Chapter 5: The Witch and the Wolf Pups
The silence Cregan left behind was a different creature. It wasn’t the hollow, echoing quiet of her old hut. This silence was full. It hummed with the rhythm of the Hold—the distant forge, the murmur of conversations in the square, the comings and goings of patients to her now-busy infirmary.
Her ribs still ached, a dull reminder if she moved too quickly, but the work was a good distraction. She treated a deep wood-splinter in a carpenter’s palm, mixed a soothing balm for Selene’s arthritis-knotted hands, and changed Willem’s dressings. The boy was healing with the unnerving speed of the young and lycan, his colour returning, his jokes getting clumsier by the hour.
It was on the third morning, with crisp snow beginning to flurry outside, that Jace appeared in her doorway. He had a look she was learning to recognize—a mischievous glint that usually preceded him nudging some boundary.
“They’re bored,” he announced, leaning against the frame.
Lysaria looked up from grinding marshmallow root into a fine powder. “Who is?”
“The litter. The pups. Kael’s three, Elin’s twins, and the others. They’ve been cooped up for days. Driving their parents, and by extension, me, absolutely mad.” He pushed off the frame and came in, picking up a dried sprig of lavender and sniffing it. “They’re curious about you.”
A familiar old tension tightened her shoulders. Curious. It was how it always started with village children, right before the taunts began, before the stones were thrown. She kept her voice neutral. “I’m not a spectacle.”
“Nah, it’s not like that.” Jace’s tone softened. He could be surprisingly perceptive when he wasn’t being an idiot. “They heard you saved Willem. They think you’re… I don’t know. Magic. Most of them have only ever known Selene’s remedies. You’re something new. Something interesting.”
He twirled the lavender. “Show ‘em a trick. Something small. Ease their minds. Ease their parents’ minds. Nothing wins over a pack faster than their pups being happy.”
She eyed him. “A trick.”
“Yeah. Like… I don’t know. The fire thing.”
“The fire thing?”
“Cregan mentioned it. Said you lit a blaze in a heartbeat out in the wilds. No flint, no tinder. Just…” He snapped his fingers.
It was a simple enough bit of old lore. A focused push of will, a whisper to the latent heat in dry material. It was survival, not parlor magic. But the thought of performing it, even for children, made her skin feel too tight. It was the very thing that had marked her as other, as wrong.
“Jace, I don’t think—”
“Please?” His smile was disarming, but his eyes were serious. “It’s a grey day. They’re restless. A small fire in the central pit, a story. It’s what packs do.”
The word ‘packs’ did it. The sense of being outside, looking in. She put down the mortar. Her heart was a frantic bird against her ribs, but she gave a short, sharp nod. “A small fire. One demonstration. Then I have work.”
The word spread faster than she could change her mind. By the time she and Jace walked into the main hall, a dozen children ranging from toddling age to perhaps ten were already gathered on woven mats near the massive central fire pit, which currently held only grey ash and a few half-burnt logs. Their parents lingered at the edges, at tables mending gear or peeling winter roots, their attention conspicuously casual.
The children fell silent as she approached. Their eyes were huge, taking in her blood-red hair, her mismatched eyes, the strange cut of her clothes. Not with fear, she realized. With a rapt, uncensored wonder. A little girl with two brown braids sucked her thumb, staring unblinkingly.
Jace sprawled on a bench nearby, grinning. “Alright, you lot. The Healer’s gonna show you something. No shouting. No getting underfoot. Understand?”
They nodded, a sea of bobbing heads.
Lysaria knelt by the ash, the cold of the stone floor seeping through her trousers. She arranged a few pieces of dry, curled bark and some kindling into a small teepee. Her hands, for all their steadiness in surgery, trembled just a little.
“It’s not a trick,” she said, her voice quieter than she intended. She cleared her throat. “It’s just… listening. Everything that was ever alive holds a little warmth, a little memory of the sun. You just have to ask it nicely to remember.”
She placed her palms not on the wood, but just above it. She shut her one black eye, her one grey eye, blocking out the staring children, the watching adults, the weight of her own history. She focused on the dry, skeletal memory of the bark, the latent potential sleeping within it. It was like finding a single, still-warm ember in a mound of ash. She cupped it in her will and breathed.
Remember.
A wisp of smoke curled up from the center of the kindling. Then a tiny, perfect orange flame blossomed, licking hungrily at the bark. It caught, crackling to life, building into a warm, dancing fire in the space of three heartbeats.
A collective, gasped “Ohhhh” rose from the children. The little girl with braids took her thumb out of her mouth and pointed. “Pretty!”
The tension in Lysaria’s chest unraveled, replaced by something fragile and warm.
