POV: Sylra
Sera was at the gate when the column formed up.
I pulled her two steps from the nearest guard and kept my voice low.
"There's a fresh cut in the nursery doorframe," I said. "Wet nurse's entrance, shoulder height. Veth's tracking mark — Vedran will confirm it. Someone walked in last night and none of the corridor watch logged a passage."
Sera looked at me. Her face did not change. "How long ago did you find it?"
"Before dawn," I said.
"Why am I only hearing this now?" she asked.
"Because the column rides at first light and you can run a hunt without me," I said. "I cannot wait for one."
She held my gaze for a count of three. "I'll find them."
"I know you will." I turned back to the column. "Don't clear the wet nurse until you've checked her first."
I didn't wait for her answer.
Caelen held the point. Vedran took my right shoulder. Kael rode at my left. Twelve guards, tight formation, nobody talking. The column moved east at a working pace and the gate closed behind us.
I did not tell the men about the mark. I would tell them when we were clear of the first day's road. Until then I carried it alone and watched the tree line.
The road was dry and the air bitterly cold. An hour out, the farms thinned and the pine forest began closing on both sides — not dense yet, just present, the trees getting taller and closer the further east we moved.
The sky was flat and white. No wind. The kind of morning that muffled sound and flattened distance, where a man could stand forty meters into the trees and the road would never know he was there.
Vedran rode at my shoulder and said nothing. That told me he was reading the same road I was.
"You've seen this stretch before," Vedran said quietly.
"I marked it on the map last night," I said, but he didn't answer.
Past midday the terrain shifted. The flat ground gave way to a slow rise and the pines pressed in hard on both sides, thick now, the canopy cutting the light and sight lines down to almost nothing on either flank.
The road narrowed between the two stands — barely wide enough for three horses abreast — and the ground underfoot went soft and quiet.
The column slowed on the rise without being told. Every man in the formation felt it — the quality of enclosed ground, the absence of sound from the flanks, the way the trees stood too still.
Caelen's shoulders set differently at the front as Kael's hand moved to his blade without him looking at it.
I watched the left treeline. The birds had stopped.
I had time to register that — the silence, the wrong texture of it, the way a forest went quiet when something large was holding position inside it — and then both flanks broke at once.
Ten wolves, hard out of the trees on both sides, no signal, no warning, the split so clean and coordinated it had been rehearsed. The first wave hit the column before the guards finished drawing.
Caelen's voice came in a command without a shout, clean and fast. "Hold the queen. Vedran left, Kael behind, I take the front."
The guards closed on me. Two went down in the next second when the left flank punched through the formation's edge. Vedran was already gone from my shoulder.
I dropped from the saddle and shifted before my boots found the ground. The golden wolf came up clean — no drag, no stagger, full weight in one motion.
The first attacker hit me mid-air. I took him on my flank, drove him into the road, felt his ribs give. Moved before he finished landing. The second came wide and I turned inside his angle, got under him and used his momentum against the dirt.
The third hesitated and that cost him everything.
On the left Vedran put two wolves down so quietly I nearly missed it. Two movements, two results, nothing wasted between them.
Kael held the rear. His wolf was heavier than it looked and it didn't pursue — it planted and waited and the two attackers who came from behind the column ran into a wall they hadn't anticipated. Neither got back up.
At the front Caelen cut through the line like the outcome was already decided and his body was finishing the arithmetic. Under a minute. It was always under a minute with him.
The wolves that could run, ran. The rest were in the road.
One was still breathing.
I shifted back and the column reformed in silence. Guards checked their flanks. The prisoner rattled air through his teeth in the dirt.
No pack mark on any of them.
Vedran was already crouched over the leader, collar turned back, looking at what was inside. His jaw went tight — the small, controlled movement that meant a confirmation had landed and he took no satisfaction from it.
"What is it?" I asked.
He held the collar open toward me. A small grey ribbon, tied inside the lining. Neat enough to pass for a repair stitch.
"Solvayne's eastern broker," Vedran said. "I've been tracking the channel for some time. This confirms the connection."
He stood and let the collar fall.
Caelen had the prisoner by the collar with one fist, hauling him off the road. The man had lost a tooth, blood dried on his chin, one eye swelling shut — still conscious in the deliberate way of someone who had decided something before the ambush started and intended to hold it.
Caelen drove him to his knees in the center of the road and set his blade at the man's throat. "Who paid you?"
The man looked up through the blood. He looked at the blade. Then he laughed — wet and certain, the sound of a man who had already settled his own accounting.
"Aren Solvayne," the man said. He spat to the side. "He told us Lord Erran was going to offer your queen something at his table that Solvayne wasn't supposed to lose. He said if she ever sat at that table, his Conclave was over." His eyes moved to me. "We were paid to make sure she never got there."