The forest felt thinner after the blood moon. The howls had ebbed with the dawn, dragging tatters of sound into the trees until the silence settled like ash. The pack loosened very slightly, shoulders notched down a fraction, ears less sharp. It wasn't safety. It was the space where choices became possible.
Garrett stood at the edge of the hollow, looking south. "The worst has passed," he said. His voice didn't rise; the clearing arranged itself to hear him. "We return to Ravenholt."
A murmur went through the handful of humans. Someone made a sound that could have been relief, or dread.
Elara stepped forward before she realised she had. "We're not just salvaging," she said, palms damp. "We look for survivors."
Every head turned—wolves and humans both. Amber's eyes narrowed, weighing. Caleb stared at Elara, jaw tight, as if she'd stepped onto a cliff-edge. Luke, a pace back from Garrett, didn't move at all.
Garrett held Elara's gaze a long moment, gold steady and unreadable. The quiet stretched.
"As you command," he said.
Something cold and certain slipped down Elara's spine. She hadn't meant it as an order. It had sounded like one anyway.
They moved.
---
The road to Ravenholt was stained. Birds had kept their distance; the only life in the ditch was a scatter of flies and a fox bold enough to nose at old blood and then skitter off at the scent of wolves. The outer wall was black where fire had licked it, grey where smoke had sulked and settled. The gate had been torn inward neatly, as if the keep itself had drawn breath too fast and broken a rib.
Bodies lay everywhere.
Not laid out by any hand. Not counted. Strewn like a game a giant had lost interest in.
Some were men and women in torn leathers, weapons fallen from hands that had forgotten how to hold. Some were wolves, coats matted with soot, mouths filled with grit. Some were neither one thing nor the other—caught half-turned, jaws stretched too long, fingers twisted into hooks, ribs breaking under skin that hadn't decided what to be. A few were gnawed down to the tidy geometry of bones. Those were worst, because you could mistake them for clean until you looked at the teeth-marks.
A grey wolf dragged itself across the courtyard, breathing like a bellows with a hole in it. Amber went to one knee beside it without a word. She set her hand on its head; it went still under her palm, trusting. Her knife was quick and exact. She stood without looking behind her. No one asked her to justify mercy.
The pack flowed through the ruin with efficient quiet. They did not shift here. To the handful of people Elara had brought this far, they were hard men and women in cloaks and leather, disciplined, unsentimental. That lie was kinder than the truth for now. Garrett split the sweep with a gesture: stables, the great hall cellar, the chapel. Elara took the middle line without thinking, and Luke fell in at her shoulder as if that had been the plan all along.
---
The stables stank of hot ash, wet straw, and the sweet rot of meat gone just a little too long. Part of the roof had fallen in; light pooled in ragged squares on the floor. Under a collapsed beam, something coughed.
"Hold," Garrett said softly, and the wolves stilled as if a line had been pulled taut through their spines.
Amber and two deltas set their hands to the beam. Elara wanted to help and knew she would be more hindrance than weight. She found the boy who had carried water for the garrison and eased him back a pace without making him look at the shattered horse sprawled nearby. He didn't seem to see anything he stepped in. His eyes were the flat of a pond in winter.
The beam came up with a slow groan. Shapes scurried from the pocket beneath it: a woman with soot ground into the crease above her lip, clutching a child whose hair was singed short; an old man with his arm in a sling made of someone's apron; two lads grey with ash, faces striped pale where tears had run. Garrett's bulk filled the gap, steadying, and they emerged past him as if his body were the doorway and safety was a thing you could fit your shoulder through.
"Outside," Amber said, and her voice made a path. "One at a time. Breathe."
Elara counted without deciding to. Seven. Nine. Twelve. Fifteen, blinking like moles in the light.
Her silver flickered at the edges of her sight and she pushed it down. Not here. Not yet. She made herself see hands, faces, the way the child's shoulders loosened when he realised there was sky again.
A woman caught Elara's sleeve, fingers digging. "Is—have you seen—Tessa? Kitchen Tessa? She's my sister, she—"
"We're still looking," Elara said, and she didn't make it hope or apology. "We'll keep looking."
Behind them, someone whispered a name to the dirt as if it might answer. No one told them not to.
---
The cellar door to the great hall had been barred from the inside and then buried from above. Smoke had blackened the stones. The corridor down to it echoed in Elara's bones—how many times had she carried jugs this way for some dinner that felt important at the time?
"Beam," Luke said quietly, and the two deltas with him set their palms to the plank wedged across the door. It shifted a finger's width and stuck.
