But I had to. He was not yet a warg, but he worshipped Wargyr, and that meant he forfeited the right to live. As he slept, I would cut his throat with his own dagger, and escape with the horse, the ritual book, and my journal, and leave his body for the wargs.

I accepted it, internalized it, and then tried my damnedest not to think about it. Better to let the fury of the moment carry me through, than to anticipate the sickness and terror of the deed.

Miro turned yet another page, and another round of laughter came pealing out of him. “What is this? You were jealous about Auré putting her hands all over him?” He looked up, eyes twinkling and reflecting the fire like red pools. “You really are twisted, Lady Silence. Imagine being jealous over that thing.”

I closed my eyes and counted to ten, exhaling slowly.

“‘Are you all mine?’” he mocked in a falsetto voice. “Is there something wrong with me?’”

My teeth gritted together painfully and I started the count over, trying to let the anger leak away, but it was dammed up inside me and I wanted to pull a burning brand from the fire and shove it in his eyes.

“Yes. I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you: you actually believe a fiend has feelings. You’re too naïve for this world, Cirrien. You serve one purpose, and that’s for him to feed.”

I opened my eyes, yearning to respond in a way that’d be clear even to him, and my body froze before my brain fully understood what I was seeing.

Miro, still leaning against a saddlebag, the firelight playing across his features, the darkness all around us. The flat yellow shine of eyes behind him, a multitude of stars dropped to earth. The elongated snout hanging over his shoulder, a thousand teeth gleaming.

He saw it in my face before he turned and fell away towards the fire, shouting several curses as he scrambled away from the warg.

Gods, they’d approached so silently, here between one breath and the next.

The warg made a terrible sound, a dry, scraping chuckle like laughter from a dead man. It had crouched behind him on all fours, and the others appeared from the dark, slinking along the perimeter of the firelight.

In a dim, numb part of my mind I wondered why the horse hadn’t screamed in terror, like any self-respecting horse would, and then I heard the wet sounds of tearing meat and understood.

Well, then. I was to die, I supposed, sometime in the next few minutes. Moving like a sleepwalker, completely cut off from my emotions, I picked up the journal, which Miro had dropped dangerously close to the fire. I brushed the dirt from its crimson leather binding, cradling it to my chest like a baby. All of my last words were in here; if Bane ever found my body, if the journal survived, I hoped he’d know from what he read that I had loved him with everything I had.

I stared up at the warg’s white pinprick pupils, so incongruously calm, and waited for it to descend in a maelstrom of tooth and claw.

“Well, then, Miro Kyril, what have you brought me?”

The voice that flowed out of the night was deep, masculine, with the rolling melodical burr of a northern Forian.

Miro rushed to his feet, still panting and pale, eyes frantically searching the crawling pack of wargs. He spun, looking for the speaker, until the wargs parted and he stepped through.

My first sight of Thurn Hakkon, and I knew him instantly. He would have been a handsome man in another time and place, tall and well-muscled, his deep auburn hair spilling over his back in braids, with a neatly-trimmed beard. But his chiseled features were sharp, brown eyes set in a predator’s gaze. His mouth was a cruel slash.

Hakkon stopped at the edge of the firelight, hands spread. “Well?”

Miro pointed at me, finger trembling. “Sir. I brought Cirrien lai Darran, Lady of the Rift.”

Hakkon turned that gaze on me, as though he hadn’t noticed me at all. Not an iota changed in his expression, but his eyes went glacially cold. “The Lady of the Rift,” he repeated in that musical voice.

“Yes.” Miro swallowed, and bowed nervously. At any other time I would have been gleeful to see him terrified, cringing like a worm, but now… all I could do was sit there, tethered to the tree, clutching my journal like a shield. “She’s a lai, sir. Due to inherit a vast—”

“Kyril.” Hakkon touched two fingertips to the bridge of his nose, as though a sudden headache had afflicted him. “Kyril, Kyril, Kyril.”

Miro went silent, his hands fisted at his sides and trembling. With each repetition of his name, Hakkon shook his head in disappointment, and Miro shrank further into himself.

“I asked you to bring me something of value, Kyril.” Hakkon gave him a quizzical smile. “I asked for maps. I asked for the number of his legions. I asked for their locations. I asked for gold, I asked for weapons.”

His voice steadily grew louder, a vein throbbing in his temple.

“I asked for anything of value, but I did not ask for his goddamned wife!”

Miro was struck silent as the grave, staring at Hakkon like he was watching his own death approaching.

The man curled his lip, revealing teeth far sharper than those of any human being. “What worth do you have to me now? You didn’t see the point, Kyril. I needed footholds in the Rift, not a sacrifice. The girl was already meant to die.”

“He loves her!” Miro blurted, pointing back at me with a shaking hand. With his gaze fixed on Hakkon, it was shockingly accurate, his finger aimed right at my heart. “He loves her, he won’t just let her die, he’ll come for her. You can lure him in, kill him on your ground, and use her estates as your foothold. The lai Darrans are already dead. It’s all hers now. There’s plenty of room for a pack.”

My palms and back had gone clammy, a tendril of terror piercing the numbing fog of accepting my own death.

What was worse than dying on a warg’s teeth?

Watching Bane be torn apart by a pack of them.

I shook my head, wordlessly denying Miro’s claim, but Hakkon had looked at me again with a new speculation in his eyes.

“Does this boy speak the truth, wife of Bane? Will he come for you?”

I shook my head again. Inwardly I was praising Miro’s plan to forge my writing, to tell Bane never to come for me. I hoped he listened. I hoped he threw the letter in the fire, cursed my name, and never gave me another thought, if it kept him out of Foria, away from these circling things that called themselves wolves.

“She’s mute.” Miro glanced at me sidelong, venom in his gaze. “She can’t speak. But I assure you, if Bane knows she’s here, he’ll come for her. The proof is there, in the book she’s holding.”

I clutched it tighter as Hakkon pushed Miro aside with ease, coming to stand before me. The Forian commander knelt, bracing his arms on his knees and letting his hands dangle between them.

I didn’t want to meet his eyes; I kept my gaze lowered, picking out all the small details that turned Hakkon from a monstrously mythic figure into what he was: simply a twisted man. His knuckles were heavily scarred, the tiny red hairs dusting the back of his hands and arms catching the light like embers.

“Let’s have it then, lass.” He held out one of those scarred hands, his voice soft and kind. If I didn’t know what he was, if I hadn’t seen the cruel lines of his face, I could hear that voice and truly believe it was the voice of a good man. “I’ll take a look for myself.”

I leaned back, ready to kick him away, but there was the slight crunch of paws on grass behind me, and hot, fetid breath washed across the back of my neck.

Goosebumps rose on every inch of my skin, which crawled from head to toe. I didn’t have to see to know what was behind me, a gullet lined with teeth just inches from my neck.

I swallowed, tears of fury and terror building in my eyes, and Hakkon easily reached out and plucked the book from my hand.