Wren
The week after Stone River fell was the hardest week the mansion had ever worked.
Messengers rode day and night. Darius brought the rest of his warriors north and the two packs became, in everything but name, one. Refugees came over the western pass with frostbite and terrible stories, and Berta fed them all, and Lucien treated them all, and I sat with their children and learned every name. The fence was closing. You could feel it in the maps, in the air, in the way the old wolves looked at the sky.
And in the middle of that week, on the coldest, clearest evening of the winter, Zephyr came to my wing wearing his good coat, looking like a man walking into a battle he'd been rehearsing for nine years, and said:
"My evening. If you'll still have it."
"You planned a date? Now?"
"Now