“Can you do it with wet wood?” asked an older boy, his brow furrowed in scientific inquiry.
“Not easily,” she said. “It likes things to be ready. Dry. Willing.”
“Can you make things cold?” a tiny voice piped up.
“That’s a different kind of asking,” she said, a real smile touching her lips for the first time. “A much ruder one.”
They giggled.
The questions came then, a torrent. Not about magic, but about fire. Why did it make that sound? Could it feel the wood? Did it sleep? She answered as best she could, weaving in little bits of lore about hearth-spirits and the proper way to bank a flame for the night. She was so engrossed she didn’t notice the initial approach.
The little girl with braids, whose name was Myla, crept forward. She stopped just shy of touching, her small hand hovering near Lysaria’s sleeve. “Your hair is like my ma’s berry jam,” she announced.
Before Lysaria could reply, Myla reached out and gently touched a strand that had escaped its braid. Her touch was feather-light, curious. “Is it hot?”
“No,” Lysaria whispered, utterly still. “It’s just hair.”
That was the signal. They closed in, not with menace, but with the fearless tactile curiosity of the young. A boy named Finn patted her shoulder like she was a fascinating new dog. Another little one, fascinated by the contrast, gently placed a grubby finger under her grey eye, then her black one, as if checking they were both real.
Soon, she was surrounded. A pup climbed half into her lap to see the fire better. Another leaned against her back, playing with the end of her braid. They were warm, solid little weights, smelling of wool and milk and the outdoors. Their trust was absolute, unguarded.
She looked up, overwhelmed, and caught Jace’s eye. He was watching, his usual smirk replaced by a softer, satisfied expression. He gave her a slow, deliberate wink.
From across the hall, she saw Selene smiling as she kneaded dough. Kael, Willem’s father, nodded to her once, his eyes grateful before he went back to whittling.
This was it. This was the thing she had never known, had barely allowed herself to imagine. Not just tolerance, but a place within the daily tapestry. It was terrifying in its sweetness.
The moment was broken by the heavy thud of the main hall doors being shouldered open. A gust of snow-filled wind and the scent of cold pine and iron swept in.
Cregan stood in the doorway, caked in snow from head to toe, his hair plastered to his forehead. Elara and the rest of the patrol filed in behind him, weary and weather-beaten. His scanning eyes found her immediately, taking in the scene: Lysaria, lodged firmly in the heart of a pile of sleeping, dozing, or quietly chattering pups, the small fire crackling merrily before them.
Every muscle in his body, coiled from days of tension and watchfulness, seemed to unlock at once. He didn’t smile. The relief on his face was too profound for that. It was in the slow exhale that fogged the air, in the slight sag of his shoulders.
He shrugged off his pack and began stripping his frozen outer furs. His eyes never left her.
Jace sauntered over to him, chuckling. “Took you long enough. We’ve been having a cultural exchange.”
Cregan just grunted, peeling off a glove. Snow melted and dripped from him onto the floorstones.
“See?” Jace continued, his voice low enough that only Cregan and Lysaria, with her sharp hearing, could catch it. “Told you they’d love her. She’s a natural. Just look at her.”
Cregan did look. His gaze traveled from the child in her lap to the one curled against her side, to the tranquil, slightly bemused expression on her face. The cold, hard Alpha mask he wore for the wilds was gone. What was left was raw, unshielded tenderness, and a pride so fierce it could have lit its own fire.
“Yeah,” he said, the single word a rough scrape of sound. “I see.”
He started walking toward the hearth, toward her. The children, sensing the Alpha’s return, rustled with excitement but didn’t abandon their new perch. Cregan crouched down by the fire, extending his hands toward the warmth. His sky-blue eyes reflected the flames as he looked at her over the heads of the pups.
“Everything alright here?” he asked, his voice gentle.
Myla, the brave one, answered for her. “Lysaria made the fire remember, Alpha. And her hair is like jam.”
A real smile broke through then, transforming his tired face. “Is it?”
He reached out, not for the child, but past her. His finger, still cold from the storm, gently hooked the same strand Myla had touched. He tucked it back behind Lysaria’s ear, his knuckle briefly grazing her cheek. The touch was a brand, a promise, a homecoming.
“Welcome home,” she said softly, the words meant only for him.
He held her gaze, the noise of the returning pack, the children, the crackling fire, all fading into a distant hum. In that look was three days of absence, of constant watchfulness, of the thread that had stretched taut between them. It was all there, simmering in the space above the children’s heads.
“Yeah,” he murmured, his voice thick. “It is.”
The warmth of the fire and the solid, trusting weight of the children pressed against her was a narcotic. Lysaria felt the last tight coil of vigilance in her spine begin to soften. Cregan’s thumb brushed her cheekbone once more before he pulled his hand back, the gesture lost in the simple act of warming his palms.
