The hollow held its breath after Riven changed and changed back, as if even the trees were deciding whether to run. Firelight licked the undersides of branches and threw everyone's faces into restless relief—fear made bigger, hope made smaller. A pot hissed where it had boiled too long. No one moved to lift it.
Riven did not let the silence thicken into panic.
"You've seen what we are," he said. His voice didn't rise; it simply carried, the way a river carries, regardless of who listens. "But wolves are not the only truth among you."
The words ran through the gathered like a spark in dry grass. Murmurs broke, then knotted. A man drew his wife a fraction closer. Someone's knife scraped against a stone and was still.
"You already know Torvee," Riven went on. His hand indicated her, palm down, not a flourish but a fact. "You've seen her shift. She is a shifter—bound to a spirit animal. Not wolf. Not fae. Her own kind."
Torvee had not stood when he spoke her name; she was already upright, shoulders back, Jonah pressed into her side like a shadow that had learned to hold on. For a heartbeat she looked as if she'd rather be anywhere else. Then she inclined her head once, black hair falling forward, and let a breath out. She didn't change. She didn't need to. Those who had seen the raven burst from her skin didn't mistake what she was; those who hadn't—who had only heard hurried stories in the flight from Ravenholt—stared and tried to fit the idea in a world that had already come apart.
Jonah slid his small hand into hers. Torvee closed her claw-calloused fingers around it, careful as if he were spun glass.
"And then," Riven said, "there are the fae."
The talking cut off cleanly, like a rope.
"Some of you know," he said. "Most of you do not. You have lived believing yourselves human. Yet your blood is older. Different."
A man barked a laugh without humour. "Fae are stories to scare children."
"Stories that bleed," Riven returned, not unkind. His gaze shifted and fixed on a woman with bandages up to the elbow. "You were clawed. Twice. Your neighbour saw it. By the old smithy door. You should not be standing."
The woman looked at her hands as if they had betrayed her. "I thought—perhaps it wasn't deep."
"It was," Riven said. "And still you live. That is not luck. That is blood."
A ripple of breath went through the hollow. Someone whispered, "No," and meant, Please. An older man near the cooking fire crossed himself, then looked embarrassed and angry in the same second. Two lads glanced at each other with the sharp dread of boys who've been told they are not what they thought they were and don't know whether to boast or run.
Elara had been trying to keep the silver at the edge of her vision tamped down, the way you keep a door on a latch when the wind wants it open. The latch failed. Light slid across the camp in threads only she seemed to see. Auras flared and dimmed like breaths—greens layered and bright, blues like river-glass, a couple of colours she hadn't named yet that the moon had hidden from language. Only a tight cluster of faces—fifteen—stood without any glow at all, bare as winter hedgerow.
Her mouth went dry. It was one thing to suspect. It was another to see.
Riven did not pause for the crowd to catch up. "Wolves. Shifters. Fae. All are immune to the feral curse. That is why some of you lived when you should have died. That is why wounds closed instead of consuming you."
He let the sentence sit. Let people try to argue with it and find they had no breath for it.
"The fifteen among you who are neither wolf, shifter, nor fae," he said, and his eyes fell like weights on a small ring of faces near the back, "are only human. You are the minority now."
The word minority landed like a slap. Heads turned towards that cluster instinctively, as if the rest had been given something and they had been left out. The fifteen stiffened and shrank, all at once. One of them—Heath, who had mended shoes by the south gate and never raised his voice—flushed a hard, painful red. "We've done nothing wrong," he said, too loud.
"No one has said you have," Garrett answered, voice even. He had moved without Elara noticing, and now stood just at Riven's left shoulder, a half-step back, exactly where a Beta should. "You don't have to prove your worth here."
"But we're the ones you're warning," another human snapped, fear sharpening what he meant into something uglier. "You say, don't raise hand or word. As if we— as if—"
"As if you are frightened," Riven said, saving him from finishing a sentence he could not take back. "And frightened men make bad choices."
"If you wanted us dead," Amber added, mild as a hammer, "you would be dead."
The man shut his mouth.
