The council hall emptied like a lung, exhaled voices trailing into the cold. Outside, the village lamps made islands of honeyed light along the rope-railed paths, and from the higher terraces wolves watched the dark with that still, patient attention Elara had learned to read as readiness.
They walked back in a loose knot—Kara crackling with leftover fight, Clint nursing pride and making jokes to patch the cracks, Elise quiet as flint, Torvee with a hand resting on Jonah's shoulder as if absence might make him drift. Caleb kept half a pace off Elara's right, close enough to speak, far enough that no one could accuse him of clinging.
"So," Clint said into the night, voice pitched grand, "in three nights I become legend."
"Legendary nuisance," Kara said without turning.
"Legendary nuisance with claws," he persisted.
Elise's mouth curved. "You already have claws. They're just on your tongue."
He put a hand to his chest, wounded. "Et tu, Elise?"
"Ah," she said mildly, "Latin. At last: proof of civilisation."
Kara barked laughter; even Torvee's mouth twitched. Jonah glanced up, measuring adults by their noises, then looked back at the lamps, the stubborn line still set in his small jaw.
At the fork—one way toward the lodges, the other to the healer's door—Elise touched Kara's sleeve. "The healer asked for us after the lamps are trimmed."
Kara nodded. "Fine. We'll go."
Clint blew out a breath. "If I'm about to be told I'm secretly fae, I want my money back."
"You never had any," Kara said.
"Then I want someone else's," he said cheerfully, and for a heartbeat they were just four people walking home, not pieces in a ritual that might change the grammar of their bones.
They reached the lodge assigned to Elara's small cluster. Inside, pallets had been laid beneath a window where the mountain's breath slipped under the shutter. Someone had left folded blankets by each bed, a cup set beside each like an offering. The kindness of it jabbed Elara in the ribs.
Jonah hovered in the doorway, eyes on Torvee, a question like a held breath.
"Not tonight," she said softly, and the words cost her. "We promised: we do this properly or not at all."
He nodded, a soldier's acceptance in a child's chin, and let her steer him toward his pallet. He lay down obediently and kept his eyes open because children believe monsters are afraid of eyes. Torvee sat cross-legged beside him, her back to the wall, one hand lightly over his ankle as if that alone could keep him in the world.
Caleb lingered until the others had found their spaces. "Walk?" he said to Elara, low.
She should have said sleep. She nodded instead.
They took the path that circled the upper terraces, lamps marking each bend. Below, the square kept murmuring—cutlery, laughter, someone arguing quietly about whether a crossbow string should be waxed with tallow or beeswax. Above, the sky had gone knife-bright; the moon had shouldered herself another thumb-width higher.
"What are you thinking?" Caleb asked.
"That the elder's bowl looks older than the mountain," she said. "That the healer's eyes made me feel twelve. That I don't like the word Lunara and it keeps following me around like a stray dog."
He snorted. "Say the word and half the village stops breathing."
"I'm not their Luna."
"You might be," he said, not unkindly.
"I'm Elara," she shot back, softer than before.
They walked. Wind threaded the path, cool and clean. On an upper ledge, a wolf lifted its head, listened to the horizon and put its muzzle back on its paws.
"What if I told you I didn't like any of this," Caleb asked after a time, "but I'll stand where you ask me to, because you asked it?"
"I'd say that's the nicest thing you've said all week," she said, and didn't trust herself to look at him.
They rounded a bend and almost walked into Amber, who was coming down from the lookout with her patrol. Sweat slicked the edges of her hair. Her eyes went first to Elara, a swift assessment, then past to the dark beyond the ridge. She gave the brief, silent nod of a soldier acknowledging a commander she hadn't been told was hers.
"Everything all right?" Elara asked.
Amber's mouth tightened. "Scouts at the northern run. Tracks where there shouldn't be tracks. They're feeling for the edges."
"Elk?" Caleb suggested.
"Feet that try to be hands," Amber said. "Not elk." She looked past them, to where the old hall shouldered the dark. "Riven will call the elders again."
She moved on with her pair of greys sliding like shade behind her, and Elara felt the angle of the night shift. The wind tasted like metal now, or memory.
"Go on," Elara said to Caleb. "Sleep. Please."
"And you?"