“Snow’s coming down hard out there,” Elara said, dropping her own pack by the wall with a thud. She shot a glance at the pup-pile, one eyebrow arched. “Looks like you had better weather in here.”
“The best,” Jace chimed, handing her a waterskin. “We had a lecture on the polite way to ask fire to exist. It was enlightening.”
Cregan didn’t join the banter. He just watched the flames, his profile sharp and tired in the flickering light. The little girl in Lysaria’s lap, Myla, had succumbed, her head a heavy warmth against Lysaria’s ribs. Another boy was snoring softly into the wool of her sleeve.
One by one, the pups slept. The excited whispers faded into the deep, even breaths of exhaustion. The parents began to drift over, moving with the quiet efficiency of their kind, gently extracting their children from the cozy nest they’d made of the witch.
“Come on, darling,” Kael murmured, lifting his sleeping son from beside Lysaria. “Let the healer breathe.”
She felt each small departure like a loss of heat. Soon, it was just Myla left, a dead weight in her lap. Selene approached, her hands flour-dusted. “I’ll take her, my dear. You’ve given her quite the day.”
Lysaria carefully transferred the sleeping child, her arms feeling strangely empty afterward. The hall was clearing, the pack dispersing to evening meals and dens, the fire burning lower. Cregan finally moved, shifting to sit beside her on the now-vacant mat. His shoulder pressed against hers. He smelled of cold, wet wool, pine sap, and beneath it all, the faint, sharp scent of something metallic.
“Long patrol?” she asked quietly, staring at the embers.
“Long enough.” He picked up a stray twig from the floor, turning it over in his fingers. “Quiet. Too quiet west of the Blackstream. Found a snapped snare, but no game in it. Just… waiting.”
“You’re hurt.”
He glanced at her, a faint surprise in his eyes. She nodded toward his left sleeve. A dark, ragged tear in the leather, and a rusty brown stain that wasn’t mud.
“It’s nothing. A branch. Clipped me.” He said it too quickly.
“Silver-lined branch?” Her voice was flat.
He was silent for a long moment. The twig snapped between his fingers. “Maybe. The wire in the snare was. Old. Flaking. It just grazed the leather.” He finally looked at her, the fatigue in his face deepening. “It’s not a wound. But it’s a message.”
The words sat between them, cold and heavy. Someone had been on their territory. Someone using silver. Elara and Jace had gone still nearby, overhearing.
“Whose?” Jace asked, all trace of humor gone.
“Don’t know.” Cregan rubbed a hand over his face. “The work was sloppy. Amateur. Or meant to look that way.”
“To draw you out?” Lysaria’s mind was already clicking through the possibilities, the old, dark lore about territorial disputes. It was never just about land. It was about challenge.
“Maybe. Or to scare.” He dropped his hand, his gaze finding hers again. The worry in them wasn’t for himself. “They were close to the eastern border. Too close to the Hold.”
To her. He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to.
Elara’s jaw was tight. “We double the perimeter watches. Rotate the hunters in pairs.”
Cregan gave a short nod, the Alpha again. “Do it.” He turned back to Lysaria, his voice dropping. “I need to check that sleeve. In the infirmary.”
It wasn’t a request. It was an excuse. She understood. He needed to move, to do something, and he needed a moment away from the watching eyes. She pushed herself up, her stiff muscles protesting. He rose with her, a solid presence at her side.
They walked the short, cold path to the infirmary in silence, the fresh snow swallowing their footsteps. Inside, she lit a single candle with a touch. The familiar smells of her herbs enveloped them, a sanctuary.
“Take it off,” she said, her healer’s tone overriding everything else.
He shrugged out of the heavy jacket, then the padded tunic beneath. The tear in the sleeve of his undershirt revealed a long, angry red welt across the hard muscle of his forearm. Not deep. Not bleeding. But the skin around it was inflamed, blistered in a way no ordinary branch would cause.
“You were lucky,” she whispered, reaching for her salve jar. The one she’d perfected for Willem.
“I had other things on my mind.” His voice was rough. He watched her scoop out the green-grey paste, her fingers steady. “Seeing you there. With them. It was… I kept thinking of it. Out there in the quiet.”
She began applying the salve, her touch careful. The muscle under her fingers was rigid. “What about it?”
“That I want it,” he said, the words stark and simple in the quiet room. “The fire. The quiet hall. The pups. You. Not as a moment. As my life.” He let out a slow breath as the salve soothed the burn. “And that someone laying silver wire in my woods threatens all of it. That makes me angry, Lysaria. In a way I haven’t been in a long time.”
