Chapter 198: Surviving And Rebuilding

Chapter 198: Chapter 198: Surviving And Rebuilding

*

Astrid’s jaw worked. "I wasn’t going to leave him."

I shifted back long enough to speak clearly. Cold bit immediately through skin and damp clothes. "Both of you will finish the night on the return sleds. Then you’ll run the same course tomorrow at dawn with Johan until he says you’re thinking again.".

Astrid’s head snapped up. For a heartbeat something old and stubborn flashed in her eyes—the look of a girl who still half-expected Elena’s daughter to soften an order into a suggestion. Then it passed. She nodded once, sharp.

"Understood."

The injured boy mumbled the same. Sigrid already had him on the sled. The hunt closed around the gap and kept moving.

We ran until the moon stood high and the pack’s calls turned from the chase to the gathering. The old stone circle on the south ridge held the night’s fire already, flames throwing gold across packed snow and the first of the kills laid out for the butchers. Food followed. Wineskins. The particular noise of a pack that had worked hard and meant to enjoy the fact.

I stayed in wolf-form longer than I needed to, circling the edge of the firelight while people shifted back in ones and twos, laughing, arguing over who had taken the better line through the pines. Magnus found me in the shadows and bumped his shoulder against mine, solid and pleased. We walked back into the light together and took our human shapes near the main fire.

Someone pushed a cup into my hands. Someone else was already telling the story of Astrid’s idiot gap-run with more drama than it deserved. Johan Berg stood a little apart with his arms folded, listening, the corner of his mouth turned down in the expression he reserved for promising wolves who still thought speed was the same as sense.

Anders came up with a strip of roasted meat and no commentary. I took it. We ate standing up like everyone else, grease on our fingers, snow melting into the backs of our boots.

An older warrior—Halvar, who had run border patrols since my mother’s early years—stopped in front of me with a slight, formal tip of the head.

"Clean hunt," he said. "Your mother used to take the north ridge first. You took the draw. Worked better tonight."

It was not quite praise. It was not quite a correction. It sat in the space between, the place where the pack still measured me against a shadow that no longer stood in the yard.

"The draw had the fresher sign," I said.

Halvar’s eyes creased. "So it did." He moved on. The moment passed without becoming anything larger than it was.

Magnus’s hand settled at the small of my back, brief and private. "You’re allowed to enjoy it."

"I am enjoying it."

"You’re cataloguing it."

"I can do both."

He huffed a quiet laugh and stole the last bite from my fingers. I let him.

The fires burned lower. Young wolves who had made it through their first full Winter Moon Hunt without disgrace fell asleep in piles near the heat. Sigrid organized the return loads with the same unshowy competence she brought to everything. Erik Lund reported the outer markers clear. Astrid sat on a sled with her disgraced companion and looked like she was already replaying the gap-run in her head with less pride and more sense.

I walked the edge of the gathering one more time. Frostfang felt present in a way that had nothing to do with councils or borders—just bodies, heat, food, the shared fact of a night run under a hard moon. For a stretch of quiet I stopped being a problem to solve in someone else’s memory and became simply the woman who had called the horn and run at the front of the first wave.

Magnus caught up again as the first sleds started back toward the keep.

"Home?" he asked.

"Home."

We shifted for the return. The pack stretched out along the trail in a long, loose line, full and tired and still humming with the leftover energy of the hunt. The keep’s walls rose out of the dark ahead, familiar and solid.

We were almost to the gate when a runner broke from the trees on the eastern approach—alone, moving fast, not one of ours. The scent hit me a second before the shape did: unfamiliar pack, road-dirt, urgency without the sharp edge of attack.

The runner stumbled to a stop in the churned snow in front of the gate, dropped to one knee out of habit, and looked straight at me.

"Queen Lila of Frostfang," he said, breathing hard. "Message from Bjornvik. Alpha Harald asks for your ears before the next moon. It’s about the coastal road—and about a ship that should have arrived three days ago and didn’t."

— Thorne POV ---

The road south had been quiet for two days.

Tuva rode ahead of me through a stretch of pine that had started thinning toward scrub and broken stone. The air smelled different here—less of the deep northern cold, more of wet earth and old smoke. We’d left the last familiar marker behind at dawn. Whatever maps still called this region didn’t have much to say about the people in it.

"There," Tuva said.

I followed her gaze.

The settlement sat in a shallow bowl between two low ridges. Half the roofs were gone. A few walls stood blackened and empty. Others had been patched with whatever wood and hide the survivors could find. Smoke rose from maybe a dozen fires. Someone had tried to clear a path through the rubble. Someone else had given up halfway and left a cart rotting on its side.

It wasn’t empty.

I counted movement as we came down the slope—figures near a partial hall, children chasing each other between the standing walls, a woman hauling water from a creek that cut the lower edge of the place. A man in a leather apron stood outside a half-rebuilt smithy, watching us with a hammer still in his hand.

Tuva slowed her horse. "How many do you make?"

"Twenty families. Maybe a little more if you count the ones who don’t come out for strangers."

"And you want to ride straight in."

"We’re not circling it like a problem." I kept my hands visible on the reins. "We’re going to ask who still speaks for them."

The man at the smithy set his hammer down when we reached the edge of the cleared ground. He was broad, grey at the temples, with the particular stare of someone who had stopped expecting good news from the road. Two younger men drifted out from the patched hall behind him. Neither reached for a weapon. Both looked ready to.

"You’re not from the valleys," the smith said.

"No." I dismounted. Tuva did the same. "Name’s Thorne. This is Tuva. We were heading further south. Saw the smoke."

"Smoke’s about all we’ve got left worth noticing." He wiped his hands on his apron. "Bjorn Arnesen. What’s left of the forge is mine. What’s left of the place doesn’t have a single voice anymore. If you’re looking for an Alpha, you’re a few bad winters late."

A woman came out of the hall doorway—lean, practical, dark hair tied back with a strip of cloth. She looked us over the way she’d look over a tool she hadn’t decided to trust.

"Marta," she said, by way of introduction. "If you’re traders, we don’t have much to trade. If you’re looking for easy ground, keep riding. If you’re here to collect on old debts, you can try. We’ve gotten good at having nothing."

Tuva’s mouth twitched. "We’re not collecting."

"Then you’re lost or curious. Neither pays for roof beams."

I looked past them at the settlement. The bones of it were better than the surface suggested. The creek was clean. The bowl of land held wind without turning into a full trap. Someone had started marking garden plots in the softer dirt near the water. A couple of the standing houses had new thatch on one side only, as if the work kept getting interrupted by the simple fact of not having enough hands.

"What happened?" I asked.

Bjorn shrugged one heavy shoulder. "Raids. Sickness. A winter that didn’t end when it should have. People left. People died. The ones who stayed stopped waiting for someone to come put a banner over the mess." He glanced at Marta. "She keeps the food counts. I keep the tools working. The rest of us keep the children from freezing. That’s the whole government."

A boy of about ten peered around the hall door, got caught looking, and vanished again. Somewhere behind the smithy a baby started crying and was quickly hushed.

Tuva walked a few steps toward the creek, studying the line of the land. I stayed where I was.

"You’re rebuilding," I said.

Marta’s eyes narrowed. "We’re surviving. Rebuilding is what you call it when you think you’ll still be here in five years."

"And do you?"

She didn’t answer immediately. Bjorn shifted his weight and looked at the partial hall like it had personally disappointed him.

"We’ve got hands," he said at last. "We’ve got a forge that still draws. We’ve got enough stubborn fools to keep the roofs from falling on the children. What we don’t have is someone who looks at this place and sees anything except a ruin waiting to finish collapsing."ℴ