Page 3 of The Ashpaw: Part One

Heart racing, she sat up, scrambling backwards against the trunk.

Friends? Foes? Either way, she could very likely be dinner…

The wolfkin pup stood, legs trembling for a moment before it shook off the shawl, the blood on the dressing already dried.

It padded over to Fern, and she swallowed. “It would be very rude to eat me after I helped you.”

The wolfkin snorted, then nudged her face with its nose, sniffing her and giving her cheek a cursory lick.

She giggled despite the danger lurking outside. “That tickles!”

When another howl broke the silence, the wolfkin looked up, ears straight and tail wagging.

Friends, then.

“Well, off with you. I’m sure your clan is worried sick.”

The wolfkin moved to leave, and then turned back, whining and looking at Fern like it still wanted something, or wasn’t ready to say goodbye quite yet.

But then when she reached out to give it one last pat on the head, it snapped, nipping her on the finger.

“Ouch!” she cried, bringing it back to cradle into her chest. It had broken the skin, blood pooling from the bite and running down her wrist.

The wolfkin stepped forward, and Fern tried to scoot away, but it merely licked the blood clean, gave her one last look, and then bolted out of the tree.

Fern held her breath, praying to the gods that it wasn’t about to bring its clan here. As though it hadn’t just tasted her to be sure she’d be delicious.

But one minute turned into five, which turned into twenty, and Fern looked down at her finger, still throbbing. She dipped it in the leftover paste, wrapped it up with the scrap of fabric she had left, and then, when the sky began to turn to blue with dawn, she made her way back home.

Chapter 2

Darion

Ten years later

Darion stood in an antechamber of the temple, his father and uncles dressing him while the priestess chanted in the old tongue—words he only vaguely recognized.

He felt like a pup, raising his arms so his father could slip the tunic over his head, the white linen made yellow with age and the bright embroidered hem faded and beginning to fray.

It was the same tunic his father wore at his own courtship ceremony. And his father before him.

He tried not to scrunch his nose at the smell of it—musty, carrying just the hint of old sweat and wolfkin musk. But the corner of his father’s lips lifted ever so slightly as his gaze passed his face, knowing Darion’s tells all too well.

One of his uncles tapped his shin, and he raised one foot and then the other as the woolen britches were pulled up, the cord tied tightly.

“Lady Kyntha is a fine she-wolf,” his Uncle Norden said, as though he meant to convince Darion that this was a decision made for anything other than politics.

Mating the daughter of the Ironcoat Clan would end almost fifty years of bloody, pointless feuds over territory, slights real and imagined, and the thousand petty provocations wolfkin had always found reason enough to bleed for.

“Disciplined, sharp-minded… and she comes from a long line of fecund matriarchs.”

Well, there was another reason aside from politics, he supposed. The duty to reproduce was something all wolfkin knew well, and Darion hardly needed to be convinced of it.

“An alpha is only as strong as his clan,” his father often said. “And the strongest clans are forged in blood.”

His father, head of the Sabletails, had sired three children himself: his elder brother Eidan, born to a Solvekh; a daughter by the same she-wolf who had died before her first winter; and finally Darion, born of the Lurvekh mate who secured his place as heir.

Two pups surviving into adulthood was something to be proud of, even if that number was small compared to the litters his ancestors used to have.