She finished bandaging the arm, her movements methodical, giving her time. She looked up, her heterochromatic eyes meeting his. The candlelight danced in them. “Then we find them. And we make them stop.”
A fierce, wild approval flashed in his gaze. He caught her hand, the one that had just healed him, and pressed her palm flat against the center of his chest. His heart hammered against it, a relentless, powerful rhythm.
“We,” he repeated, as if tasting the word.
Outside, the wind picked up, moaning through the cracks in the stone. But in here, there was only the candle’s flicker, the scent of herbs, and the solid, undeniable beat under her hand.
But in here, there was only the candle’s flicker, the scent of herbs, and the solid, undeniable beat under her hand. His skin was warm through the thin linen of his undershirt. He didn’t move. The world narrowed to that point of contact, to the faint, clean smell of snow melting in his hair.
“We,” she finally said, the word an anchor.
A log shifted in the infirmary’s small hearth, spitting a spark onto the stone. The noise was startlingly loud. Cregan’s hand covered hers, pressing it tighter against his chest for one more second before releasing it. The absence of that contact felt immediate and cold.
“Jace will have spread the word about the snare by now.” He turned to pull his tunic back on, his movements efficient, masking whatever had just passed between them. “They’ll be edgy.”
“They’re always edgy,” Lysaria said, wiping the leftover salve from her fingers with a cloth. She aimed for lightness. “It’s part of the charm.”
He snorted, a real, short laugh. “Yeah. Charming.” He watched her as she replaced the lid on the salve jar, her hands sure in the dim light. “You handled the pups well. Better than I would’ve.”
“They’re less intimidating than a wounded Alpha,” she replied, a corner of her mouth twitching upward.
“Debatable.” He finished fastening his belt. “Myla’s convinced your hair is made of preserves. You might get sticky offers at breakfast.”
The easy back-and-forth was a rope bridge thrown over the chasm of what they weren’t saying. It felt necessary, and strangely comforting. She blew out the candle, plunging the room into the deep grey light of the snow-blurred window. They stood together in the gloom, not moving toward the door just yet.
Snow fell outside.
It sheeted down, silent and relentless, already piling in soft drifts against the window. It was the kind of snow that muted the world, that promised isolation. Inside the infirmary, the air was still thick with the ghost of his pain and her remedy, with the echo of his heartbeat under her palm.
He was looking at the snow, his profile a sharp cut against the pale window. She watched his face. The worry was still there, etched in the faint line between his brows, in the tight set of his jaw. But beneath it, something else had settled since he’d walked into the hall and seen her surrounded by his pack’s children. A resolve that had nothing to do with territory or threat.
She knew her own face was an open book to him. The careful walls she’d spent a lifetime building felt porous here, shaken loose by sleeping children and a shared, silent fear. She wasn’t hiding the awe she’d felt at their trust, or the sharp, protective anger that flared at the thought of silver-soaked wire laid in these woods. It was all there, in the way she held her shoulders, in the quiet of her breathing.
Both are not talking about their feelings but their eyes tell a different story.
His gaze slid from the window to her. In the grey light, his eyes were the colour of a winter lake at dawn. They weren’t guarded now. They held a question, an acknowledgment, a map of all the things the snow outside might try to bury. They traced the line of her cheek, the set of her mouth, as if memorizing a terrain.
Her own eyes, black and grey, didn’t look away. She let him see the loneliness that was finally, hesitantly, receding. She let him see the steadfastness she could offer, the kind forged in a different sort of solitude. It was an answer, and a promise.
The moment stretched, taut and wordless.
A burst of laughter echoed from the hall, followed by the clatter of a dropped pot. The ordinary noise of the pack living, persisting. It broke the spell, but gently.
Cregan nodded, once. A decision made. “We’ll start patrols at first light. Pairs. You’ll work with Selene today on more of that salve. As much as you can make.”
“Already on it,” she said, her voice husky. She cleared it. “I’ll need more yarrow. The deep-wood kind.”
“I’ll have someone get it.” He moved to the door, his hand on the latch. He paused, looking back at her. “Stay inside the main hall perimeter. Until we know.”
It wasn’t an order from an Alpha. It was a request from a man who had just found something precious and fragile. She heard the difference.
“I’ll be where you left me,” she said quietly. “By the fire.”
He held her gaze for one last, endless second. Then he pulled the door open, and a whirl of freezing air rushed in, carrying the scent of the coming night. He stepped out into the swirling white and was gone.
Lysaria stood still, listening to his footsteps fade into the muffling snow. She placed her hand back on her own chest, where the memory of his heartbeat still pulsed against her skin. Outside, the world was being erased, blanketed, hidden. But inside, something had just become irrevocably, terrifyingly clear.