"I'll see what Riven wants."
He hesitated, then nodded and peeled away without argument, which was a kindness rarer than sleep.
The old hall was lit, not for show but for work; the embers in the firepit had been roused to a steady glow. Garrett stood by the doorway, hand on the lintel as if judging if the wood would complain about more council. He grunted when Elara ducked under his arm and waved her in with a tilt of his chin.
Inside, the shifter elder sat with his wrapped bundle in his lap, lips moving in that low, steady whisper Elara had decided was either prayer or conversation with stone. The fae healer was there too, arms folded, eyes making inventories of people and possibilities. Riven stood at the far side, more shadow than man.
Amber came in behind Elara and spoke without preface. "Sign of probing on the north run," she said. "Not a pack's drift. Feral scatter pulling toward a point. We took two down quiet and backed out. Fresh ones were moving to the noise before the echoes finished." She flicked a glance at Elara, then back to Riven. "That wasn't happening yesterday."
"Moon fattens," Garrett said. "Teeth follow."
Riven's voice was quiet enough to make a room lean in. "How long?"
Amber didn't pretend to know more than she did. "A night. Two. They'll test every choke. If they smell we're fat with people who don't know the paths, they'll press. They like corners and panic."
Garrett's jaw worked. "We'll hold the upper gorge with two ranks. Ribbons of wire across the last bend, pit the side channel. Move the old oil drums into the narrow."
"Elara," the healer said, without looking at her. "Sit."
It took Elara a heartbeat to understand that the command had been to her. She sat.
Riven turned to the shifter elder. "You wanted three nights," he said. "I want it before or after the moon, not during. I won't have half the square writhing in a trance while the walls listen for claws."
The elder's hands stilled on the cloth. "The draught works best with the tide up," he said. "The full pulls spirit close. That is how the old songs sang it."
"And the old songs didn't have ferals using doorways as dinner bells," Garrett said.
"Can it be done sooner?" Riven asked, eyes on the elder.
The elder considered, and when he did his gaze went not to the fire, but to the pillars that held the roof and the rock that held the pillars. "Yes," he said at last. "It is not tidy. It is harder. But yes. Tomorrow after sundown. Those who choose, we call. The mountain will frown. I will ignore her and apologise after."
"And the boy?" the healer asked.
Riven's head turned. Amber's did too. The room held its breath.
"No," Torvee said from the doorway, voice scraped thin with not-sleep. She had come without moving the air. Jonah wasn't with her; Elara's heart counted and found relief. Torvee's eye found Elara's, pleading and proud both. "Not him. Not when I have to hold a line with teeth on it."
The elder nodded once. "He waits," he said. "He will hate me for it. I will carry it."
Elara exhaled the breath she hadn't realised she'd locked in her chest.
Riven looked back to Amber. "How many adults if we move tomorrow?"
"Three," Amber said, and for a beat Elara thought she meant people, not nights. "Kara, Elise, the big one—Clint. They're ready to do something reckless under supervision." The corner of her mouth flicked. "And willing."
The healer glanced at Elara. "You'll stand with them?"
Elara blinked. "Why me?"
"Because they listen to your voice," the healer said, not unkindly. "Even when you think you're only using it to talk yourself into courage." She tipped her chin toward Riven without moving her eyes. "And because the pack watches where he watches, and he watches you."
Heat beat in Elara's cheeks; she told herself it was the fire. "I'll stand," she said. Her hands were steady in her lap. That was either a miracle or the silver making choices for her.
"Good," Garrett said. "Then we bleed tomorrow, not when the moon is fattened and every feral for thirty valleys is throwing itself at our doors."
The elder tied the cloth around the bowl again, slow and careful, as if he were swaddling a child. "Tomorrow," he agreed. "After sundown. The draught will be harder. The pain will be… honest." He looked up and met Elara's eyes. "You will tell them that. They will drink anyway. Then they will sleep like stones until morning, and when they wake they will be other."
"Other and able to stand a line," Garrett said, and for the first time that night his voice held something like relief.
Amber was already turning lists in her head. "I'll rotate patrols. Double the top-line watches. Luke can hold the southeast spur; he knows the rock. I want wire and barrels in the north bend and someone sitting in the echo notch—we get a warning there half a minute before the path feels it."
