The wolf's wrist was broken in two places, and he was lying about how it happened.
Mara knew because she'd been resetting bones since she was fourteen, and fractures from a training fall looked nothing like fractures from a fist. The angles were wrong. The bruising pattern bloomed too far up the forearm, old and yellowing at the edges three days old, at least which meant he'd been walking around with a broken wrist for three days, telling no one.
She didn't ask why. She already knew that too.
"Deep breath," she said.
He obeyed. She reset the joint in one clean movement.
He bit down on the sound that tried to come out of him, jaw locked, eyes fixed on the cottage ceiling. When it was done, his exhale shook the table.
"Done?" he managed.
"Wrapping it now." She moved efficiently, unspooling linen bandage with practiced hands, keeping her touch firm and steady the way Elder Sena had taught her, the way she'd taught herself to be with frightened things. Steady. Predictable. Safe. "You should've come two days ago."
"Couldn't."
She didn't push. She never pushed. That was the deal she'd made with this pack a long time ago she gave them her hands and her silence, and in return they let her exist in the small space she'd carved out for herself in the corner of Silverstone's carefully ordered world.
She tied the bandage. Released his wrist. "Keep it elevated. Come back in three days."
He slid off the table, cradling his arm. He was young nineteen, maybe twenty with the kind of face that hadn't quite finished deciding what it was going to look like. He glanced at her once on his way out. Opened his mouth. Closed it.
"Three days," she repeated, because she understood: some things didn't have words.
He left.
Mara turned back to the worktable, listening to the sound of the cottage settling into quiet around her, and tried not to count.
Three days.
Three days until the ceremony. Three days until she stood in the great hall in a white dress holding flowers she hadn't chosen, in front of a pack she served but had never quite belonged to, and made a vow to a man who looked at her the way Aldric Cole looked at everything he owned with the quiet, total confidence of someone who has never once been told no.
She picked up a jar of arnica paste and put it back. Picked up a bundle of dried yarrow and hung it on its hook. Her hands needed to be moving. They always needed to be moving, these days.
The door opened without a knock. It always did.
"Tell me you're not still in your work clothes."
Delia swept in like weather warm, bright, carrying too many fabric swatches and smelling of the expensive perfume she'd been wearing since she'd convinced Uncle Dorian to raise her allowance six months ago. She was beautiful in the effortless way of women who had been told so, repeatedly, since childhood, and she moved through the world as though it had been arranged for her comfort.
Mara loved her. She also, sometimes, found her exhausting.
"I'm still in my work clothes," Mara said.
"Mara." Delia spread three fabric swatches across the worktable with the focus of a general deploying troops. "The pre-ceremony dinner is in four hours. Four hours. Do you understand the concept of time?"
"I understand it fine. I just had a patient."
"You always have a patient." But Delia said it fondly, tilting her head to study the swatches. "Ivory or cream? And do not say it doesn't matter, because it absolutely does."
Mara looked at them both. "Cream."
"See? That took two seconds." Delia gathered the swatches and looked up, studying Mara's face the way she sometimes did quick and sharp, before the bright surface reassembled itself. "Are you nervous?"
The word felt too simple for what was sitting in her chest. "No."
"Liar."
"I'm fine, Dee."
Delia crossed the room and took both of Mara's hands in hers, the fabric swatches crumpled between their fingers. Her expression had gone soft the real version of her face, the one that existed before the performance. "It's going to be good," she said. "I promise you. Aldric is"
"Don't," Mara said. Quietly. No bite. Just a line.
Delia understood the line. She let go of her hands. "Okay." A breath. "Okay. Four hours. Cream dress. I'll come back at six."
She left.
The cottage was quiet again.
Mara stood still for a moment, both hands pressed flat on the worktable, looking at nothing. Through the window, the pack grounds stretched out in their perfect, managed way stone paths, manicured grass, the great hall at the center of it all with its high windows and its flags. Silverstone. Everything clean. Everything ordered. Everything hers, in the way that the healer's cottage and the title and the small bedroom in the secondary quarters were hers assigned, functional, and belonging to her in the way borrowed things belonged to you.
She closed her hand around the edge of the table.
Opened it again.
Then she pressed two fingers to the place below her collarbone habit, mindless, the way someone touches a bruise to test if it still hurts. The scar there was small and pale, irregular at the edges, sitting just below her left collarbone where no remembered injury lived. She'd had it her whole life. She'd asked, once, when she was twelve, and Elder Sena had said birthmark and changed the subject, and Mara had learned that there were things in this pack that didn't get pressed on.
She pressed the scar and felt nothing. Same as always.
She dropped her hand. Pulled her kit closed.
She had four hours.
The forest called her the way it always did without sound, without reason, the way the body remembers what the mind has tried to organize away. She went after dark, when the pack house lights were amber squares in the distance and the pine trees swallowed the noise of the world, and she stood at the edge of the tree line with her arms loose at her sides and just breathed.
Three days.
She was allowed to need three minutes.
The forest was still around her in the deep, listening way of old places. No wind. The moon was three-quarters full and the light came down in silver columns between the trees, and Mara stood in it and tried to locate, somewhere in the complicated architecture of herself, something that felt like peace.
She found, instead, the feeling of being watched.
It came slowly not threat, exactly, which was the strange part. She'd been on enough border patrol walks to know the particular cold of threat. This was different. This was the feeling of being found. Of something turning its attention toward you across a great distance and arriving, fully, in the space around your skin.
She went very still.
The forest did not move.
She turned in a slow circle scanning, healer's eyes, cataloging: trees, shadow, mooncolumn, undergrowth, nothing, nothing, nothing
There.
Between two black pine trunks, at the exact depth where shadow became solid two points of reflected light. Eyes. Pale. Unblinking. Watching her with the absolute stillness of something that had been standing there long enough that it had forgotten to perform patience. It simply was.
Mara's heart kicked once, hard.
The eyes didn't move.
Neither did she.
And in the three seconds they held three seconds of complete, suspended silence the scar below her collarbone flared warm. Not pain. Not heat, exactly. Something underneath heat. Something that felt, impossibly, like recognition.
She opened her mouth.
The eyes vanished.
The trees stood empty. The forest breathed again. A pine branch dropped snow twenty feet to her left, and the ordinary world reassembled itself around her like it had never stopped.
Mara stood at the tree line with her hand pressed over her collarbone and her pulse hammering in her ears, staring at the place between the pines where something had looked at her.
Something had looked at her like it already knew her name.
She went inside. She went to bed. She lay awake in the dark with her hand on the scar until exhaustion pulled her under, and her last clear thought, before sleep took it, was this:
Three days.
By morning, she was sure she'd imagined it.
She was wrong.