when the blizzard around the cabin dropped, all at once, into an eerie, dead stillness.

The howling wind vanished as if wiped away by a giant hand, and the air froze solid as a slab of iron. Outside, the Cleansers locked rigid where they stood.

Then the terror came down — vast, soul-shaking, crashing out of some black abyss to smother the whole waste. Even the torches already burning in the Cleansers' fists shuddered and guttered out beneath the weight of it.

The snow began to tremble. Deep in the woods, countless pairs of wolf-eyes kindled at once. Then, all together, the wolves began to keen, and the birds burst screaming from the trees.

"What is this…" I breathed.