Riven's gaze travelled the circle. "Understand me. You will not raise hand or word against my pack. Nor against those who stand with us. If you do, you will answer to me."
No one doubted he meant exactly what the words said, no more, no less.
The silence that followed was not the shocked hush that had fallen when he'd shifted. It was noisier, made of breath and rustle and the small sounds grief makes when it can't be swallowed quickly. Someone whispered, "Elise," under their breath and folded their hands until the knuckles blanched. A child began to sob, tiny and hiccuping; his father shushed him and cried with him in a way men often don't, because he had used up all his not-crying yesterday.
Elara's heart beat too hard. In her silver sight, the camp was a map she did not know how to read aloud. There—Marla, green flaring and fading around the hollow place where her sister's ribbon sat in her palm. There—Callum the apprentice mason, blue thin around the edges as if a shy animal had come close and might bolt. There—a narrow violet around a boy who had given half his bread to someone older without looking to see if anyone had seen him do it. And there—the tight circle of humans, bare of light, faces working through sums that no one had told them they would have to know.
Caleb's fingers brushed the back of her hand. "El," he murmured, just for her. "Breathe."
"I am," she said. It was not entirely a lie.
He swallowed, jaw working. "What does this mean? For us?"
Us. It hit soft and sharp. "It means we can stop pretending we're all the same," Elara said, quietly. "And start deciding what to do now that we know we're not."
"That sounds like the beginning of a fight," he said.
"It could be the beginning of something else," she said, and didn't try to define it.
Luke had drifted to the far side of the nearest fire and stood there, hands loose at his sides, watching the crowd the way a shepherd watches the line where the field becomes wood. When a pair of lads—brothers by the look—began to square up to each other with the wildness of fear that turns inward, Luke crossed the space in three long, unhurried steps and simply put his palm on each of their shoulders. They deflated as if someone had let air out of the night.
"Sit," he said, not loudly. They sat.
Torvee sank to a knee so Jonah would not have to crane to keep hold of her. "Are you frightened?" she asked him, because children deserve questions with answers.
He nodded, eyes too big, thumb in his mouth.
"Me too," she said. "It's alright to be scared and alright not to understand. You don't have to understand tonight."
He leaned into her side harder, small body relaxing a fraction.
On the other side of the hollow, the bandaged woman whom Riven had named—who had insisted her wounds were shallow—stood abruptly. "If I am… if I am fae," she said, the word out of her mouth for the first time tasting like something that cut the tongue, "what does that make me? What do I do with that?" She didn't aim the question at anyone. She aimed it at air.
No one answered for a moment. Then the old priest, Heath, found his feet with effort, steadied himself on a staff that hadn't been a staff until he needed it, and said, "It makes you the same woman who shared her bread last winter when the flour went weevilly. It makes you the same neighbour who mended my fence with her bad wrist. You keep doing that."
The woman put her hands over her face and cried with relief and humiliation and more relief.
"Practical matters," Amber said, lifting her chin slightly, turning the camp towards the work that keeps people from shaking apart. "Water from the stream. Bread cut small so the smallest can eat first. Bandages checked and changed. You—" she pointed at two lads with more muscle than sense, "—fetch fallen branches, nothing green. You—" she indicated a pair of women with steady hands, "—help me check the stitches. Anyone with fever, you tell me."
The command moved through the hollow like balm. People seized it like a rope thrown from a bank. Doing something made fear quieter. Garrett began to disassemble the nearest fire and rebuild it better; the men who had been muttering watched his hands for the trick of it and learned without saying they were learning.
Riven had said his piece and did not try to speak over the work. He stood where everyone could see him, which is sometimes all a leader has to do. The wolves near him didn't fidget. They made stillness look like a craft.
Caleb stayed beside Elara, close enough to touch, and didn't. "You knew," he said, not accusing, not yet. "About the auras. About… who's what."
"I see it," she said, the truth quiet. "I didn't know what to do with it."
"And now?"
"And now I'm still deciding."
He huffed something that might have been a laugh if it weren't tired. "You sound like Garrett."
