Chapter 17 Seventeen
Selene's POV
I have never been able to stay put during a crisis.
Some wolves go quiet when the moment accelerates, internal and contained, processing before they act. I go the other direction. My hands require tasks, otherwise the other parts of me go searching for problems to create just so I have something to work on. So when Draven’s camp went from traveling column to emergency set-up in less than three minutes, I grabbed the closest stack of tent stakes and started pounding them into frozen earth before someone could tell me to.
No one told me where to place them. I looked at the site layout, I looked at where the senior wolves were positioning the main structure, and I figured it out. Selene’d been doing that her whole life, reading a room or a camp or a situation and identifying where an extra pair of hands would be most useful.
Pounding stakes into the ground in a storm was primal and physical, it kept my eyes moving.
I didn’t take my eye off Draven the whole time.
I want that to be made plain, even if only in the secrecy of my own mind. I did not trust him. I could see Elara warming to him in the way she warmed to things that challenged her, slowly and with complete focus, and I knew why because I had eyes and had observed the man operate for less than twenty-four hours and already understood that he was a kind of person who made you want to prove something to him without asking you to. That quality in a person was either this time genuine or it was engineered, and I had not quite decided which it happened to be with him.
Fortified men in the face of pressure were men who were always going according to plan you hadn’t been informed about.
I filed away that thought and continued working.
The storm rolled in fast and mean, with the temperature dropping in a way that went from uncomfortable to dangerous within thirty minutes. With the practiced efficiency I’d witnessed all morning, Draven’s wolves erected the camp, no wasted steps, no doubling back, and each person knowing their task and completing it before moving onto the next. I kept pace with them and asked no questions and forty minutes later we had a functional storm camp in the dead zone in a blizzard, which is not how I saw my week going when it all started.
Once the main structure was tied down and the wind lines were in place I noticed a void in action by the supply tent so I exploited it.
The wolf known as Brix was working solo, inventorying provisions with the laser focus of someone who had done this specific job so many times that it became meditative. She was small and still with a scar that ran clean through one eyebrow, which had healed well but obviously hadn’t been treated right away, the kind of scar you got far from anybody who knew anything about medicine. She’d been one of the three guards posted at the boundary of camp last night when we broke free from the trees, and she’d been the one who moved first when Draven waved for them to stand down.
Senior wolf. His trust extended to her.
I knelt beside her and unsorted a stack of wrapped provisions uninvited, encouraging a few moments of comfortable parallel labor before I spoke.
“How long were you at the border camp … that’s what they are calling it,” I asked. Casual. The tone of someone making small talk to kill time.
She gave me a sideways glance but didn’t stop her hands. "Five days."
“Before the summit preparation began,” I said.
“We were scouting the eastern approach.” She set a bundle aside. “The king likes to have terrain knowledge ahead of when he has to move through it quickly.”
“Five days is a deep scout,” I told him.
She gave me a look then. Not unfriendly but also direct, the look of someone who had caught on that the question was less casual than the tone. She was the type of wolf who had been around someone insightful long enough that she’d started to develop some of it herself.
“So it is,” she said, and returned to what she was doing.
I crouched beside her for another moment, and then stood up and walked away.
Five days.
I walked back through the camp running the numbers in my head, fixating with all the intent that I usually gave to problems that had implications.
The camp on the border was set up five days ago. The soiree at Silvercrest had taken place three nights prior. Which meant Draven was at the eastern border crossing with a contingent of his wolves two days before any of what happened that night had transpired. Two days before Elara stepped out onto those steps in a red dress, with a champagne bottle and tear-stained cheeks, and sat down alone in the cold.
He had been there already.
I flipped that over like you flip a stone to see both sides.
Sure, it could be exactly what Brix had said it was. Pre-summit scouting. Tactical positioning. A king who preferred to scout his terrain before he needed it, pitched camp at the quickest eastern crossing because the summit loomed and that was the pragmatic play.
It was possible.
I have known Elara since before either of us had any conception of what our lives would turn out to be like, when we were young enough that the future was still a theoretical thing that happened to other people. I know the rhythm of her thoughts and I know how she moves and I know the specific shape of her face as she is convincing herself something is a coincidence because to believe otherwise requires a bravery she isn’t sure yet resides within her.
I filed everything Brix has said and waited for my chance.
By late afternoon the storm had moved in completely, the wind rising to something that sent shivers through the tent walls and filled every space in the canvas with a high thin howling note that made talking feel like hard work. Light went gray, then dark gray, then that one particular darkness of a storm night when the snow reflects back whatever small ambient light is left over and creates a kind of false brightness that makes for an even fuller feeling of dark.
Most of the pack was inside. Settled, nibbling, the quiet murmur of a pack of wolves making do with imposed torpor.
I found Elara in the tent we had been assigned, seated with her knees up and her back against a folded pack, awake and staring into the void in roughly the way she did when working something through.
I sat down beside her.
I told her.
The border camp. Five days. Two days before the soiree. I presented it just like I had presented it in my own mind, clean and linear, free of editorializing, just the facts and the timeline and the difference between what could be dismissed as coincidence and what demanded a different explanation.
Elara listened without interrupting.
She was quiet for a long time when I finished.
Outside, wind pushed against the canvas and the nearest tent rope hummed a low sustained note.
“Maybe it was a coincidence,” she said.
Her voice was even. Considered.
I looked at her.
She was staring at the tent wall, her chin resting on her knees, and I watched the careful neutral expression she was keeping and thought about every version of that expression I had ever seen play across her face over the years and what was happening underneath it when she did.
“You know me for a long time,” I said.
She didn't answer.
“Long enough,” I said, “that I know you do not really believe that.”
She stayed quiet.
I saw her process it, that particular interior quality of a person sitting with something that alters the shape of what they thought they knew. Not panicking. Not angry. Just so, the way that Elara froze-up when something was telling her to overthink a decision she’d already made.
She hugged her knees closer to her chest and fixed her gaze to the tent wall.
The wind screamed along the ridge of the tent and the snow against the canvas produced a constant soft percussive sound outside and somewhere on the other side with the storm that had driven every wolf inside an hour ago, Draven was keeping watch.
I did not point that out.
I didn't need to.