Chapter 3 The Deep Wolves Stir

What is loyalty, if it will lead us to ruin? And what is prophecy, if it will bind the heart before it will learn the truth?

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Far out beyond Virelle's cliff-battered shores, where the sea darkened to a deeper, more sinister color and stars cast ghostly reflections on its glassy surface, a fortress had emerged from the water like a broken tooth. Its towers were cut from basalt, blackened by time and tide, and capped with bone and silver. The fortress had no name among men. It was The Maw to the Deep Wolves.

There, beneath a sliver-moon sky, Edrik Thornjaw stood on the precipice of a ledge and looked out over the tidepools in which leviathans rested. His body was scarred by the marks of a thousand tides, and the hunger in his amber eyes was no less after a hundred years. Anacobal was gone. No, not gone-lost. Walked away from his vocation.

And Edrik felt it. As surely as the sea knew the moon, he knew that the boy had broken the bond.

A thin plume of steam puffed from his nostrils. "Bring me the Seer."

From the shadows behind him, men and women emerged like waves themselves. One detached with anger-frantic speed, and soon returned with a hooded woman in sea-glass robes and barnacle-beaded hair. Lady Varessa. Her eyes were shrouded in knowledge that no one should possess. She did not kneel.

"You already know," she said softly.

Edrik confronted her. "He swims in alien currents."

Varessa's voice was like a conch shell. "With her. The moon-born. The girl who straddles beast and maiden."

Edrik growled. "She should not be stirred."

"She is stirring. And you cannot stop her, not with tooth or foretelling. Only with sacrifice."

A huge rumbling swept through the sea below as if even ancient things sleeping there agreed.

Edrik's eyes contracted. "Then I will take her before she has made the choice."

Varessa did not smile, but there was a glint in her face like cold iron. "But know this, Thornjaw. The tides are not the same. The blood-moon approaches. The old laws will stir."

He spat over the waves. "Then let the old gods rot in their own salt."

---

Meanwhile, in Virelle, stormlight flashed along the horizon. The sea breathed in troubled time. Within Merbel's cliffside hut, time remained stationary, caught between breath and silence.

Anacobal leaned on the wooden sill of the window, gaze scanning across the sea for things only he was aware existed to fear. His shirt billowed loose over him, torn at the neck from the wreck the day before. Salt had left a deposit along his forehead, but somehow he seemed even otherworldly-not sickly, not breakable. As if he was a product of the wind itself.

Merbel busied herself boiling tea. Forest herbs, flavored with a touch of blue moss only she dared to gather. Her hands trembled more than they ought. It wasn't just the danger of having a stranger. It was him.

The quiet between them wasn't tense, not quite. It pulsed with things left unsaid.

"You dream," Anacobal breathed. Not a question.

She froze, stock still. "What makes you think that?"

He moved back from the window. "Because you snore in your sleep like a sleeper waiting to be awakened. And because I see them too. The temples beneath the waves. The light distorting the darkness. The voice calling you Daughter."

She scowled at him. "How do you know that?"

He didn't answer. Instead, he walked slowly towards her, never taking his eyes off hers.

"Because you're not merely a girl with a secret," he said. "You're a bridge. And the sea remembers its own."

Merbel's cheeks flushed. Her wolf stirred, not with danger, but with awareness. It was maddening.

She turned away, grasping for a cup. "You speak in riddles."

"Because the truth would burn us both."

The wind and the kettle were the only noises for an eternity.

And then, in a surprised tenderness, he added, "I don't know why the sea brought me here. Not altogether. But when I discovered you on the cliff. it was as if a cord had pulled tight. As if I'd been swimming all my life towards that instant."

Merbel swallowed. The wolf within her growled, not with hunger, but with desire. She had spent her entire life hiding. Folding in. Covering the beast with smiling faces and long sleeves.

And yet this stranger. this man who spoke of blood-moons and bridges. saw her. Entirely.

She set down the tea, hands trembling. "What are you really, Anacobal?"

He walked to her then, close enough for her to smell the ocean on his skin. "A traitor. A bearer of curses. A fool who believed he could escape fate."

His eyes fought with hers, sea-glass green with storm at the edges. "But I'd be all those things again, just to locate you."

Their lips hovered. Close. Closer. The air thrummed with something old and sacred.

And then the tea boiled over.

Surprised, Merbel stepped back. The moment broke like glass.

Anacobal breathed deeply and went to open the window, letting wind cool the room.

Down far below, the sea crashed harder against the rocks.

---

It was on that night that Merbel could not sleep. She stood at the edge of the cliff, her feet bare, her cloak billowing in the wind. The moon hung fat and white. The storm had not yet broken, but she sensed its coming.

The dream voice spoke once more. Come home, Daughter of Tides. We wait where coral sings.

Anacobal walked behind her in silence. "You're hearing them again."

"Yes."

He looked at the moon. "She calls to you, too. Doesn't she?"

Merbel nodded. "But I don't know why. I was born on land. I shift under the moon. My father was a woodsman. My mother."

"Your mother was more than she told you."

Merbel looked at him. "You knew her?"

He hesitated. "No. But I knew her people. And I know what she gave up to keep you hidden."

She closed her eyes. The waves beneath her complained with more noise, as if they sensed her distress. "I'm tired of being a secret."

"Then don't be."

"It's not easy."

"Nothing that's ever worth becoming is."

She turned to him. "What if becoming me destroys everything I love?"

He kept her gaze. "Then let it. So something better can rise from the wreckage."

She loved him for an instant for how effortlessly he spoke. But hate melted into yearning.

She took his hand.

And for the very first time, she allowed herself to lean against him, her heartbeat synchronizing with the rhythm of the sea.

The tide below was whispering secrets.

The stars above were beginning to change.

And far below, in The Maw, Edrik leaned over a map carved into whalebone.

His scouts were already sailing towards Virelle.

"Find them," he snarled. "Before the moon finds her first."

Varessa watched from the darkness.

And smiled.

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