Chapter 15: Chapter 15
( Rhydian)
I notice it first in the training yard.
Not because I’m looking for something wrong — I’m not, I’m trying to remember the footwork Elena drilled into me yesterday without making it look like I’m thinking about footwork, which apparently is the entire point of footwork. But I notice it because four years of surviving alone rewired something in my brain that I can’t switch off. The part that’s always cataloguing. Always measuring. Always asking *what’s different today.*
What’s different today is Brennan.
He’s one of Elena’s senior warriors. Thirty-something, solid, the kind of wolf who moves like he was built for it — efficient, economic, no wasted motion. I’ve watched him run drills every morning since I got here because watching other people train is how I’ve been trying to catch up without anyone noticing I’m behind.
This morning he drops his sparring partner’s strike that he caught clean two days ago.
Not a close thing. Not a matter of timing or a tricky angle. Just — drops it. His arm comes up and then it’s like the message gets lost somewhere between his brain and his body, and the strike lands on his shoulder, and he shakes his head like he’s trying to clear water from his ears.
His partner doesn’t say anything. But I see the look.
I keep moving through my own warmup. Don’t stare.
But I’m watching.
By the end of the session I’ve counted seven separate moments that don’t fit. A warrior who trips on flat ground. Another one who sits down between drills when she didn’t sit down yesterday or the day before. A young wolf, couldn’t be more than nineteen, who goes pale in the middle of a run and walks the last hundred meters with his hand pressed to his temple.
Headaches.
I know what headaches look like. I lived in a cave — in damp, in cold, in altitude that took some getting used to. I know the particular way a body moves when something inside it is wrong.
These wolves have headaches.
---
I don’t say anything at breakfast.
I sit across from Elena and eat and watch her face and try to figure out if she’s feeling it too, if there’s something behind her eyes today that’s different from yesterday. She looks the same. Reads the same note three times before setting it aside, which isn’t like her. Rolls her shoulder once, twice, the way you do when a headache is sitting at the base of your skull and won’t commit to being a full headache yet.
She catches me looking.
"What," she says.
"Nothing."
She holds the look for a second, then goes back to her cup.
I turn my own cup in my hands. The water in it is from the main house supply — I know that because I watched the kitchen girl fill it from the same pitcher she fills Elena’s from every morning. Same source. Same water.
I set the cup down without finishing it.
"You’re not drinking," Elena says, without looking up.
"I’m not thirsty."
"You sparred for two hours."
"I’m still not thirsty."
She looks up then. Something in my voice maybe, or just the fact that I’m usually not the one who argues with my body about what it needs. She studies my face with those grey eyes that don’t miss much.
"What’s going on," she says. Not a question.
I look at the cup.
"How long has the Pack been using this water supply," I ask.
A beat. Her expression doesn’t change but something behind it does — a sharpening, a stillness. "Since the settlement was built. It runs off the main spring under the back house." She pauses. "Why."
"Brennan dropped a block this morning that he’s caught clean every day for at least a week. Mira sat between drills. That young one — red-haired, runs near the fence—"
"Corvin."
"He went white in the middle of a run. Finished it walking." I meet her eyes. "I’ve been here three weeks. I know what these wolves look like when they’re moving right. They’re not moving right today."
Elena is quiet. Completely quiet, the kind she gets when she’s taking something seriously enough that she stops performing composure and just — goes still.
"It could be a virus," she says. Careful.
"Could be."
"Winter’s starting. Something moving through the Pack—"
"Could be," I say again. "But it hit fast. Yesterday Brennan was fine. Mira was fine. Whatever this is, it didn’t build up slowly."
She looks at my untouched cup.
Then at hers.
She sets it down.
The silence between us does something — stretches in a specific direction, toward a specific name, and neither of us says it out loud yet. But I can see it landing on her. The same place it landed on me in the training yard when the seventh wrong thing happened and something in my chest went cold and certain.
"You think someone put something in it," she says quietly.
"I think I’ve seen people poisoned before. In the territories outside the border. Rogues use it on each other’s water sources when they want to take a cave without a fight." I pause. "It doesn’t always look like poison. Sometimes it just looks like a bad week."
Elena’s hand is flat on the table. Very flat. Very still. The kind of still that means she’s holding something in that doesn’t have a clean shape yet.
"How long would something like that take to—"
"Depends what it is. If it’s a suppressant — something that just takes the edge off, makes wolves slower, more human-tired — you might not see real impairment for three, four days." I look at her. "We’re seeing it now. Which means if it started in the water, it started two or three days ago."
She stands up.
Not dramatic, not fast — just standing, the way she does everything, with that economy of movement that means she’s already three steps ahead and her body is catching up. She goes to the window. Looks out at the yard, the training grounds, the settlement spread below the hill.
Her back is to me.
