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"There is an oak tree deep within the dark forest, the Svartur Minn," he said, "on the boundary between our packland and the Mánarís pack. It’s beyond the marshland, right up near the cliff. You've passed it a hundred times, but it is one among many and is hidden by a veil."

Maxen nodded slowly. "I have heard of it."

"It is vast," Blaidd said. "Older than any of us can imagine. And inside it lives a colony of changelings."

"I didn't know they existed," Blaidd added. "I doubt any of you did. They are content to remain there—hidden, bound to the tree. The oldest are as old as the oak itself. In many ways, they are part of it and it is a part of them."

They listened with rapt expressions, confused about where this was leading.

"Like us," Blaidd said quietly, "they seek strength beyond their borders. We wish for mates from other packs to avoid stagnation, and they do the same, but differently."

"Do they...take cubs as the stories say?" Lisna asked, her voice tight.

"No…not quite. Every thousand years, they need to add new blood to their younglings," Blaidd replied. "And the blood needs to be powerful."

He paused, wishing he had never participated in the tournament. He had never wanted to be the alpha.

"One winter," he said, "a half-feral young woman wandered into the forest, banished from her pack."

"She had been kept by a man who later found his moon-blessed mate. When she attacked her lover’s mate, she was cast out. There was no protection, no hope for the future." Blaidd's voice was flat. "She knew what happened to the mind when one turned feral."

He looked down at his hands, marked by a thousand scars.

"She somehow gravitated toward the oak and climbed it. And on the next full moon, she hung herself from one of its branches."

Lisna gasped softly.

"And just as the last spark of life left her body," Blaidd continued, "one of the changelings took her body."

Maxen frowned. "Took her body?"

"They cannot walk the world as themselves, as they are one with the tree," Blaidd said. "They need a host. A body."

Understanding dawned slowly and horribly.

"That is how they leave the oak," Blaidd said. "By inhabiting the nearly dead. The witch explained it to me, though I still don't understand their ways."

The room felt colder as their thoughts turned to Rowena in the underground chamber.

"That body," Blaidd said, voice steady despite the tremor in his hands, "was Isolde's."

No one spoke because none of them trusted their voices yet.

"So the woman I mated for eight long years was a changeling in that woman’s body," Blaidd finished quietly.

He leaned back against the pillows, exhaustion washing over him again.

"And everything you think you know about her death—about the children, about me"—his eyes lifted, dark and steady—"was built on a lie."

Blaidd let out a long, unsteady breath. "I was only twenty-two and desperate. That part is mine to own."

"All my friends had found their lifemates. I wondered if mine was dead, if I was fated to never find her," he went on. "So, I decided to participate in the Great Trials for the Moon Warden." His mouth twisted faintly. "And you know what happened after that."

Sion frowned. "The final match?"

"Brandr defeated me," Blaidd said. "He claimed the throne of Moon Warden."

Recognition rippled through the room.