I had exactly one option.
Run.
---
I closed my fingers around the pendant and pushed it into my pocket. The healer was already moving, faster than I had seen her move in years.
"Back door," she said. "Now."
---
"Wait," I said. "What did you mean a claim to the throne? What throne? Hybrids don't have a throne."
"They did once," she said. "Before the pure bloods took everything."
She grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the back of the house.
"I will explain later. Right now you need to move."
---
The sound of boots outside got louder. More than one soldier. Maybe four or five from what I could hear.
I had good hearing. One of the few things my hybrid blood gave me that actually worked in my favor.
"How many times have they come through before?" I asked.
"Never like this," she said. "This is different."
---
She pushed the back door open. Cold air rushed in.
Behind her house was a narrow path that led toward the tree line. The forest started about two hundred steps away.
Two hundred steps was a long way when soldiers were at the front door.
"Go straight through the forest," the healer said. "Do not stop until you reach the river. Cross it and keep going north."
---
"North leads into unclaimed territory," I said.
"Yes," she said.
"Rogues live in unclaimed territory."
"Also yes."
I stared at her.
"You are telling me to run from soldiers straight into rogue wolf territory," I said.
"I am telling you to survive," she said. "Those are not always comfortable directions."
---
A fist hit the front door hard.
"Open up. By order of the Alpha King."
The healer looked at me one last time. Her eyes were steady. No fear in them at all.
"Your father believed you would come into what you are when the time was right," she said quietly. "I think that time just got moved up."
---
I did not have time to ask what that meant.
I ran.
---
The cold hit me the moment I cleared the back door. My feet found the path without me thinking about it. I had walked this way a hundred times collecting herbs for the healer.
But I had never run it.
Behind me I heard the front door of the healer's house open. Voices. The soldier asking questions. The healer answering slowly, calmly, the way old women do when they want to waste your time.
She was buying me seconds.
I used every one of them.
---
The tree line swallowed me up fast.
The forest was dark even in the morning. The trees here were old and grew close together. Barely any light came through.
I slowed just enough to keep from running into something and breaking my neck.
Think. Which way is north.
I found the moss on the tree trunks. It grew thicker on the north side. My father had taught my mother that once and she had told me. One of the few useful things that came from a history I was never supposed to have.
I turned north and kept moving.
---
I heard them enter the forest behind me maybe ten minutes later.
Two of them from the sound of it. Moving fast. Too fast for regular soldiers.
Shifters.
Of course they sent shifters.
---
My wolf side wanted to shift. I could feel it pushing at me the way it always did when I was scared or angry.
The problem was I had never fully shifted in my life.
I had tried. More times than I could count growing up. I always got halfway and then something stopped. Like a door that would open just enough to show you the room on the other side but never let you through.
Half-blood. Half everything. Not enough of anything.
I pushed the feeling down and ran harder.
---
The river appeared sooner than I expected. It was running high from last night's rain. Dark water moving fast over rocks.
I did not slow down.
I hit the water and the cold was like a slap across my whole body. The current pulled at my legs immediately.
I pushed through it. The water reached my waist at the deepest point. My teeth were locked together to keep from making noise.
Then I was on the other side, wet and shaking, climbing up the bank into the trees.
---
I stopped and listened.
The soldiers had reached the river. I could hear them at the bank.
"She crossed," one of them said.
A pause.
"North side is rogue territory," the other one said.
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Orders didn't cover rogues," the first one said.
"No," the second agreed. "They didn't."
---
I stayed completely still.
The sound of them stayed on the south bank for a long moment.
Then slowly, it moved away.
They were going back.
---
I let out a breath so long it felt like I had been holding it for an hour.
My whole body was shaking from the cold. My clothes were soaked through. The pendant in my pocket felt heavier than it should for something so small.
I looked down at my hand. Still clenched into a fist from the run.
I opened it slowly.
My palm had a faint mark on it where the pendant had pressed into my skin. A small crown shape. Already fading.
What are you, I thought, looking at it.
---
A branch snapped behind me.
Not the soldiers. They were gone. This was something else.
I spun around.
A man leaned against a tree not five steps away from me. Arms crossed. Watching me like he had been there the whole time.
He was young. Maybe a few years older than me. Dark hair. Eyes that caught what little light came through the trees in a way that was not quite human.
Wolf. Definitely wolf.
And from the way he held himself he was not a low rank either.
---
"That was either very brave or very stupid," he said. "Crossing the river in November."
"It worked," I said.
"You are soaking wet and shaking," he said.
"But alive," I said. "So it worked."
---
He looked at me for a moment. His eyes moved over me the way shifters do when they are reading your scent.
I watched his expression change slightly when he got to whatever he was reading from me.
Something shifted in his face. Not disgust. Something else. Something I did not have a name for yet.
"You are a hybrid," he said.
"Yes," I said. I was too cold and tired to say it with any kind of apology.
---
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Kaia," I said. "What is yours?"
He was quiet for a second. Like the question surprised him.
"Riven," he said.
"Are you going to kill me or help me, Riven," I said. "Because I am very cold and I would like to know which one it is before I lose feeling in my feet."
---
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile.
"Rogues don't usually help people who cross into our territory," he said.
"I didn't have a lot of other options," I said.
"No," he said, looking at me steadily. "I can see that."
---
He pushed off the tree and reached into the pack on his back. He pulled out a folded piece of cloth and held it out to me.
It was a rough blanket. Worn but dry.
I took it.
"There is a camp an hour north," he said. "You can dry off and eat something."
"And after that?" I asked.
He started walking without answering.
---
I stood there for a second holding the blanket.
Was I really about to follow a rogue wolf I had just met into the middle of unclaimed territory?
I looked back toward the river. Toward Ashveil. Toward soldiers with the Alpha King's crest on their armor.
Then I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and followed Riven into the trees.
---
The pendant pressed against my leg as I walked.
A claim to a throne that had been empty for three hundred years.
I did not know what that meant yet.
But I had a feeling I was about to find out.