The trouble came on the second morning Kael was gone, and it came the way real trouble usually does — not as an enemy at the gate, but as two frightened families at the door of the great hall.
Vael brought them to me. Two households from the western edge of the kingdom, a dozen wolves between them, arrived at dawn with their belongings on their backs and an old grievance in their mouths. I sat in the Luna's chair, not Kael's, and I listened.
The story came out in pieces, both families talking over each other until Vael put a stop to it with one sharp word. The western households shared a stretch of grazing land and a single deep well, and the well had gone bad — fouled, one family said, by the other's carelessness; poisoned, the other insisted, on purpose. They had come to Ashenveil to h
