Greythorn

Greythorn was not a pack so much as the memory of one. Mara smelled it before she saw it — woodsmoke thinned out over too much distance, the sour note of a territory whose borders weren't being walked often enough. When the trees finally opened she stood at the lip of a valley and looked down at a cluster of grey buildings hunched against the mountainside like animals waiting out a storm. There were no children running. That was the first thing she noticed. A healthy pack was loud with children. A woman met her at the boundary stones — broad-shouldered, maybe fifty, with a face that had been weathered into kindness rather than out of it. She introduced herself as Senna, the pack's beta, and she did not ask Mara a single question about where she had come from or why. "You'll have heard things about us," Senna said, walking her down the slope. "Most of them are true. We lost half our number to the sickness eight winters back, and the strong ones drifted off to packs that could feed them. What's left is old, or stubborn, or both." She glanced sideways. "Which are you?" "I don't know yet," Mara said honestly. Senna laughed, a short bark of a sound. "Good answer." They passed a longhouse with a sagging roof, a smithy gone cold, a vegetable garden putting up a brave and losing fight against the season. Faces appeared in doorways and withdrew. Not hostile. Just tired. "You should know how it works here," Senna said. "We don't have the luxury of ceremony. Everyone works. Everyone eats what the work brings in. If you can't hunt you mend, if you can't mend you haul. There's no shame in any of it and there's no charity in any of it either. Do you understand the difference?" "I think so." "You will." Senna stopped at the foot of a path that climbed away from the houses toward a single building set apart, its windows dark. "That's the alpha's house. You'll meet him when he decides to be met. Don't take it personally — he's like that with everyone." Mara looked up the path. Something about the dark windows made the wound in her chest ache, though she could not have said why. "What's he like?" Senna was quiet for a moment. The wind moved through the valley, carrying the first dry flakes of the snow that had been threatening since the river. "Garrick Vane has held this pack together with his bare hands for eight years," she said at last. "He's buried more of us than he's welcomed. He doesn't laugh, he doesn't explain himself, and he has not let a single soul close to him since the sickness took his sister." She turned to face Mara fully. "He'll keep you alive, girl. That's what he does. But if you came here hoping to be wanted — you should know that's the one thing Greythorn ran out of a long time ago." Mara thought of Callum's face in the firelight. The word *no*. The bond tearing. "I didn't come here to be wanted," she said. "I came here because there was nowhere else." Senna studied her with those weathered-kind eyes, and something in them shifted — not warmth, exactly, but the beginning of a decision. "Then you might just fit," she said. "Come on. There's a bed, and there's stew, and tomorrow there's work. That's the whole of what we have. It's more than you'd have had alone." The snow came down harder as they walked, settling on the dead garden, on the cold smithy, on the silent valley. And high above them the dark windows of the alpha's house watched the new wolf arrive, and gave nothing away.