The world returned to Elowen as a tremor—iron knocking wood, hooves thudding mud, voices leaking through slats like cold breath. She opened her eyes to the ribs of a wagon cage, the bars slick with mist. Chains rasped when she shifted, a dull, intimate sound, as if the metal had learned her pulse during the march and now kept time with it.
Someone coughed. Someone prayed. Someone tried to swallow a sob and failed.
Elowen lifted herself on bruised elbows. The wagon was packed—ten, perhaps twelve of them, knees braced against knees. Salt stung the air, brine crawling in from the sea they could not see, and beneath it she tasted damp wood, dried sweat, a smear of ash. The iron collar bit when she turned her head. She pressed her shoulder to the plank wall and shut her eyes.
The memory came as sound first: the howl in the grove, low and far, a thread tugging through her. Then light—torches spiking between the oaks; shadows unmooring. Thalor's shout—*Run, roots hold—*and the undergrowth exploding with shapes too broad for men, too quick for deer. The taste of crushed thyme in her teeth as she fell. Hands rough as bark. A chain's first cool kiss.
She let the memory go before it could set; there was no room in her chest for both breath and grief.
Across from her, Eldra Hearthveil stared at her bound hands, lips working around a prayer that had lost its words. A boy she did not know watched the floor as if waiting for a door to open in it. Beside Elowen, a child slept with her face pushed into her mother's skirt, shoulders twitching when the wheel dropped into a rut. The mother stroked her hair in the same motion, over and over, as if repeating could make it a promise.
Elowen's fingers moved before she thought. She reached the short distance her chain allowed and touched the mother's wrist—just two fingers, light as breath. The woman flinched, then looked up. In the space of a blink, Elowen felt the woman's fear like a sudden storm eddying in two tight circles: What if they take her? What if they do not? The twin currents were so strong she nearly gasped.
"Breathe with me," Elowen whispered. The wagon complained over a stone. "In. Out. Like we do by the stream when the nets snag."
The woman's throat moved. "In," she echoed. "Out."
It was nothing—air and counting—but Elowen felt the fear loosen a notch, the storm's eye widening. On the other side of the cage, a man's shoulders dropped a finger's breadth, as if the words had reached him too. It slid through the wagon the way a good harvest rumor once did, small and steadying. Elowen's collar pinched; she went on anyway, giving breath where she could, a thread at a time.
The convoy slowed. Hooves changed their rhythm. The wagons began to creak uphill, each plank complaining at once. Through the slats, the trees thinned to broken silhouettes and then to nothing. Wind came unfiltered across open ground, smelling of salt, tar, and a sweetness she could not name—pitched tents lacquered with perfume, or citrus oil thrown on braziers to drown the iron.
"Keep your heads down," a voice barked from outside, close enough that the wagon shook with it. "Eyes on the boards. Anyone lifts their gaze and I take it down for them."
They climbed another ridge and the world opened.
The auction house loomed ahead, lantern-lit and layered, a giant hive set on a low rise like a thing that had grown out of salt and bone. Ropes as thick as a man's wrist webbed its dome to stakes driven deep in the packed earth. Figures moved behind them: broad-shouldered, antler-crowned, feather-crested, a sifting of silhouettes like the shadows of great birds seen from under a lake.
The wagons rolled into a pen ringed by stakes and chain. The gate slammed. The clang traveled through Elowen's bones as if the iron were part of her. Hands came—gloved, quick—and set them in a line with the efficiency of men who had tied a thousand ropes and never once considered the wrists inside them. Elowen found herself on a plank walkway that ran behind the main platform, the boards polished by fear and sweat.
"Forward," came the order. "Quiet."
"Quiet," echoed a second voice, not the same and yet not different—trained to the same shape. The line shuffled. Iron caught. Someone stumbled and was yanked upright by a hand that did not bother to be gentle.
Elowen ducked under a hanging rope and almost collided with a mirror. Not glass—polished steel, tall as a tree, set to reflect the bodies pushed past it without reflecting the faces of those who watched. Her own image flashed at her: dirt like war paint on her cheek; hair matted to her neck; the welt at her collarbone raw and new. Her mouth was open, startled into honesty. She closed it.
"Head down," a handler snapped. She dropped her gaze and saw the floor instead: etched with runes that had been softened by many feet until they were only grooves where sweat pooled. Footsteps drummed on the other side of the veil, a thousand of them, arranged in tiers. The house had been built to make the watching effortless. It had also been built to make the watched forget there had been a time before this.
