My mother always said my birth was a curse on our village.
I used to think she was being dramatic.
I stopped thinking that a long time ago.
---
My name is Kaia. I am the daughter of a wolf shifter father and a human mother. That already made me wrong in the eyes of everyone around me.
But it was worse than that.
My father was not just any wolf shifter. He was the disgraced son of the Silver Fang pack. Cast out before I was even born.
Nobody let me forget it.
---
"Move, half-blood."
The shoulder that hit mine was hard enough to send me stumbling into the mud. I caught myself on the edge of the market stall before I fell completely.
The man who shoved me did not even look back.
I wiped the mud off my palm and kept walking. Getting angry cost energy I did not have.
---
The market in Ashveil was busy this morning. Farmers selling grain. Women haggling over cloth. Children running between the stalls.
Nobody made space for me.
I was used to it. You get used to a lot of things when you have no choice.
---
I was here for one reason. The pack healer needed herbs from the far side of the market. She was too old to walk that far herself.
I was the only one willing to do jobs nobody else wanted.
That was my place in this village. Not quite human. Not quite wolf. Useful only when no one better was available.
---
"You there. Hybrid girl."
I stopped walking.
The voice came from a stall to my left. An older woman, thick arms crossed over her chest, watching me like I was something she found stuck to her boot.
"You buying or just breathing my air?" she asked.
"Buying," I said. "Dried wolfsbane and river moss. Half a bag of each."
She stared at me for a moment longer than necessary.
Then she started measuring out the herbs without another word.
---
I kept my eyes forward while I waited. Looking down invited more trouble. Looking around invited eye contact. Eye contact invited conversation.
I had learned to take up as little space as possible.
My wolf side made that hard sometimes. There were moments when something inside me pushed back. When the anger rose up and wanted out.
I always pushed it back down.
Now was not the time.
---
"Eight copper," the woman said, dropping the wrapped herbs on the counter between us.
I counted out the coins and placed them down.
She swept them up without touching my hand.
I picked up the herbs and walked away.
---
The crowd was thicker near the center of the market. I heard the reason before I saw it.
Drums.
Low and steady. The kind that meant an announcement was coming.
I should have kept walking. Whatever this was, it was not for me.
But my feet slowed anyway.
---
A man in dark armor stood on the raised platform at the center of the market. He was tall. The kind of tall that made people move back without being asked.
Behind him stood four soldiers. Each one wearing the silver crest I recognized even from a distance.
The Alpha King's crest.
My stomach dropped a little.
What did the Alpha King want with a village like Ashveil?
---
"By order of His Majesty, Alpha King Caden of the Iron Throne," the armored man said, his voice carrying easily over the crowd. "A decree is hereby declared across all territories."
The market went quiet fast.
"The war in the Eastern Territories has reached the borders of the inner lands. All able bodies between the ages of seventeen and thirty are to report for conscription within three days."
Murmuring broke out around me. A woman nearby grabbed her son's arm.
---
I did not move.
I was twenty. That put me exactly in range.
But they did not conscript hybrids. Everyone knew that. We were not trusted with weapons. We were not trusted with anything that mattered.
I let out a slow breath.
This was not my problem.
---
"Furthermore," the man continued, and something in his tone made the murmuring stop again. "By direct order of the Alpha King. Any hybrid found within pack-controlled territories who cannot prove citizenship status will be removed."
There it was.
Removed. That was the clean word for it.
---
I looked down at the herbs in my hand. The healer had given me work. That work gave me a small coin each week. That coin let me eat.
None of that counted as citizenship.
I had no papers. No pack affiliation. No one to speak for me.
How long did I have before they came checking?
---
Three days.
The same three days as the conscription order.
I turned and walked away from the platform before I heard anything else.
---
The healer's house was at the edge of the village. Small. Crooked roof. The smell of smoke and dried plants always hanging around it.
I knocked twice and pushed the door open.
"You heard?" the old woman said before I could speak.
She was sitting by the fire. Her eyes were sharp even if her hands shook these days.
"I heard," I said.
---
I set the herbs on her table.
She did not reach for them. She was watching me in that way she had. Like she was reading something written on my face.
"Sit down, child," she said.
I sat.
---
"They will come through this village within two days," she said. "Not three. Two. The soldiers always move faster than the decree says."
"I know," I said.
"Do you have anywhere to go?"
The question landed flat between us. We both already knew the answer.
---
No pack would take me. No human settlement this close to pack territory would risk it either.
I was the thing that did not belong anywhere.
I had known that since I was old enough to understand words.
"I will figure something out," I said.
The old woman looked at me for a long moment.
"There is something I never told you," she said quietly. "About your father."
---
I went still.
Nobody talked about my father. Not here. Not ever. Even my mother had stopped saying his name before she died.
"What about him?" I asked.
The healer reached into the folds of her robe and pulled out something small. A worn piece of leather cord with a dark metal pendant hanging from it.
She held it out to me.
---
The pendant was shaped like a crown. Simple. Old. The metal was so dark it was almost black.
But when my fingers closed around it something moved under my skin.
Not pain. Not exactly.
More like something that had been sleeping for a very long time cracking one eye open.
---
"Your father did not just belong to the Silver Fang pack," the healer said. "He was cast out because of what he found. What he brought back from the Forbidden Lands."
She nodded at the pendant in my hand.
"He brought back proof that the Hybrid bloodline is not a mistake," she said. "It is a claim."
I looked at the pendant.
"A claim to what?" I asked.
---
She looked at me steadily.
"To the throne that has been empty for three hundred years," she said. "The one the pure bloods have been fighting over ever since."
The fire crackled between us.
My hand tightened around the pendant.
Everything I thought I knew about my useless, cursed, unwanted life had just shifted under my feet like sand.
---
And somewhere outside, I heard the first sound of soldiers' boots on the road into Ashveil.
They were already here.