Finding a wolf Vale had hidden for years, before the Founding Moon, without letting Vale know we were looking that was the puzzle, and it had a cruel shape.
I couldn't ask Vale. I couldn't move openly, or the faction would know we'd cracked the plot and scatter. And I couldn't use warriors kicking down doors across the territory, both because it would announce us and because it was Damien's method, and I'd sworn off it. I had to find one carefully hidden wolf the way I found everything now: quietly, from below, by thinking like the wolf who'd hidden them.
So I thought like Vale.
"If I were building a forged heir," I said to Cain, the map of the wider territory spread before us, "where would I keep them? Not in Crescent Hollow too close, too watched. Not with the rogue clans too unstable
