Sadie

Navin and I wandered the quiet snowy roads, holding mugs of steaming tea in our hands. I blew on the cup, enjoying the warmth bouncing back at me. I considered Navin with new eyes as we meandered through the village, scrutinizing everything from the way he positioned his body against the sudden gales of frigid cross-breeze to the depth of his steady gait. Even that sweetly awkward smile he gave me now seemed limned with malice. Was it all a ruse? He became more of a mystery to me with each turn around the frozen courtyards and tumbledown townhouses.

Maez had broken off from us, easily falling into friendly conversation with every stallholder in the markets. She found her salve, and I acquired my embarrassingly random length of rope that I tucked deep into my cloak pocket. Navin and I had walked on, silently agreeing to take in more of the town side by side.

The little township seemed frozen both literally and in time. It looked half-abandoned, too, unloved shutters hanging from hinges, locks rusted shut, drifts of snow shoveled against disintegrating pinewood doors. Townsfolk must have moved to the nearby capital of Taigoska, where there were more work and more amenities. Even in the human quarter of the city, I remembered how much it was bustling with life and activity. There would be no art galleries and restaurants in a sleepy little village like this, no shows or concerts, no adventures to be had.

I didn’t blame the humans for wanting to leave this humdrum existence. It reminded me a little of the stagnancy I’d felt in Olmdere, though I’d never admit it aloud.

I slid a glance at Navin. No musicians would be paid enough to stop here either . . . and why would they when they could stay in the capital only a stone’s throw west where they would be paid handsomely for their performances? Yet Navin knew the place well—well enough to sneak up on me. The soldier in me bristled. No one snuck up on me. I added Navin’s furtiveness and familiarity with the town to my ever-growing list of suspicions about who—and what—Navin really was.

“How old were you?”

I asked, my ringing voice too loud in the snow-mantled quiet. “When you fled Olmdere? How old were you?”

Navin’s shoulders tensed but he didn’t break his stride. “Fifteen,”

he said with all the casualness of a sharpened knife.

“So young.”

I blew out a long, steaming breath that curled into my hair. “How old was your brother?”

“Seventeen.”

“Sawyn recruited Rooks young then,”

I said. “Makes sense. If I was a teenager with the world crumbling down around me, I’d want someone to put a sword in my hand, too.”

“Or at least food,”

Navin said, and I nodded, a little ashamed that hadn’t dawned on me as a motive for his brother. I forgot humans couldn’t just shift and go hunting for some bunnies. I’d never feared an empty belly with the forest always just beyond my window, my keen sense always ready and scenting for prey. Yet another way I didn’t understand humans at all.

Navin’s footsteps faltered as he peeked at me and then back to his mug. “I hate that I can understand why he did it.”

I nodded and sipped my drink, enjoying the pleasant warmth that trailed from my mouth to my wool-cloaked chest. “This family secret—”

“.”

Navin took a step in front of me, blocking my path forward. The steam from his tea swirled up into his shadowed hood. “I can’t tell you about this. I wish I could, but it’s much bigger than me, and—and I can’t.”

I wore an impassive mask even as I cringed inwardly. I was blatantly digging and now he knew it.

“Okay,”

I said, knowing if I pushed any harder, he’d pull even more away from me.

“Okay?”

He sounded surprised.

I shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “I don’t really need to know. I was just curious.”

He narrowed his eyes at me for a beat. I needed to be a more convincing liar. I sidestepped around him and kept walking. “So how long until we get to Nesra’s Pass?”

“We’re not going down Nesra’s Pass.”

He fell into an easy stride beside me again, seemingly relieved at the pivot of conversation. “We’re cutting straight down from Taigos to Valta.”

I looked side to side, trying to remember every map of the continent I’d ever seen, but I could recollect no such passage. “But . . . Nesra’s Pass is the only way down through the mountains?”

“It’s the only Wolf way down through the mountains,”

Navin said as a rueful smile whispered across his face. “There are other ways down from the Ice Wolf kingdom.”

My mouth twisted in thought. “You seem to know a lot about these secret roads.”

I watched his face carefully as I spoke, trying to find any tell, hoping that something I said would give it away, but he merely shrugged. I yearned to set him off-balance, for him to give me something to fear or hate or even begrudgingly respect, some flash of truth and redemption for all he’d done. Worst of all, this stranger before me had rung every alarm bell within me, and Gods help me, I liked it—a thrill after my stagnancy in Olmdere—a riddle I needed to solve. What truths were brewing beneath the surface of this conversation? What deceptions lay just beyond these pleasantries?

“It’s the life of any traveler,”

Navin said breezily. “Ora would line up all of our events. They were constantly sending pigeons and letters to this lord or that—solstices, coronations, town festivals, barn raisings, you name it. We play for Wolf and human alike. We’ve always been constantly on the move for as long as I’ve been a part of the troupe. You learn how to get to places the fastest course possible.”

“And why haven’t the Wolves ever learned about this traversal?”

“Why would they?”