"Wedge," he added, and one of them slid a broken spear-shaft into the gap. Luke braced, lifted, breath short, shoulder straining. The bite wound there pulled his mouth into a line Elara recognised from people who had carried buckets through winters. He didn't look at her looking. The beam came up; the door shuddered; someone inside yanked it the last inch and a rush of air wafted out that smelled of bodies, fear, and bread gone sour.
They came up blinking, half-crouched out of habit. There were more of them than Elara had let herself hope: ten, twenty, nearly twenty again, some bandaged with shirts, some peppered with claw-rakes that should have been poison and weren't. One man carried his daughter on his back and only remembered to breathe when he saw the sky. Another climbed the steps and then froze so violently Elara thought his heart had stopped.
"Scott," he said, and the name broke on the hinge in the middle.
Elara followed his gaze. A body slumped against the wall at the bottom of the steps, half in shadow where the torchlight didn't reach. He had been a big man; his hands hadn't known how to be gentle with cups. He had kept the south gate and always had a boiled sweet for children who waved when he came off watch. His jaw was stretched too far now and set that way. His fingers weren't fingers. His eyes were stuck midway through turning, yellow like old bruises.
The man who had said his name put a hand out as if he could push grief away by reaching, then let it fall. Two others took him under the elbows and steered him into the light. Someone started to cry without sound. The girl on her father's back began to cough and couldn't stop.
Elara's silver, treacherous, sharpened without her permission. The cellar mouth swam with faint colour—green bright as new leaves clung to a woman whose sleeve was stiff with blood; cool blue whispered along the edges of a lad with a split lip and a scratch that should have been a death sentence; a thin violet flicker quivered around a boy who looked so young she wanted to put a hand over his eyes. Not human. Not most of them. Thirty-four, the number came from nowhere and sat down in her head as if it had been there all along.
She blinked hard until the colours dimmed, then reached for a skin of water and pressed it into the hands that could still hold.
"Slowly," she said, because instructions were safer than sympathy. "If you drink too fast you'll be sick."
"Where's Tessa?" the woman from the stables asked again, voice frayed. "She works the kitchens. She'll have gone to the chapel—she always runs there, she says it's closer to the saints—"
"We're going," Elara said. "Now."
---
The chapel door hung off one hinge, the holy oak split with a crack running the height of the boards. Someone had tried to nail it shut from the inside and the nails had torn out in splinters.
"Ferals inside," Garrett said, softly enough that a man would have missed it. The wolves didn't.
They did not shift. They didn't need to. Four went in with knives the length of a man's forearm and faces like stone. The sounds were quick and close to the floor. When they came out again they were breathing harder. One of them wiped his blade on the rag of a torn banner so it wouldn't drip. No one asked what was on the other side of that cloth.
Amber shouldered the door the rest of the way and let it fall inward. The chapel was a wreck of benches, wax, and prayer. Blood had skidded across the flagstones and dried in whorls. Under the altar, in the shallow hollow where offerings had once been kept, a clutch of bodies trembled.
"Quiet," Elara said, stepping in ahead of the men who would frighten with their size. "It's finished. Come out."
They came as if learning to unfold—an elderly priest whose hands had shaken even before the night started, two girls with soot on their faces making tracks where tears had tried to clean, a young mother with a baby strapped to her chest with a strip of curtain, and a woman Elara recognised as Marla who had sold onions at the market. Marla's mouth opened; a sound came out like something broken. Her gaze stayed fixed on the second pew from the back.
Elara didn't want to look and did. The woman there had fallen with her head bent as if in prayer. Her hair was braided with a ribbon. The braid made Elara's stomach drop before the face did. Even ruined faces have to introduce themselves around a braid you've watched bob for years.
"Don't," Elara said, but softly, because telling someone not to see isn't kind and isn't possible.
Marla folded around the pew-end and made a noise that turned the room to glass. Amber caught her under the arms and hauled her back, not gently, because gentle wouldn't work.
"Tessa," Marla said, in the gap where a breath should have been. "She—she said the saints—"
Elara put her hand on Marla's cheek, not because it would fix anything, but because her hand could tell the truth her mouth couldn't carry. "I'm sorry."
Someone beside the altar whispered, "Father Heath," and the old priest swayed until two others steadied him. "I am," he said, and his voice was shredded. "For what it's worth under heaven, I am."
They filed out past the pews and the stains. In the doorway, a boy of maybe ten stopped dead, staring at a patch of chewed bone that was just bones if you squinted and not if you didn't. "Mum?" he said, and the word hit Elara like a thrown stone. Garrett moved without making a sound she could hear and turned the boy around so he saw only shoulders and belts and the door.
"Don't look," Garrett murmured, which was a mercy and a lie at the same time, because the seeing had already happened.
