Wren
They tell me two thousand wolves feasted in the valley that day. I believe them. I heard it, all afternoon, rising up the mountain like warm weather, music and laughter and Caius’s trained pups practicing their howl.
But the cliff held only the ones who mattered, and the cliff is what I will remember.
They’d rebuilt the path with steps and lanterns so even Maren could climb it, though she scorned the arm Tomas offered and beat him to the top. By sunset the shelf of stone at the top of the world held perhaps sixty souls: the Council, Isolde in her blue, Corvin in the front row exactly as sentenced, watching it be beautiful with a face like a man passing a kidney stone made of his own opinions. The forty women, all forty, guests of honor. Berta and Selene and Tomas and Vessa. Mira, m
