"We hold shape," I told my five, and they straightened behind me like a line drawn taut.

That was the last order I gave as a free wolf. After it, I was a treaty witness, which is a softer word for currency. The Veylen Elders had spent me to stop a war, and the war had cost them my brother first, so I suppose I came at a discount.

Greymoor's gate stood open. Two iron doors, each thick as my forearm, the chain-and-counterweight old but oiled. Guards on the wall, and the back of my neck told me there were more I couldn't see. The road behind us was still passable, I could feel it the way you feel a clear path before a fight, though the pack had sealed the territory the moment we crossed the marker stones. Leaving now meant Clause 7 notice or a fight I didn't have the people for.

Elan's memorial token was a hard small weight against one palm, worn smooth these eight weeks by my thumb going over and over the carved edge. The treaty scroll filled my other hand, sealed and witnessed and heavy as a verdict I'd signed myself.

A wolf moon hung pale in the dawn behind us. Elan would have laughed at that. Look, he'd have said, jerking his chin at it. Even the moon thinks this is a terrible idea. Then he'd have told me to quit reading omens and watch the room instead.

I was watching the room when the bond hit me.

It came as heat. Not a feeling I could argue with, a fever that arrived all at once and knew which way to lean. A wave of it rolled up from my sternum and pulled, specific as a palm laid flat between my shoulder blades, toward something across the courtyard and a little above me. My wolf lifted her head before my human mind had finished translating, and she was already certain, the way she is never certain of anything.

His, she said. Easy. Like a name she'd always known.

No, I told her, and kept my face still, and kept walking.

He was against the main-house wall beside the door, in the stillness of an animal that has never once needed to make itself look large. Dark hair. Pale skin, with old scarring laddered up the left forearm I'd understand later. Grey eyes, and the gold already coming up in them, not human, not yet, fixed on me the whole length of the courtyard.

I had grown up among dangerous men. Trained with them. Watched them shrink themselves over sheep-grazing rights in council because they couldn't afford to be small about anything that mattered. Daegan Strom was nothing like them. He looked like the war had decided what it needed, and he hadn't argued.

I stopped two strides out and laid my hand on the scroll.

"Treaty witness invocation. Veylen pack." My voice held. Good. "Clause 7. Accommodation and provisions for accompanying witnesses, sufficient to station. Five individuals. One healer-trained. We'll take the east wing if it's empty."

Behind him, someone drew a small breath. The kind that means who does she think she is.

Daegan Strom looked at me and said nothing. The bond pulsed in the gap between us, fever-hot and aimed, every nerve in me tilting his way, and my wolf leaned toward it like a plant toward a window. I did not let it show.

Then he turned to my five.

"Theis Veylen." Theis went rigid at my left shoulder. "Your healer's materials are in the east wing, second room." His gaze moved. "Bryn. First room." He named the other three without a misstep, rank and use both. "Tell me if it doesn't suit."

He knew their names.

He'd done it before I arrived.

I had braced for refusal. For delay, for the slow theater of a victor making the loser ask twice. I had a clause for every move. I had nothing for a man who'd already done the thing I came to demand.

My wolf wasn't surprised.

I was.

His eyes came back to me. The gold sat higher in them now, banked, watching. Whatever the bond was doing in my chest, he could feel its twin in his. I knew it the way I knew the road behind me. He didn't reach for it. He didn't reach for anything. He turned and walked his pack inside, and the heat went with him, dragging at me like a hook behind the breastbone.

I stood in the courtyard a moment longer than I should have.

Mine, the wolf said, pleased with herself.

"Not yours," I said under my breath. "Not anyone's."

I turned to my people. Theis wore the careful look she saves for things she's filing to raise later. Bryn's hands hung loose and ready, but something had moved behind his eyes, there and gone.

"East wing." I closed my fist around the token until the carved edge bit. "Clause 7 holds the full year. I'll know before noon if there's a problem."

We went in.

I did not know yet whether I was safe in Greymoor, or already lost in it. The wolf knew. She'd known since the gate.

She just wouldn't tell me which.