Riven walked fast.
I had to push to keep up with him and I was not going to give him the satisfaction of asking him to slow down.
---
The forest up here was different from the one around Ashveil. Darker. Older. The trees were massive and the ground between them was soft with years of fallen leaves.
No paths. No markers. Nothing to tell you where you were going.
He knew exactly where he was going though. Not once did he slow down to check his direction.
---
"How many people are in your camp?" I asked.
"Enough," he said.
"That is not a number," I said.
"No," he agreed. "It is not."
---
I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders. My clothes were still wet and the cold was working its way into my bones.
Keep moving. Stopping means freezing.
"Are they all wolves?" I asked.
He glanced back at me. Just for a second.
"Mostly," he said.
---
I caught that word. Mostly.
That meant some of them were not. That meant maybe I was not going to walk into a camp full of pure bloods who would look at me the way everyone in Ashveil did.
Maybe.
---
We walked in silence for a while after that. The only sounds were our feet on the ground and the wind moving through the branches above us.
I used the quiet to think.
I had nothing. No food. No money. Soaking wet clothes and a blanket that belonged to a stranger. A pendant I did not understand in my pocket.
And somewhere behind me soldiers with the Alpha King's orders were clearing hybrids out of every village in the inner lands.
Where exactly did I think I was going from here?
---
"You went quiet," Riven said without turning around.
"I am thinking," I said.
"About what?"
"About the fact that I have no plan," I said. "And no destination. And I just followed a stranger into a forest."
"Smart things to think about," he said.
"Little late though," I said.
---
He stopped walking.
I almost ran into his back before I caught myself.
He turned around and looked at me properly for the first time since we had left the river. His eyes were dark. Steady. The kind of steady that came from someone who had learned to stay calm when everything around them was not.
"You crossed that river alone in November," he said. "With soldiers behind you. You did not panic and you did not stop moving."
He paused.
"People with no plan who can do that usually figure one out," he said.
---
Then he turned and kept walking.
I stood there for a second.
Was that supposed to make me feel better?
Strangely it did. A little.
I followed him.
---
The camp appeared between the trees without much warning.
A cluster of shelters built low to the ground. Good timber. Solid construction. Nothing like the rough temporary things I expected from rogues.
Fires burning in two places. The smell of something cooking.
People moving between the shelters. Some looked up when we walked in. Most went back to what they were doing.
---
I counted maybe thirty people. Men and women both. Different ages.
Some were clearly wolves from the way they held themselves. A few others I was not sure about.
One of them was definitely not a wolf.
He was sitting on a log near the larger fire, sharpening a blade with slow careful strokes. His ears came to a slight point at the top. His movements were too precise and too controlled for a wolf.
Elf. Or part elf at least.
---
He looked up when Riven and I approached. His eyes landed on me and stayed there.
They were sharp eyes. The kind that took everything in at once and filed it away.
"You brought someone back," he said to Riven.
"Soldiers were chasing her," Riven said.
"And that is our problem because?" the elf said.
"She crossed the river," Riven said simply.
---
The elf looked at me for another moment. Then back at Riven.
"You and that river," he said. He went back to sharpening his blade. "Fine. She can eat."
---
I looked at Riven.
"What does the river have to do with anything?" I asked quietly.
"Old rogue code," he said. "Anyone who crosses into unclaimed territory on foot in winter is either desperate or serious. Either way they have earned a meal and a fire."
"And after the meal and the fire?" I asked.
"That depends on you," he said.
---
He led me to the fire and left me there with a nod toward a woman stirring a pot nearby.
The woman handed me a bowl without asking. Hot broth with chunks of something in it. I did not ask what.
I sat down and ate.
---
The elf watched me from across the fire. Not in an unfriendly way exactly. More like he was still deciding something.
"You are a hybrid," he said after a while.
"People keep saying that like it is news," I said.
Something moved at the corner of his mouth.
"Soren," he said. It took me a second to realize it was his name.
"Kaia," I said.
---
"Wolf and human?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Hm," he said. Like that meant something specific to him.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing," he said. And went back to his blade.
---
I finished the broth and felt the warmth start to work its way back into my body.
My wet clothes were still uncomfortable but the fire helped. I shifted closer to it without thinking.
The pendant pressed against my leg again through my pocket.
---
I pulled it out slowly and looked at it in the firelight.
The dark metal caught the light differently than it had in the healer's house. The crown shape seemed almost to have depth to it. Like it went further down than the metal actually did.
What are you, I thought again.
---
"Where did you get that?"
Riven's voice. Right beside me.
I had not heard him come back.
I looked up. He was crouched next to me, eyes fixed on the pendant in my hand. His expression had changed completely.
The calm steady look was gone.
He looked like a man who had just seen something he thought did not exist anymore.
---
"It was my father's," I said. "A healer gave it to me today. She said it belonged to him."
"Who was your father?" Riven asked.
His voice was very quiet now.
"I don't know much about him," I said. "He was cast out of the Silver Fang pack before I was born."
---
Riven stood up slowly.
He turned and looked across the fire at Soren.
Something passed between them. The kind of look that meant a whole conversation in two seconds.
Soren set down his blade.
---
"What?" I said. "What is it?"
Riven looked back down at me.
"That pendant," he said. "I have only ever seen it described in old texts."
"What kind of old texts?" I asked.
"The kind that talk about the Hybrid Throne," he said.
---
The fire crackled between us.
I looked down at the pendant in my hand.
The healer's words came back to me. A claim to the throne that has been empty for three hundred years.
"You know about the throne," I said.
"Everyone in unclaimed territory knows about the throne," Riven said. "We have been waiting for someone to show up with proof it was real."
---
He looked at me steadily.
"We just did not expect that someone to show up soaking wet with soldiers behind them," he said.
"Sorry to disappoint," I said.
"You did not disappoint," he said. And his voice was completely serious when he said it.
---
Soren appeared beside Riven. He was looking at the pendant too now.
"May I?" he asked.
I hesitated. Then held it out.
He took it carefully. Turned it over once. His precise fingers moved over the surface slowly.
Then he handed it back.
"It is real," he said simply.
---
"What does that mean?" I asked. "What does any of this actually mean for me right now?"
The two of them looked at each other again.
"It means," Riven said slowly. "That you are not just a hybrid with no pack and no home."
He paused.
"It means you have a claim that every pure blood faction in this land has been killing each other over for three hundred years."
---
I looked at the pendant.
Then at the two of them.
Then back at the pendant.
"So what you are telling me," I said. "Is that my situation just got significantly more dangerous."
"Yes," Riven said.
"Wonderful," I said.
---
The fire popped and sent a small shower of sparks up into the dark.
Somewhere in the forest something howled. Long and low and far away.
I closed my fingers around the pendant and held it tight.
Three hundred years.
And somehow it had landed in my hands.