11

“I haven’t camped like this in a long time,” he hummed.

“When’s the last time?” Kodan asked. “Back when you were a pup?”

“I think so,” Elias said. “It had to be when we were still in the old Nightfall.”

Kodan whistled low. “Yeah, so about a hundred years ago.”

Elias clicked his tongue and flicked a twig of firewood at Kodan’s face as she laughed. I found myself laughing, too. I was so used to seeing Elias as the serious, unflappable King—but Kodan brought out a younger-seeming, more playful side of him.

“You’re older than me, remember?”

Kodan cringed. “I try not to.”

I pressed my shoulder against Elias’, and he adjusted slightly so he could wind his arm around me. I told myself it was the chill and the tiredness that led me to do this—but the contact felt good. Grounding. I took a sip of the warm wine.

“What was it like?” I asked. “Old Nightfall?”

“Old Nightfall?” Fina asked.

“Our former pack lands,” Kodan explained. “We lived on that territory until I was ten.”

“And I was six,” Elias said. “Even as a boy, I knew that land was going to be the death of us.” He tugged me a little closer, his arm around my waist, but his gaze was fixed on the flickering blaze. “The old territory isn’t far from here, actually. Cold and dry and impossible to farm. We were always struggling. Struggling to eat, to hunt, to build, to survive. I remember that it had a particularly harsh winter. The snow never seemed to stop and had driven the elk across the mountain pass to Shianga. Nothing to eat but salted pork and crusts of bread. The pack elders were dying—even the toughest wolves couldn’t survive that cold.”

Even Kodan’s jovial demeanor flattened at the memory.

“So,” Elias continued, “my father, the pack alpha, traveled with a small party to Efra, to ask the crown for aid. More than anything we needed food, but my father also hoped the crown would take in some of the pack and lodge them for the winter while we rebuilt in the spring, so we could avoid more unnecessary deaths. At that time the King of Frasia was an old man. My father was confident he would see the value in protecting the lives of innocent wolves.”

The King of Frasia. At that time, the king was my grandfather, Constantine. My heart sank.

“He went, he pleaded his case to the king, and then the king turned him away.”

“What?” I pulled away just enough to stare at the side of his face, though he was still looking into the flames. “He said no?”

Elias laughed a small, sardonic laugh. “He hardly waited for my father to finish talking before he turned him away. He wouldn’t even give them lodging in Efra for the evening. He turned them right back out into the wilds to return to Nightfall.”

“What was the reason?” I asked. My father had never mentioned this in my entire life. All the stories I’d heard of Nightfall as a young wolf were narratives of their ferocity and their bloodthirst—and how they showed up at the gates of Efra hungry for wolf-flesh and tore my innocent grandfather limb from limb.

“He suggested that Nightfall’s woes were the gods’ desires,” Elias said without inflection. “And that if we did not survive, perhaps it was better for the wolves of Frasia to weed out the weak.”

I was stunned to silence. The Duke of Daybreak had always spoken of Constantine as if he were a benevolent god himself, ruling over Frasia with kindness and fairness. But a kind king would never have turned away a pack in need. There was no reason for it—no reason other than cruelty and hatred.

“When my father returned to Nightfall and told his counselors what had happened, obviously there was outrage,” Elias said. “It was briskly decided that if the King of Frasia believed the gods wanted to cull the wolves for weakness, then Nightfall would speed up that process.”

Kodan smiled faintly.

“It wasn’t an easy decision,” Elias said, “but my father was trapped between a rock and a hard place. The pack would either succumb to death by the elements or death in battle fighting for a better life. He chose to fight. He never wanted glory—he simply wanted our pack to survive, and to be able to uplift all the packs in Frasia, not just our own.”

“Gods rest his soul,” Kodan murmured. The story hung in the air for a moment, over the crackling fire, and then Kodan asked, “Does anyone want to hear about the time Elias chased a squirrel into a tree and then got stuck?”

The rest of the evening passed with lighthearted stories from our childhood, but I had trouble focusing on the jokes and the laughter. I was still trying to wrap my head around the story Elias had told. The terrifying wolves of Nightfall were just a scraggly bunch of starved peasants? Fighting for their lives instead of fighting for glory?

As the fire lowered to embers, we all shifted into our wolves to sleep. It was easier to share warmth after shifting, piled against each other around the fire as protection from the cold. I nuzzled close to Elias, willing his familiar scent to calm the thoughts that were racing through my head, even in my wolf form.

You okay? his voice rumbled in my mind.

Yes, I responded. I just didn’t know Constantine had turned away Nightfall when they needed help most.

Elias’ ears flickered. I imagine that’s not the story they told you.

It’s not, I responded. I think there might be a lot I don’t know.