Navin didn’t immediately continue as we looped the township, returning to the tea cart that sat at the edge of the markets. We delivered back our empty mugs to the weathered old tea lady with a nod of thanks and kept rambling back toward the wagon.

We crunched through the ice-crusted snow for another minute before Navin said, “The towns along the Valtan border are all human ones on both sides. The capitals are nowhere near there, nor are any resources of economical value. Wolves travel across the Stoneater River to get to Rikesh. What business would they have traveling this way?”

“I don’t know,”

I mused, perturbed that there was a whole section of the continent I knew little about. “You’d think the Wolf kings would know every inch of their own lands.”

“Not better than the humans who inhabit every inch of their lands,”

Navin observed, his voice tinged in bitterness. “Wolves keep to themselves and their forests and their capital cities . . . except when it comes to collecting taxes and crop tithes, of course.”

Here we were again at the point of impasse. He was a human. I was a Wolf. We would never fully understand each other’s lives. I knew Wolves had mistreated humans in the years since they banished the monsters and were placed on their thrones . . . but Wolves were not wholly evil as some humans thought. Long ago humans landed on our Wolf shores, and we’d guarded them from the harsh new world. We were once the humans’ saviors, protectors, Gods to them. What had happened along the way to change that? Where did it all go so wrong?

“So we are heading toward a secret road to Valta?”

I tried to carry on the conversation, but it felt uneasy now with all the unspoken truths floating between us.

“It’s a commonly used farming route to deliver goods to Taigoska from Lower Valta,”

Navin said. “It’s a secret only to Wolves through their own sheer ignorance.”

I grabbed him by the elbow right as he whirled toward me, those bronze eyes heated. I glowered back at him.

“I get it,”

I said. “I get that you hate Wolves for all they’ve done to your people. There’s no need to dance around this anymore. I suppose men both Wolf and human alike are the same in one regard: you never say what you fucking mean.” My grip on his elbow tightened. “Do us both a favor and speak plainly: you hate them. And if you hate them, you have to hate me.”

I released him and took a single step before his hand shot out, his large legs easily outmaneuvering me and caging me in against the crumbling temple wall on the outskirts of town.

I could’ve ducked under his arms. I could’ve pulled out my knife. I could’ve tipped the balance of power once more in my favor . . . but I didn’t. I let him stand there, towering over me, leaning into me. A white-hot thrill ran down my spine, imagining what it would be like if he could truly overpower me.

“I never said I hated you.”

His words were tight and barely restrained, the venomous warning of a scream.

There he was. The real him.

“But you hate everything that I am!”

I shouted back, pushing further, not letting his closeness cow me. “Tell me, did you pursue me out of morbid curiosity? Was it a form of self-loathing? Was I some sort of oddity for you to explore? Some vile taboo conquest you could—”

His lips silenced me. His mouth collided with mine in a scorching kiss, and I instinctively rose up on my tiptoes to meet him. My fingers twisted in his cloak and tugged him closer as his tongue plundered my mouth. How could he keep pulling me in like this? What spell did he hold over me that so easily had my heart racing and my limbs buzzing?

Our kiss was more fevered and urgent than the one we’d shared many weeks ago. His teeth scraped over my bottom lip, sucking it into his mouth. The low hum he let out sounded like the last resonant note of a song. Then he pulled away, leaving me toppling forward, lips parted and breathless. I barely caught my footing, my body bending toward him with a fevered magnetism.

Navin took another step back, steam swirling around from our panting breaths, the distance making my cheeks heat in a furious blush. I swallowed the shame of that kiss, composing my expression into nothing but steel as I met Navin’s darkening gaze.

“I only knew I wanted you. That’s all,”

he murmured. “Just you, .”

Just me.

He said it like I could just be a human for him. As if I existed outside of anything else—no culture or kingdom or space—just me in isolation. But I didn’t exist like some faery floating in the ether. I was a product of all that I was raised to be. I was a product of my people, good or bad, evil or righteous, and whether I chose to carry on that legacy or not it still irrefutably existed within my blood. There were parts to me that I couldn’t deny, parts I didn’t want to deny. Navin needed to pretend I was a human to want me at all.

I held his stare, letting the primal ferocity of my kind leak into my expression as I said, “Who I am is a Wolf.”

Then I ducked under his arm and moved with my true speed. He reached for me, but I quickly sidestepped him, reminding him that I was faster and stronger than I seemed, too. We would only play these games when I allowed it. Let him never forget I was not some human girl that he could tower over and kiss if I didn’t want him to do exactly that.

As I raced over the frozen tundra, my thoughts became a tangled web. I wanted his secrets—needed them—for Calla, for Olmdere—but I couldn’t do it this way. I couldn’t open myself up to this man and guard myself from him at the same time. It had to be one or the other.

I found Maez whistling merrily as she milled about the wagon.

She raised her hand in a half wave. “Hey, I—”

“I can’t do this, Maez,”

I said, my throat constricting. “Not like this.”

She spun on her heel and followed after me. “Okay,”

she said in a calming voice, her swift change in tone denoting how much she sensed my jumbled mess of feelings. “Okay, Sads, we’ll find another way.”