The border shimmers like heat off summer stone, and I hold it. My knees want to buckle, every muscle from my jaw to my ankles locked tight and trembling with the effort of keeping this invisible thing thin.
The boundary between Stormhowl territory and the neutral ground beyond it—a line I couldn't even see two weeks ago—wavers, thins, goes almost translucent under my grip. I can feel the land on the other side like a second heartbeat pressing against my ribs.
"Breathe," Sorrel says from behind me. "You're clenching your teeth hard enough to crack them."
I unclench. The border wobbles but holds—thin, shimmering, mine. Thirty seconds. Forty. My nose starts bleeding, a warm trickle I ignore because if I lift my hand to wipe it I'll lose everything. Fifty seconds. A minute.
I let go and the border snaps back like a bowstring. I stagger sideways, catch myself on a tree trunk, and stand there breathing like I just sprinted the length of the camp. My hands are shaking so hard the bark bites into my palms.
Underneath the shaking there's something else—a hum, electric, alive, the feeling of having held something enormous and not broken under it. Nothing in my life has ever felt like that.
"One minute." Sorrel is sitting on the fallen log where she always sits, wrapped in furs, her ancient face giving away nothing. "The original alphas trained for years to sustain that long. You're doing it in weeks."
"The pregnancy," I say, wiping blood with my sleeve. My voice comes out rougher than I intend. The air between us still hums faintly, like something remembers being held open.
"The pregnancy unlocked what was already there. Nico's power, when it comes—" Her gnarled fingers tighten on the walking stick. "It will dwarf yours. What you're touching is the edge of what he'll command without effort."
I sit down across from her because my legs have made that decision for me. The hum is still in my blood, fading slowly, and the thought of Nico carrying ten times this makes my stomach clench around something I can't name.
"Sorrel." I wait until her eyes meet mine. "If I dissolved a real border—not a test—an actual boundary between two packs. What would it cost?"
The silence stretches long enough that I hear the river. She doesn't look away, but something in her face closes, the way a door shuts when someone's decided you're not going to like what's on the other side.
"The gift takes from the body what it gives to the land," she says. "A small border costs exhaustion. A few days' recovery." Her fingers move on the walking stick, slow, deliberate. "A major one costs considerably more."
She doesn't say the word. She doesn't need to—it sits between us like a stone I put there myself, and I let it sit. I'm not asking for permission. I'm asking for the price.
I stand on legs that barely cooperate and walk back to camp with the taste of blood still copper-bright on my tongue. Nothing says self-improvement like daily nosebleeds and learning what your own death might purchase.
Jericho finds me at the fire pit washing my face, takes one look at the blood on my collar, and his jaw does something complicated. "Training," I say before he can start. "I'm fine. Past tense bleeding. Very important distinction."
He doesn't push it—which is how I know Sorrel told him. He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a folded letter. Lira's handwriting, steady this time, no slant, no smudge. The paper is warm from his body and I hate that I notice that when my hands are still trembling.
I read it twice. The first time fast, scanning for Nico's name—alive, safe, still with Neve. The second time slow, letting the details land one by one, and the slowness is worse.
Hilda has placed her own wolves at the nursery wing entrance. Lira and Neve still have access but they're being watched—not overtly, not dramatically, the way you dismantle something when you want it to look intact until the moment you kick the last support out.
Ronan's addition is three words in his own cramped hand at the bottom of the page: Come back soon. Ronan doesn't waste words—three of them, and my ribs feel like they're shrinking around my lungs.
I hand the letter to Jericho. He reads it standing, his face going still the way it does when he's calculating something he doesn't want to calculate. When he finishes he folds it carefully, which is how I know it's bad—Jericho is not careful with paper.
"This isn't politics anymore." His voice is flat, stripped of the warmth I've gotten used to hearing. "This is preparation. She's building a structure to take power, and she's putting guards on your son while she does it."
My throat works around the word I've been avoiding for three letters now. "Yes," I say, and the admission tastes like iron.
"When do your two months end?" he asks, and the question is not a question—it's the opening of a plan. "Four days," I say.
"I'm coming with you." His chin lifts, the angle that means this is not a suggestion. I know this angle—I have learned every degree of his stubbornness the way you map terrain you intend to cross.
"No." The word comes out harder than I mean it to, and I push through before he can get there. "A Stormhowl alpha riding to Moonveil's gate breaks the treaty. You know that."
"I don't care about the treaty." His hands close at his sides, and the urgency in his voice comes from a man imagining the woman he loves behind walls he can't reach.
"You care about me getting back here." I stand, and the dizziness from training is gone, replaced by something sharper. "If you violate the peace agreement, Hilda's faction gains legal ground to bar me from ever returning to Stormhowl."
I hold his gaze. "That's old law—the same law that gave me these two months. You hand them that weapon and I lose both places."
The muscle in his jaw tightens, releases, tightens again. He looks at me the way he looked at me in the herb garden—like I'm the only fixed point—except now that fixed point is telling him to stay put while she walks into the fire.
"I hate this," he says quietly. I touch his arm, brief, firm, the kind of touch that says hear me, not hold me.
"Lira and Ronan are inside. Neve is with Nico. Four days." He doesn't answer right away. The fire pops between us, scattering sparks. Then he nods once—the nod of a man conceding a position he'll spend every remaining hour trying to fortify from a distance.
I go to the small table in my quarters where Sorrel's carved stone sits beside Clara's comb. I pull out paper and ink, and write in letters steady enough to carry across enemy territory in a runner's pocket: Four days. Hold.