"Rhydian," she says.
"Yeah."
"Is there any part of this that you think I’m overreacting to."
I look at her shoulders. The line of them. The way they’re held too level, too careful.
"No," I say.
She nods once. Like confirmation of something she already knew.
"Marcus," she says. Just the name. Flat and quiet and landing like a stone.
I don’t say yes. I don’t say no. I turn the empty cup in my hands and I think about the way he walked into our room that morning and didn’t look at me, not once, and I think about Elena saying *he suspects me but suspicion isn’t proof* and I think about Viktor’s tea.
"It fits his timeline," I say carefully. "Whatever’s coming, whatever he’s arranged — he’d want the Pack weakened before it happened. Not obviously sick. Just—"
"Just slow." Her voice is barely above a breath. "Slow enough that when something hits us we can’t meet it properly."
"Shadowpine," I say.
She turns around.
Her face is controlled. Completely controlled, the mask she wears in council meetings, and underneath it — I’ve gotten good enough at reading her to see it now — something that is genuinely frightened. Not for herself. For them. For all those wolves in the training yard moving wrong and not knowing why.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her scared for someone else and it does something to my chest that I don’t have time for right now.
"We can’t go to the council," she says. "If Marcus has anyone there—"
"He has Henrick at minimum."
"—they’ll know we’re looking. He’ll move faster." She crosses back to the table. Doesn’t sit — stands with her hands on the back of the chair, thinking out loud now, which she doesn’t usually do, which tells me how fast her mind is moving. "I need to confirm it first. The water. I need someone who can test it without it getting back to him."
"Your healer," I say. "The one who did my wrists. She didn’t look at Marcus when he came in that first morning. People who are loyal to someone look at them when they enter a room."
Elena stares at me for a second.
"That’s—" She stops. "That’s a very specific thing to notice."
"I spent four years alone. You learn to read rooms." I shrug. "She’s not his. I’d bet on it."
"Her name is Senna." Elena straightens. Pushes the chair in. "I’ll go to her alone. You don’t come — if Marcus is watching he’ll make it look like the rogue husband dragging the Alpha into paranoia." Her jaw tightens. "You go back to the yard. Keep your eyes on the water situation. Count how many wolves seem impaired. Build me a number."
"And if I see someone getting worse. Actually worse, not just headaches—"
"Come find me immediately. Don’t tell anyone else. Don’t—" She pauses, looks at me directly, "—don’t let Marcus see you notice anything."
I hold her gaze. "I know how not to be seen."
"I know you do." Something moves through her expression that isn’t quite softness and isn’t quite gratitude but lives somewhere adjacent to both. "You were right to tell me."
"You would’ve noticed."
"Maybe." She picks up her coat from the hook by the door. "But you noticed first."
She says it without looking at me — matter-of-fact, already moving, already thinking forward to Senna and the water and whatever comes next. But I feel it land somewhere specific. Somewhere it was needed without me knowing it was needed.
That I was useful. That what I am — the paranoid, cataloguing, survival-wired, cave-living thing that I am — wasn’t in the way for once.
That it was exactly right.
I pull on my jacket. Move toward the door.
"Rhydian."
I stop. Turn back.
She’s looking at me properly now. Not the Alpha-reading-the-room look. Just her.
"Be careful," she says.
It’s two words. She says them plainly, without weight, already turning away by the time they’re out.
I stand there for one second longer than I need to.
Then I go back to the yard.
---
The morning moves around me and I move through it, doing what she asked — watching without watching, counting the hesitations and the pale faces and the too-careful movements that don’t belong to these wolves. I find fourteen by midday. Fourteen in a fighting force of sixty.
It’s not catastrophic yet.
Yet is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
I’m standing near the water trough at the yard’s edge, watching Corvin attempt drills with a focus that’s clearly costing him more than it should, when I feel someone watching me.
I don’t look right away. Old habit. You look right away, you tell them you’re paying attention. You let it sit for ten seconds first.
Ten seconds.
Then I look.
Marcus is standing at the far fence. Just standing, hands clasped, face pleasant and distant the way it always is. He’s not looking at the drills. He’s not looking at the water trough.
He’s looking at me.
When our eyes meet he doesn’t look away. He holds it for one long moment with that almost-kind expression, like a man who wants you to know he sees you. Who wants you to know it doesn’t worry him.
Then he turns and walks away.
My hands are fists in my pockets.
Three weeks ago I would’ve gone after him, I think. Cornered him somewhere and made him tell me what he’s done and not cared what came after.
Three weeks ago I had nothing to lose.
I breathe out slow through my nose. Watch him disappear around the corner of the main house. Then I turn back to the yard, to Corvin, to the fourteen wolves moving wrong, and I think about Elena’s face when she said be careful and didn’t make anything of it.
I stay in the yard.
I count.
