The girl came out of the northern forest at dawn, and she was running.
Not the measured, strategic run of a scout returning from patrol. Not the confident lope of a wolf who knew the territory and was crossing it with purpose. This was the ragged, desperate, last-reserve sprint of someone who had been running for a very long time and was operating on nothing but terror and the biological refusal to stop moving when stopping meant dying.
She was in wolf form — medium-sized, dark gray, with fur that was matted and filthy and streaked with something that could have been mud and could have been blood and was probably both. Her eyes were wild — not the wild of aggression, but the wild of an animal that had been hunted past the point of rational thought, whose entire consciousness had narrowed
