He assured me it was pork. I didn’t believe him.

My stomach grumbled as I checked my last translation, though it was growing quieter, my gut tight with pain. I’d given in to temptation and eaten a few small bites of the toffee from Miro, but then I thought of him as I chewed, those few flashes I retained from our first night in Foria, and I knew I would never be able to taste it again without thinking of that.

Most of my memories were mercifully blank when I considered his mutation. I thought that perhaps my mind had emptied itself in one agonizing flash—an open, infected wound, purging itself to save the rest of the body.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been here. Perhaps two days, but my sense of everything was wrong.

Exhaustion made my eyes bleary and sore, my head spinning when I stood up. The whole world seemed to tilt around me at times, and would snap back into place in a blink.

It was impossible to sleep. During the day, some of the wargs became people. They did… well, people things, cooking in vast pots over campfires, crouching around the fires and speaking in low voices. But the smell from the pots and the middens was thick and rank enough to drag me from sleep, and the guards would come in three times a day anyway, bringing me more plates of food doomed to be wasted.

And at night… the wargs came out at night. Their high voices and howls would drift through the window, and just knowing they were out there, creeping around in the shadows, kept me wide awake and staring at the ceiling. The terror was constant, gnawing at my bones.

So I stayed awake day and night, and worked on the translations. Between my aching eyes and dizzy head, it had taken me maybe a solid day to decipher the most recent lines, and I wasn’t remotely sure it was accurate.

I wasn’t even sure I was fully awake. Perhaps I was dreaming it all. But I had half the ritual translated.

In a circle of thorns, 

With blood freely given.

Tears shed in love,

To water the petals of the Mother…

I put my pen down, rubbing my sore eyes. The flesh around them was pink and raw from how many times I’d rubbed in the past few days. Tears smarted at the corners, threatening to sting the sore skin.

What was the point of any of this? Whatever this ritual was, it meant nothing now.

And eventually the blood sigil against pregnancy would fade. I had a lifetime of being livestock to look forward to.

A sheep, birthing wolves.

But they could not force me to give myself to Wargyr. I had already vowed myself to a fiend, given my blood freely in a circle of thorns, buried our shared bond to grow the bloodroses of the Mother…

I was his, and I would willingly die before they gave me to their wolf god. I touched the words I’d written, the translation that could mean anything. It was certainly not a way to become a warg or fiend; Miro’s sickening transformation had nothing to do with watering petals. I’d been wrong.

It was becoming more difficult to maintain a single train of thought, my thoughts were jumping from place to place in my exhaustion. Everything was muddled together.

I was so tired. Any day now, Hakkon would come through that door, and he wouldn’t be carrying a plate but a prisoner, another innocent woman, and he would tell me… we are all meat.

We must hunt or be hunted.

When that time came I would face it alone. Bane hadn’t come, my only happiness.

Stay away, I love you too much to see you destroyed. Stay away.

I would be hunted by them on my own, as was right. I’d vowed myself and Wargyr couldn’t break that.

I rubbed my eyes again, the pen just too heavy to pick up, and the lock rattled on the door.

I jumped upright, quivering, adrenaline crashing through my veins. My breath felt hot and raspy in my throat.

Would it be a plate? Or a woman?

Or worse?

But Hakkon came in empty-handed. Broad shoulders pushed back, a self-satisfied little smile tucked into the corners of his mouth. He’d changed into clean clothes, his dark auburn hair brushed.

He frowned at my last full plate, left to congeal. Several flies crawled over the greasy meat, buzzing and twitching their wings.

“I suppose you may starve yourself for now,” he said, brows pulled together. “You must understand that I will force it down your throat when your husband is dead. A starving mother makes for frail pups.”

I’ll be dead by that time, I said listlessly, still examining his empty hands, his tidy appearance. To what purpose? What could be worse than my turn at the hunt?

“Let me give you a reason to rejoice, redling.” He smiled at me, taking a seat on the other side of the small table. The chair looked tiny compared to him, a chair made for a child instead of an adult. “The scouts have spotted the Soulbreaker on Forian soil.”

I stared at him, trying to make sense of a title that sounded only vaguely familiar. What is a Soulbreaker?

Hakkon picked up my pen, twirling it around in the narrow shaft of sun coming through the window so the silver metal sent bright flashes into my eyes. “I believe you have met? Wroth is his name. Your husband is coming for you, with all of his brothers. Such a pleasant gift even I had not expected.” He laughed, dropping my pen carelessly on the table. “We will wash over them as one, an inexorable tide.”

I reached out and picked it up, clutching it tight. This and the journal, the long-wilted bloodrose in my hair… they were all I had, and they would come with me to the grave.

Hakkon examined me thoughtfully, his head tipped to the side. “Does it bring you hope, redling?”

I shook my head. No.

His brown eyes didn’t look away, peeling every thin layer away from my soul. “Ah, so it is true that you love each other. Who would have believed that one day, I would hold the heart of my perfect foe in my hands? That she would become the mother of my children, her lands the birthplace for a new pack? Wargyr has showered blessings upon me.”

I closed my journal, aligning it neatly on the table as Rose would have done. You’re trying to frighten me, but you’ve already gone too far. All my fear is gone.

“Is it, now?” That smug smile was back.

I examined him in turn, seeing the hundreds of tiny scars chiselling his face, illuminated by the sun. How are you able to become a man? I thought you shed your skins.

Hakkon went still, holding my gaze. His eyes were cold but considering. “With age and experience, and much blood. What brings you to ask this?”

Simple curiosity. I gestured to my journal. I want to know things.

“Good. I will be pleased if my children inherit that curiosity. Yes, the warg sheds his human skin in a single night, but with years of effort, you can wear it once more.” Hakkon looked down at his own hands, the squared-off fingers, the thick calluses. “It takes great strength of will to unshackle the mind from the remorse instilled in us by the sheep. Many of the wargs out there will never achieve such a thing, which is why they are there: to die. But I come from a family that has worshipped the Mad God through the ages. At the age of nine, a child of our line is inducted into the ranks. By the time he is twenty, he should have control of his human skin once more. If he does not… then he is rabid, useless, no more than an unthinking beast. He is culled from the pack. Your husband will cull my useless pack for me, and die in the doing.”

He turned his hand over, as though seeing it for the first time.

“It is like the fiends,” he said, and my heart leaped—it was the information I wanted. “When they go fiend, they become beasts. But with great effort, they are almost as men again, civilized in mind, if not in form. They could do as I do, if only they released the shackles of their guilt and made peace with their supremacy. To become a man, one needs only to let go. To feel nothing but righteous pride in the service of Wargyr. A wolf does not need to feel guilt when he eats a lamb. It is his right.”