We wait in the salt closet until the dog's patience runs out before ours.
Boots fade. Leashes jingle into smaller news. Syth touches the jamb once—KEEP warm under her palm—and cracks the door the width of a coin. River fog slips in, thin and salty. No one stands in it except the quay.
"Walk," she mouths.
We move as if we belong to the floor. Two captives wrapped in blankets—Spindle Hand and Blue Thread—breathe quiet between Ira's shoulders and Syth's steadying hands. Kirella lifts the lantern low so it hums in the language of kitchens instead of boats. My tırpan rests short along my forearm like a promise I plan not to spend.
Back lanes swallow us: tarps, rope ladders, the soot-sweet smell of fried dough pretending to be breakfast. Two vendors lift their chins as we pass—the kind who believe in soup more than sermons.
Syth starts the Promise Choir as if discussing weather.
"We won't pay," she says, voice small and warm.
"We won't sell," the vendors answer, matching the tune before they remember who chose it. A third line rises by habit from an old woman in a doorway: "No names to paper or stone."
The lantern deepens in my palm, the good-heavy that says: the path heard you.
A KEEP door opens on a crooked lane. Lelia is there, face uncombed with sleep, apron tied like a flag. She takes Spindle Hand first, then Blue Thread, and makes space for both with hands that never learned the word later.
"Go," she tells us, because that word weighs less when a friend says it.
Syth tucks the ticket—needle over waves—into Kirella's cloak. "Even tide," she reminds, soft as chalk. "If you don't come home by dawn, I move the Walk without you."
"Understood," he says.
Ira grins at us with the kind of tired that earns breakfast twice. "Don't fight wolves," he adds, which is a prayer disguised as advice.
"We'll try something better," I say.
We peel away from the Walk before the sky remembers it is capable of color. The city's last lanterns look embarrassed to still be burning. We take the Gutter Pines road—broken cobble to dirt to a long smear of needles, resin bells tied on strings between trunks to tattle when wind forgets manners. The smell changes from river metal to pine pitch and wet earth. The lantern's hum lowers in deference. The ring under my boots keeps modest, a shy warmth.
Totems mark the border: bone plaits with smears of soot, moons scratched into bark with a nail that ran out of patience, a cairn of oath stones stacked shoulder-high. Someone who knows how to carve cut a little stair into the top stone for paw pads to fit. The wind carries a little honest musk that says a family lives here and does not want to be watched.
We stop three steps short of the cairn.
I draw a thin ring seam around the base—not on the stones, around them, a circle that says we see, we won't step on. Kirella knots a short length of red twine to a branch and leaves it unpulled, a rope that means no claim in a sailor's alphabet. He lifts the lantern just enough to let the cairn count our breaths.
"Two," he says.
"Two," I answer.
Clack.
The sound is wrong in trees. Iron. A pain that prefers meat.
We find the trap fifteen paces into the pines—a Lockwright make, teeth neat with shame. In its maw a boy not old enough to have his first full moon-necklace, half-shifted: human chest, wolfed-out calves, toes like new thoughts ending in indecision. Blood slicks his ankle where the steel got opinionated.
He bares teeth at us on principle. "Don't," he says, breath bright with fear and stubborn.
"We're already here," I say, and kneel where he can see both my hands.
Kirella sinks one knee on the chain. I slide the brine needle into the hinge and feed it a thin line of salt-water until the glue inside the trap remembers it used to be bark and rain. The spring loosens with a sulky click.
"Count me," I say.
"One—two—three—four," Kirella breathes.
On four we pop the plate. Iron jaw opens with a gasp the forest swallows. Kirella lifts the teeth away as if they could change their mind. I pull the boy's leg free and bind the ankle with a strip torn from my sleeve, quick and plain. He watches me the way a stray dog watches a hand: wary, hungry for the idea of kindness, smart enough to doubt it.
"Name?" Kirella asks, and then: "Bowl-name is fine."
The boy licks his lip. "Third Moon," he says, ashamed he has only two.
"It'll grow," I tell him.
The pines pop a resin bubble. Resin bells tick nervously. Then a low growl travels between trees like a rumor that finished school.
Two wolf scouts step from the trunks—hybrid form, eyes amber-thin, scars clean, breath steam. A third stays a shadow with a bone horn at his neck.
They take it in at a glance: trapped kin, our hands, our tools. The reading lands where pride wants it.
"Poachers," one says—woman-voice gravelly, shoulders broad, clawed hands held low in "I'm not there yet, but I can be" stance.
"We cut traps, not throats," I say. I point at the hinge where brine ate manners and the Lockwright stamp on the steel's underside. "Your border is salted. Someone left a machine pretending to be a test."
"Convenient," the other scout says. His gaze flicks to the boy's ankle, to my strip of sleeve, to the red twine at his totem tree. "Convenient strangers."
Third Moon tries to speak. The female scout hushes him with a look that would stop a river's mouth.
They move at once, clean as a drill—no speech, claws out, restraint thin.
Close is where I live.
I let the tırpan stay short—no need to make a spectacle in someone else's church—and step into the female's reach. Her right hand feints long; her left wants my throat. I catch the forearm with the shaft, bind and turn, my hip finds her hip and argues; she stumbles into a knee tap that sets her on the pine duff with more dignity than she planned to lose. No cut. No gloat.
