They don't carry me back. I walk, which is not surprising, but somehow still disappointing.
Isolde moves ahead on the path without looking back, her pace too fast, too controlled—the particular stride of a woman holding herself together by the teeth.
Jonah trails at her heel like nothing happened, his chin already back at its usual insufferable angle. Twenty minutes ago he was screaming. Now he's fine. Remarkable recovery time. Must be genetic.
My shoulder has stopped bleeding through—or I've gone past the point where my body bothers reporting it. The forest thins. Grey stone walls push through the pines ahead, smoke curling from the eastern chimney against a sky that couldn't be bothered to pick a color.
Halfway down the path, Jonah catches Isolde’s sleeve and shoots a curious “How did you know you needed to find me?” Of course. Me. What did I even expect?
Isolde speaks without turning. "Aldric saw it from the ridge. He came to the house first. Mira sent him back out for me."
So the household already knows. Wonderful. I love an audience for my worst moments.
The voices cut off the instant we cross the threshold, replaced by the particular silence of people who have been discussing you and haven't quite finished rearranging their faces.
"What has she done." Mira stands in the front hall doorway with her arms folded, and she makes it not a question.
My stepsister's gaze travels across my sleeve, my shoulder, the way I'm holding my left arm like something I'd rather set down, and her mouth does that thing it does—tightening at the corners, already composing the official record of whose fault this is.
"Inside," Isolde says. "Everyone. Now." The tone moves people without requiring anything further.
"I said it." Mira's voice cuts the hall before Isolde has even closed the door. "Years ago. I told you she would bring something like this down on us."
"Mira—"
"And now look!" She turns to face me fully, hands dropping to her sides like she needs them free for emphasis. "Do you understand what you've done? Do you have any idea?"
"She was going to kill Jonah." I lean my good shoulder against the wall because standing upright on my own has become a negotiation my body is losing. "A wolf came through the trees and went straight for him. I put myself between them."
"You took him out there," Isolde says from across the hall. Flat. Certain. The verdict already written. And there it is. My jaw locks so hard my back teeth ache.
"I didn't take him anywhere." The words come out level, which costs me something. "He followed me. I told him to go back to the house three separate times. He threw himself on the ground the second time and screamed until I stopped arguing.”
I take a deep breath to steady myself and continue, “You want to talk about what happened in those woods, Isolde? Start with the part where your son refused to listen to me because he has never once in his life been required to."
Jonah, leaning against the corridor entrance with his arms folded in a miniature of his mother's posture, doesn't even flinch. "I wanted to go," he says, bored. "She's slow at everything. I was helping."
I stare at him. Ten years old and already fluent in rewriting history. The pride of House Veyr.
"It doesn't matter who went where," Mira says, reclaiming the room with the ease of someone who has never had to fight for floor space. "What matters is what she did when she got there."
"Kept your brother alive," I say. "That's what I did when I got there."
"You killed a wolf," Isolde says. The hall goes quiet—the kind of quiet that has weight to it, the kind that presses down on your shoulders and holds.
She stands near the far window, still as stone, her words placed with the precision of someone who selected every one of them before she opened her mouth. "You killed a member of the Wolfblade royal pack. On Veyr land. With our name attached to every foot of the ground it happened on."
My stomach drops through the floor.
The Wolfblades. I have heard of them the way everyone has—in lowered voices, in stories that stop just short of the worst details because the worst details don't leave survivors to repeat them.
Their enforcers don't leave marks. Their punishments don't leave witnesses. The current prince earned his title, The Beast of Obsidian Throne, at nineteen, alone, and the full account of what he did that night has never been told because there was no one left to tell it.
House Veyr is mid-tier. Against the Wolfblades, we are a candle arguing with a wildfire. "I didn't know who she was." My voice sounds thin even inside my own skull. "There was no announcement. No banner. Just teeth and claws going for a child's throat."
"And whose problem is that?" Mira asks, the way you'd ask someone why they didn't read the instructions before breaking the machine.
"The Wolfblades will come," Isolde says. The temperature in her voice has dropped to something geological—ancient, slow, and grinding. "And when they do, this household will not be made to suffer for what you have done."
"What does that mean?" I ask. She doesn't answer. She turns away from the window, and the motion is its own sentence—complete, closed, not accepting revisions. "What does that mean, Isolde?"
Nothing. She is already speaking to Mira in the low, rapid shorthand of women who have run a household together long enough to need only half the words.
My shoulder chooses this moment to remind me, violently, that it exists. The pain comes in a hot wave that starts at the wound and radiates outward until my fingers tingle and my vision does something unhelpful at the edges. I press my palm against it hard and breathe through my nose.
Nobody asks. Of course nobody asks. Twenty-two years of this and I still notice it, which probably says more about me than it does about them.
I find a chair in the back hall and lower myself into it with the careful choreography of someone managing a body that has decided to stop cooperating. The household moves around me—voices, footsteps, the efficient machinery of people assembling a response to a crisis I am not permitted to be consulted on.
Jonah passes the doorway at one point, sees me sitting there, and pauses just long enough to deliver: "You should've let it bite me. At least then they wouldn't be mad at you."
I look at him, knowing full well that they would. They absolutely would. He shrugs and walks on.
But he's not wrong. That's the worst part. The math of this family has always been simple: Jonah bleeding would have been a tragedy. Me bleeding is an inconvenience. The wolf being dead is a catastrophe. And somewhere in the middle of all three, the fact that I am still alive registers on exactly no one's priority list.
I press harder against my shoulder and try to assemble what I know, which amounts to almost nothing and none of it good. Then the knock comes.
Three strikes. Measured, deliberate, heavy enough to fill every corner of the house and leave behind a silence that is nothing like the ones before it—not shocked, not angry, but final. The kind of silence that falls when the thing you've been dreading has stopped being theoretical.
I hear Isolde's footsteps cross the hall. The front door swings open. "The girl." A voice I don't recognize—flat, armored in authority, belonging to men accustomed to rooms that rearrange themselves on entry. "Your household made its promise. We are here to collect what is owed."
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