"Done," Garrett said.
Riven glanced at Elara again. No words. The weight of a nod.
She rose. "I'll tell them."
"Not in the hall," the healer said. "Tell them outside. Stars to hear you. No ritual likes a roof over its head unless the roof is mountain."
Elara found Torvee in the doorway, shoulder to the frame as if she were holding it up. Up close, she looked as if someone had wrung her out and hung her to dry. The lines around her mouth were new and old both.
"Not the boy," Torvee said again, softer. "Not yet."
"Not the boy," Elara promised. It tasted right.
They stepped into the cold together. The village had dimmed; lamps had been trimmed down to coals. Somewhere, late laughter; somewhere else, the metallic music of a spring being wound. On the high path a wolf shook out its coat and the starlight shattered across it.
They found Kara and Elise outside the lodge, elbows pressed to the rail, breath ghosting the dark. Clint was trying very hard not to look like a man waiting to be chosen and failing completely.
"Well?" Kara demanded before Elara could open her mouth. "Three nights, or are we waiting till the moon eats us?"
"Tomorrow," Elara said. "After sundown."
Clint's grin flashed, then faltered when he read the rest of her face. "And the cost?"
"Hurt," Elara said simply. "No poetry. Just hurt."
"I've had worse," he said reflexively.
"You haven't," Elise said without heat. "But you will." Her hands were steady.
Kara blew out a breath, white in the cold. "Good. Waiting makes me say things I regret."
Clint puffed his chest. "Like 'I was wrong'?"
"Like 'you're right'," she returned, "which is worse."
They laughed, and the laughter didn't last, but it unknotted the air between them.
Elise looked past Elara to Torvee. "And Jonah?"
"After," Torvee said, and if a word could be wrapped in armour, she'd done it.
Clint nodded, surprised to find that decision easy to respect. "Right. Tomorrow it is."
"Eat well," Elara told them. "Sleep if you can. Find something of yourself you want to keep and hold it tight when it starts. The elder says the draught opens what you keep shut. Be careful what runs out."
"That's comforting," Kara said dryly. "Anything else? Shall I write my will on my sleeve?"
Elara managed a smile. "On your knuckles might be more your style."
Kara grinned despite herself. "Fair."
Clint scrubbed a hand over his face. "If I don't wake up something I'm proud of, I'm blaming you all personally."
"You'll wake up you," Elise said. "That's the point."
Behind them, footsteps: Garrett doing his rounds, checking ropes with the same tenderness he'd shown his children. He paused long enough to rest a hand on Elara's shoulder, the weight of it like a promise and a problem both. "Dawn, we rig the north bend," he rumbled. "You sleep after you finish not sleeping."
She huffed. "Yes, Beta."
He grunted, pleased and irritated at once, and moved on.
They parted in ones and twos. Kara and Elise slipped inside, shoulders squared as if they could negotiate with sleep. Clint lingered long enough to look up at the stars and tell them something only he needed to hear, then followed. Torvee went to sit her watch at Jonah's ankle, her back straight and her eyes on a door only she could see.
Elara stood alone on the terrace until the cold found a way under her coat. Below, the square was a handful of red eyes; above, the mountain's black ribs curved like a sleeping thing under a sky bright as bone. Somewhere far out, the air bent around a sound—a howl stretched thin by distance, not the layered music of a pack but the torn edge of something that had forgotten language and wanted to eat it for remembering.
She went inside at last. Sleep didn't come kindly. When it did, it brought dreams of a path cut into rock and a bowl in an elder's hands, and a wolf made of gold standing where the doorway opened into night. Not Riven, not any wolf she'd seen, but the idea of a wolf: old as the moon, patient as mountains, watching her with eyes the colour of coin.
When she woke before dawn, the village had already shifted to its war-breath. Voices low, ropes humming, the smell of oil, of wire, of men and women who knew how to make a narrow place narrower. Somewhere in the old hall, cloth wrapped bowl and knife; somewhere else, a draught turned from bitter to necessary.
Three nights had become one. The moon didn't care. The ferals would. And by tomorrow, if they lived, Kara, Elise and Clint would not be what they had been.
Elara swung her legs off the pallet, found her boots by touch, and went to work.