A bell rang—three deep notes. The crowd quieted, the way wheat quiets before wind. The bell rang once more, higher, like a coin striking stone.
On the platform, the auctioneer spoke, her voice clean and edged with silk. Elowen could not see her, but she could hear the trained smile in the vowels. "Honored patrons," the voice called, "our night's offerings arrive warm from the fields. Let us begin with strength to match your tables."
The crowd responded not with words but with appetite. Elowen felt it like weather—the press of many desires moving at once. Some were blunt as fists: Take. Use. Discard. Some were tidy as ledgers: Buy. Keep. Sell. And a small handful were something like curiosity, cool and invasive, weighing without touching. She had never known sensation could come to her this way, through her skin and around her ribs. She had never stood where so many eyes had agreed upon the same hunger.
A hand at her shoulder made her flinch. "Your turn is later," a handler muttered, as if reassuring a mule. "Stand straight. Do not speak unless told."
"I won't," she said, and thought of Thalor's hands showing her where to press in the soil. Make space. See what takes root. She straightened because she chose to, and because choosing was the only thing she could still claim in a place built to strip claiming from the tongue.
The first human went out. The platform's light changed, a spill of brightness that broke into hundreds of points where it hit the veils. The voice rose, numbers braided into praise, and the crowd answered with numbers braided into ownership. Elowen kept her head down and listened to breath. She felt the man's chest lift and fall in a quickening pattern. She felt it steady when someone near him hummed under their breath—a memory, maybe, turned into a sound the throat could keep. The bidding climbed; the sound in her ribs climbed with it. When the hammer fell and the man was led away, the quiet that followed was not silence but the heat a hearth leaves in the stones after the fire has been smothered.
The second human went out. The third. The air grew busier. Perfume thickened—the kind that promised sweetness while it burned the nose. A handler's laugh cut off where it met a superior's glance and turned into a cough.
Time thinned. Elowen pressed her fingers to her own wrist, found the beat, and counted four heartbeats out, four in. With each breath, she sent calm outward, not as a net—she was no fisher—but as a thread. She did not know if it helped anyone. She knew it helped her.
"Look up," someone said softly.
She did, reflex before caution, and saw darkness where the veils overlapped above the central aisle. For a heartbeat she mistook it for a trick of lamp-smoke. Then the darkness resolved itself into a gaze, and the gaze into a color that had no business being gentle: gold.
They were eyes, and they were not like the other eyes. Those blinked with heat, or sharpened with calculation, or flared and burned down and flared again. These held. They did not roam. They took her measure and then took it again, not to split it into prices but to be certain that what they had seen had been real.
Heat rose under Elowen's skin, not the heat of shame—though shame was there, a thistle you could not pluck without blood—but the heat of being named. She could not have said what he named her with that looking. She only knew it was not a number.
The handler at her shoulder hissed. "Down." The word had teeth in it. Elowen lowered her head, breath catching. The chain shifted, iron settling. She swallowed and the collar moved and the welt complained.
Beneath the gold, something moved—just a tilt of the head, as if the one who owned those eyes had tested a scent the air had not yet carried to Elowen. The gaze did not break.
She should have felt hunted. She did, a little. Beneath it, like a spring under a stone, something else rose: a pressure in the chest that was not panic and not relief. She had felt it once in the garden when the first frost failed to bite the chamomile—like the earth whispering back: I heard you. Hold.
The bell rang the next lot. The crowd shifted as one body. Veils breathed. Bidders called. The eyes remained, unmoving in the dark.
Elowen wet her lips. Her name had not been called. Her turn had not come. Still, she stood a little straighter, as if some part of her had crossed a threshold before her feet did. The handler made a note on a slate he kept at his hip, chalk ticking. He did not look up to see what had moved in her face.
Beyond the veil, the golden eyes did not blink.
And when the platform light swung and struck the tiers a little higher, she saw—no more than a shape at that distance, fur catching a sheet of light and releasing it—but enough to tell that the gaze belonged to a wolf-beast who had not shouted with the others. His mouth had not moved. Only his attention had.
The chain at Elowen's wrists gave a small, involuntary tremor. She steadied it with both hands. Breath in. Breath out. The wagon had had bars. The grove had had shadows. This place had veils and bright, bright orbs. The eyes waited like a shore.
She lowered her gaze, because she must. The crowd breathed, because it would. The bell lifted its tongue.
And somewhere between the salt and the lemon and the iron, the roots whispered back.