Page 19 of Iron Beneath the Snow

“Then we claim her.”

The words did not need force to land.

Several wolves shifted, the weight of the implication settling in.

“You intend to bring a Frostvein daughter into Ironfang?” someone asked. “After everything between us?”

“She no longer fits cleanly within their own law,” Soren said evenly.

A few heads tilted, considering.

He turned back toward them.

“If the White Law declares her compromised, she cannot enter any sanctioned union within Frostvein. Their own doctrine isolates her.”

His gaze hardened slightly.

“Ironfang is not bound by that doctrine.”

The silence that followed carried a different quality now—less uncertainty, more calculation.

His second folded his arms.

“You intend to claim her.”

It was not phrased as a question.

Soren met his gaze without hesitation.

“Yes.”

The reaction was immediate, though not chaotic—murmurs, sharp glances, the quick recalibration of assumptions.

“Think,” Soren said, cutting through it before it could build.

“If they declare her unclean and we do nothing, they control the narrative.”

He paced once along the length of the table, his movement slow and deliberate.

“But if we step forward and claim her under Ironfang law, we force that narrative into the open.”

“We legitimize the mark,” one wolf said.

“And we humiliate Frostvein publicly,” another added.

Soren inclined his head once.

“Vargan will be forced to respond,” he said. “If he refuses, he undermines the White Law. If he accepts, he hands her over.”

“And in either case,” his second said quietly, “you gain ground.”

Soren’s expression did not change.

“What Vargan has given me,” he said, “is leverage.”

In his mind, the situation had already resolved into something simpler and far more useful.

Leverage.