"You could do worse."
"I want to do before," he said, and then shut his eyes as if ashamed of the wish. "I know I can't. It keeps standing up in me anyway."
Elara turned her hand and took his. "Me too."
Across the fire, two of the human fifteen had risen and were edging towards the trees, not making a plan so much as trying to step out of being seen. Garrett's voice crossed the space like a thrown line. "Not tonight."
They stopped and stared as if they'd been caught stealing because in a way they had—trying to take themselves out of the we that Riven had named.
"We're not prisoners," one of them said, defiance brittle.
"No," Garrett said. "If you walk out that way, you're food. Stay. At dawn we will put choices in front of you that aren't teeth."
The defiance went out of the man as if someone had poked a hole in it. He came back to the fire without looking at anyone.
"Will they hurt us?" the woman with the bandages whispered, not to any they in particular.
"Not while I breathe," Amber said, which was a promise and a boundary at once.
The priest lowered himself again and began to murmur prayers that sounded less like bargains and more like names: for Elise, for Scott, for Darren the blacksmith who had shifted half a step too slow and paid for it. The names put weight under the night. People wept and did not apologise for it.
Elara's silver softened as tiredness pushed against the edges of her skull. The auras blurred a little, stopped shouting, became the background hum she had learned to live with since the barn and the bite and the way her veins had gone moon-blue under her skin. She let her gaze find Riven because she could not stop it. He stood with his hands loose, head high, as if nothing had changed in him since the moment he had stepped from the trees. He looked at her once, not long. The look was not a command. It was a question: Can you stand?
She found, to her own surprise, that she could.
"Rationing," she said, raising her voice enough that the nearest fires would hear and the next would pick it up. "We share what we have tonight. Tomorrow we take groups to the river at first light in pairs. No one goes alone, not for water, not for wood, not to breathe." A few faces turned, surprised she was speaking. More faces turned because the surprised faces had. "We keep the little ones by the centre. We rotate the watch at the edges—humans in the second ring, wolves and shifters outside. If you can't sleep, you sit with someone who can't sleep and you keep them company."
A murmur—not quite assent, not quite relief—went through the nearest cluster. Amber's mouth tipped sideways the smallest amount, which was her way of saying useful. Garrett's glance was almost a nod. Luke's eyes met hers and he gave her a fraction of a grin that made him look his own age and not ten years older.
Riven let it stand. Let her words hang where his had. He did not reach to take them away.
When the first jobs had been done—the water fetched, the bread cut, the fires made sensible, the bandages checked—tiredness sagged the hollow like a tent under rain. Voices sank. The priest's prayers became breath. Wolves took their places at the edges as if they had always been there. A pair of shifters Elara hadn't realised were shifters until the silver pointed them out—one with the quiet contained strength of a stag, one with eyes that kept sliding up to the sky like a hawk's—settled themselves where gaps had been.
Riven looked once round the circle that was not a circle because trees make bad walls. When he spoke again, it was not with thunder but with iron.
"Now," he said, as if the word were a gate swinging open, "as a collective, we must decide what comes next."
He did not list options. He did not pretend there were many. He let the sentence pull people's spines a fraction straighter. He let them feel the dignity hiding under fear.
Caleb's fingers tightened on Elara's, not to hold her back, not to pull her forward, only to say here. Torvee drew Jonah's blanket higher and tucked it under his chin. Amber wiped her blade on a piece of old cloth and sheathed it. Garrett rolled his shoulders and stood exactly where a second should stand. Luke, already measuring the night in quiet routes and timings, lifted his chin as if smelling weather.
The fires burned lower. The stars watched without blinking. Somewhere far off, a feral tried a howl and thought better of it. In the hollow, forty-seven souls—wolves, shifters, fae, and fifteen humans who had learned a new definition of the word few—looked at one another properly for the first time.
The world had not become kinder. It had become clear.
Elara lifted her head. "We decide together," she said, and felt the shape of the word together change under her tongue. "In the morning."
And the night, holding its breath since the moment Riven had stepped from the trees, let it out.