Kirella meets the male's surge with a cloak wrap, scarfing the claws for a heartbeat, then posts a brace and runs the man's shoulder into a tree without malice, only instruction. A wrist lock finishes the sentence. "We won't kill," he says, voice even.
The female comes up low; I post my forearm against her collarbone to ask a different question; she answers with a short sweep that almost takes my feet, smart, then stops herself half a breath from biting because she has rules and they are good ones. For a moment we are two people who have seen the inside of a ring and decided not to love it.
The bone horn blows.
Not loud. Not panicked. A professional sound, three notes stacked like stones.
The woods answer in smaller truths: one there, two there, a yes far left. The pack is not a crowd; it is a map, and we just stepped onto it.
"Back," Kirella says, calm as mooring.
We fall back along a creek that chatters over small stones with opinions. I draw step-coins with my heel across wet rock—fast, humble rings that remember shoes. The scouts press but do not pounce. They want us moving. Moving makes decisions hurry.
Moonlight threads the black water. The lantern breathes with us. The pines lean in as if they have questions.
The creek forks at an old lime-kiln ruin—arched mouth half-collapsed, chalk dust on everything, a broken stairs spine leading nowhere. We cut inside. Sound compresses. Breath grows louder. The ruin smells of old ash and wet stone and the kind of quiet that's too young to be holy.
They come two at a time.
In tight spaces you don't swing; you place.
The male presses through the arch first, big shoulders making foolish promises. I give him the hook of my tırpan under his wrist and let the kiln wall be my friend: forearm post, foot reap—his balance goes where I tell it. He slides sideways into a chalky wall with a startled grunt, more insulted than injured.
The female follows smart, low, not committing weight until weight is sure. Kirella puts his shoulder into the arch and peels her off with a gentle bump that moves bones without bruising pride, then steps into her space and anchors her wrist so she can stop deciding to hurt strangers.
"Enough," I say. I could extend the blade—one handspan, one bad idea—but I don't. I open my free palm, show it empty. "We broke a Lockwright trap. Your pup walks because we did."
"Words," the male says, face bared enough to show a human mouth insulted under the wolf.
"No," I say, and roll the trap half into the kiln light with my boot so the brine seam on the hinge gleams like an argument that learned manners. "Proof."
Third Moon limps into view behind them, eyes too bright, ankle wrapped in my sleeve. He tries again, voice cracking with loyalty and pain. "They helped."
The female's ear flicks. The male's jaw works. Pride and truth wrestle with no referee.
Wind changes. Resin bells tick, silvering in the first scratch of pre-dawn. Gray threads the pines like a story wanting to be written. When the light comes proper, the holy-glass gridding across the forest from the city will start to wake in every shine and ripple. My window shrinks to ten minutes of blade time if the day asks for it.
I feel the tırpan tug at my palm, greedy as a good hound who knows the game is about to start. I keep it short. Control is a kind of prayer I have learned how to say.
Horns bloom around the grove, measured, professional. Left. Right. Behind. More wolves arrive without needing to be seen. The scouts' spines lengthen a fraction with the comfort of company.
The female lifts her chin to call the Alpha. The male shifts human enough to speak with lips and not lose face. "Why are you in our trees at night," he says, less accusation, more accounting.
"To keep a market from writing MI— on throats," I answer. "To keep our names. To ask your teeth to point at the right throat."
"Whose?" he asks.
I keep my voice even. "Lockwright. Doctor."
The trees reply with a small creak, as if they know those names are too heavy for their age.
Kirella doesn't look away from the arch, from the ring, from me. His thumb finds the beat on the lantern handle. One—two—three—four.
"We won't kill," he says again, and it sounds like We won't, if you don't make us and also like We don't do that here.
Something new moves in the trees.
Not wolf. Not city. A different idea of weight.
On the kiln's doorframe, above the chalky bite mark where old stone tried to learn teeth, someone has drawn a small joker mask in charcoal—wide grin, hollow eyes, quick lines, still wet. It was not there when we stepped in.
"Down," Kirella says, small as a breath. We lower as if we planned to sit all along.
The voice floats out from nowhere with the pleasure of a magician who likes his own hands.
"You ran the wrong way," the voice says, amused. The words are city-smooth and bored with fear. "But at least you ran."
The horns around us fall into silence—not confusion, listening. The scouts' ears twitch toward the mark. Third Moon's pupils blow wide with horrified recognition I do not understand yet.
The joker grin shines wet on chalk. The pines breathe, preparing to hold theirs. The ruin's arch turns smaller by the distance between one sound and the next.
I shift my boots on the ring I drew on the kiln floor and feel it answer, warm, patient.
The tırpan stays short in my hand, not for lack of want, only for respect. Dawn licks the resin bells and they wink like tiny, impolite suns. Ten minutes. Maybe less.
"Count me," I whisper.
Kirella doesn't have to be told. One—two—three—four.
And the chapter stops there—wolves tightening a circle we haven't earned the right to break, a joker-mask sigil fresh as a slap, a voice in the trees that knows our feet, resin bells beginning to lie for the sun, and my blade held close while the ring under our boots warms like a promise we have not yet been allowed to keep.