Back at the eastern tree, the guards moved with the clumsiness of those who had been trained to obey a different law. They cut Liora's ropes with practiced hands. The knots fell away like slow snowfall. She sagged for a moment as if the ropes had become part of weight and when they fell free she caught herself on the raw marrow of being: standing, living, breathing.
They offered her the cloak. It had been kept until the last folded, stained with dust and some of the courtyard's grim. Nyssa was there, hair loose, eyes wet and wide. She reached to fasten the cloak about Liora's shoulders with hands that trembled more from hope than from cold.
For a flash, everything was small and bright, the silver clasp between Liora's collarbones, the way the fabric laid over her back like an old promise. Men moved around them, running to the lines, shouting, grabbing helmets. The field called like a mouth open ready.
When Liora pulled the cloak tight, she did not bow. She did not speak to Gonzalo or the beta. She looked at the field. She felt the hum of men setting themselves to die or to save. The cloak was warm from the skin it had sheltered, it tasted of Liora's memory more than it did of the fire.
Then she turned. Not toward the rank of men who bared their teeth into the night, not to the Alpha who had kept her bound, but toward the east where the rogues' flags fluttered like ragged mistakes.
A murmur went through the men whose eyes caught the motion. The beta called out her name like a prayer and then like a warning. "Liora!" he shouted, half-command, half-beg. "Liora, stand with us!"
She looked at him. For a breath she let her face be a map to what had been done to her, threads of anger, of shame, of the memory of rope on skin. Her lips moved with no sound at first. Then she lifted her voice. It was steady and clear and the words were simpler than battle cries. "I will not fight for those who castrate me with law and call it justice."
The night seemed to tilt. Men's arms hung Ready and then slack. Gonzalo's face did not move like a man struck by lightning. His pride had been a shield and now it became a chain. He recovered in a flash, orders cracking from him like a whip. "You traitor," he spat, but it was as though the name was flung too late.
Liora's eyes were cold. She stepped toward the rogues' line and raised her hand, not in surrender but in a greeting. A rogue older, with lines etched sharp into his face broke from the shadow and came forward, as if to receive a petition long made. He looked at Liora as a man who recognized an old debt.
"You join us?" he asked, voice a rasp like gravel.
She answered with the simplicity of a woman who had nothing left to trade. "I join those who want the pack burned," she said. "I join those who will end the rot."
The rogue's mouth quirked into something that might have been a smile. He called to his men then, not a charge but an echoing order that slid through the field: "Retreat. Withdraw now."
The rogues stepped back in coordinated motion, not fleeing but pulling like a tide that had achieved its goal. They had made the Alpha's lines look thin; they had claimed enough chaos and now they would carry their spoils. Gonzalo's men cursed and shouted orders to hold, but the rogues' retreat was the moment of misdirection: the rout would take hold in the confusion.
Liora moved with them, not like a captive but like a partner. She stooped and, with calm hands, untied Elira where the girl still hung in ropes, face streaked with blood and tears, breathing a fragile thing. Elira blinked at first, bewildered. Then the sight of Liora's hand at her wrist made her reach for the cloak that lay trampled in the mud between them. Liora gathered it and wrapped it around Elira's shoulders with a deftness that, in another life, might have been tenderness.
Men shouted at the sight. Gonzalo threw himself forward, a shape of rage and disbelief, and in the moment his hands rocked the air with command, Liora turned and strode with the rogues. Elira followed, stumbling but steady, her small body clinging to the warmth of the cloak as if it were a small, lit anchor.
The rogue Alpha glanced back once, measuring the damage and the chance. The retreat became a flow of bodies under the moon. The field took on the long, messy rhythm of a retreat that would leave scabs of ruin behind it. Torches guttered as men picked their dead and tended their wounded. The beta cursed and tried to marshal a pursuit. But the night had a decision of its own. The rogues were gone—moving like a dark river into the hills, with Liora and Elira in their wake.
Gonzalo stood where he was, chest heaving, the map of his plans torn beneath his boots. Around him men swore and counted losses. They would later name the night as a failure of watchfulness and a moment where pride had cost them what it meant to be a pack. But none of that would change the fact that Liora had chosen a side.
She had chosen the enemy and dragged the one who had cared for her, in whatever small ways, into the ruin. They moved like a single shadow then, rogues receding into the clamor of woods and the echo of their own triumph.
When the last shape of them folded into the dark, the field was left with a single truth beaten into the earth: the pack had lost more tha
n men, it had lost a piece of itself.