Outside, the air felt unclean in a different way, as if the ruin had got into it.
---
By the time the sweeps met again in the yard, the light had shifted toward afternoon. The survivors clustered in knots. Water moved from hand to mouth to hand. The wolves paced the edges, exactly the way Elara had seen them ring the camp the night before. Human faces followed them and read only tired soldiers and hard strangers, because that was the story they knew how to hold.
Elara counted with a piece of her that had learned to count even when the rest wanted to break. Fifteen from the stables. Nineteen from the cellar. Twelve from the chapel. One little boy rescued off a stair where he had fallen asleep with his ear on his knee because no one had woken him to be afraid. Forty-seven.
What Elara did notice—as her sight settled and steadied and stopped pretending not to work—was that of the forty-seven survivors of the fight, thirty-four of them had an aura. Faint green, sharp green, layered green. Blues like frost and like river-glass. A couple of colours she didn't have names for yet. Only thirteen stood bare of it. More than one of the thirty-four had bandages where teeth had gone in or claws had raked, and none of them glowed the rancid yellow she had learned to dread. The rules she had been taught were smaller than the world.
She did not say any of that out loud.
Caleb didn't ask. He was holding the young mother's baby while she drank, jaw set and eyes rimmed red. When he saw Elara looking he gave her a look that was equal parts relief and something that didn't fit beside it.
One of the men from the cellar staggered and would have gone over if Luke hadn't put a hand on his elbow. "Steady," Luke said, and the man nodded as if Luke had said something wise. The strange spell of discipline held. No one asked why these hardened strangers moved like they shared a heartbeat.
They gathered what could be carried—skins, a sack of bread that somehow hadn't been burnt, a crate of bolts for crossbows Elara would not think about who had needed and failed to use. Then they went, because standing still made the place louder.
In the lane by the smithy, Elara's boot scuffed something half under a length of chain. She bent without thinking. A ribbon lay there, the same blue as the one braided into the hair of the woman in the pew. She folded it once and again and closed her hand on it. When Marla walked past a minute later, not seeing anything she didn't have to see, Elara pressed the ribbon into her palm. Marla made the smallest sound a throat can make and kept moving.
They left the gate open. There was no reason to close it and fifty reasons not to pretend the wall meant anything now.
The walk back to the hollow felt longer, because that is the way of walks where you carry more than you brought. Wolves bracketed the line, silent, eyes always moving. The people in the middle didn't know the word pack applied to anyone present, and Elara tried not to decide for them too early.
Luke let the line slip him back until he was at Elara's shoulder. "Don't," he said, low enough that only she would hear.
"Don't what?"
"Show them what you saw."
She could have lied. She didn't. "I wasn't going to."
He nodded, as if that were a plan executed. "They're hurt enough. Let them be human tonight."
Elara thought of the colours she'd seen burning around faces she'd known for years. "Most of them aren't."
"I know." He didn't look at her. "Let them be anyway."
Ahead, Garrett glanced back once. It wasn't a rebuke. It was a measure.
Caleb fell in on Elara's other side, shoulder brushing hers. "We should have been here sooner," he said, hoarse with the sort of guilt that doesn't want a cure.
"We were alive enough to come back," she said, because that was the only sentence in her mouth that didn't taste like ash. "That's what matters."
"For now," he said, and didn't let go of the word we.
The trees folded around them like a mouth closing. Behind, Ravenholt sat with its dead and its doors and waited for someone to decide what to call it now. Ahead, water talked over stones, and the hollow held a shape where bodies could fit into the night. Elara walked at the front because her feet had started doing that without asking her first.
She had asked to find survivors. She had. And they had.
Forty-seven heartbeats. Thirty-four glows the world had taught her to miss. Thirteen faces open and raw. Wolves at the edges who didn't look like wolves. A ribbon in Marla's hand. The weight of a choice sitting heavier than any pack on a back.
They reached the stream. The line folded into the hollow with the same care the wolves had used when they set the camp in the first place. Fires would be lit low. Water would pass hand to hand. Bread would be divided with a knife that had been cleaned because Amber had said so. The night would come on. The ferals would prowl the outer dark and test the line because that was what the world did when it wasn't sure who owned it.
Elara stood where the ground dipped and the light gathered and felt the shape of command sit behind her teeth like a word she wasn't ready to say. Not yet. But soon.
She didn't look at the silver. She didn't have to. It was there when she closed her eyes. It would be there when she opened them. And the people in the hollow would look up—not all, not yet, but some—and wait for what she would say next as if that mattered more than the trees, or the stream, or the moon forgetting itself.
Tonight she would let them be human. Tomorrow she would count again.