There is a kind of quiet that comes right before you do the thing that will either end a war or end you.
I felt it settle over the standing stones as Ironfang formed on their king and their Luna twelve bloodied wolves, my wounded team, Cain at my side, and Roan bound at the center of us because there was nowhere to leave a caged traitor in the middle of an army. The exhausted grievance-horde spread out before us in the dusk, hundreds strong, and somewhere near the center of it, under his banner, stood the man who was the reason all of it existed.
Two hundred yards. Through everything.
"When we go," Cain said, low, to the wolves, "we go as a wedge. Me and Wren at the point. We don't fight the army we don't try to win against the army, we can't. We cut a line to Damien and nothing else. E
