Pitilessly, the wind stabbed at her eyes, dimming them anew before she blinked the brine away. The tears peregrinated wistfully to her lips and collected there like dew till her tongue slipped distractedly over the contours of her mouth. Her gaze, meanwhile, was fixed restlessly to the meadow below — to the man that haunted her past; her present; and even her future. Especially her future.

From this vantage point she knew she would remain undiscovered by him, veiled as she was by the umbral thickets and woodland grove that flanked the hillside atop which the longhouse towered. Below it the farmstead and heathland stretched and undulated as far south as the eye could see. To where the weald stood tall and imposing, like a frowning sentry, enkindled with red embers that glowed crimson beneath the dying rays of encroaching twilight.

The mountain shadows were already slipping quietly over the pasturage, but Brenna hardly noticed the cold that accompanied the falling darkness. She could not even hear the cattle lowing from where she sat, for the wind groaned and whistled lustily through the trees, peaks, and scars.

All the better, she thought, lest he hear the rustle of her skirts or her shallow, anxious breathing. But for the wind, he'd have heard even the heartbeat of the nightjar that had emerged nearby. She was certain of that. Her scent, however, he could not possible detect, unless of course the wind should suddenly alter its course. But for the nonce it blew steadily up the hillside, masking her presence from the man below.

Still and all, it behooved her not to stay overlong. It was utter fatuity to imagine that anything could be concealed from ... a valdyr for long. However, Brenna wanted only this moment to watch him unobserved. To bring to order the calm that had been bestrewn so chaotically when first she'd descried his beloved countenance. It was better this way; she wanted her wits about her and her demeanor composed when she did finally face him. Tonight.

Most of the clansmen, the Greybacks included, had already filled the hall to brimming. Spring was still not fully settled over the land and the nights were yet cold. The fragrant smoke from the roasting meat and hearth fires rose languidly from the louvres in the roof — as did the sounds of merrymaking — and vanished into the greying, gloomy light of dusk.

But Renic and Heida had yet to enter there. Nor had Roth's children. Even the ever elusive wolfhound, Vali, trotted attentively beside them.

Brenna smiled tremulously as Renic knelt beside Finn, the boy talking animatedly as Freki ran circles around them. It had been something altogether fascinating and wonderful to behold: Renic with his nephews. Boys that, by the hands of fate, resembled him as much as if they were the fruits of his own loins.

She wondered if it confused Finn and Freki to see a man — a stranger — so resemble their father. It was only the scars that now distinguished Roth from his brother.

The sound of Heida's mirth recalled Brenna from her reveries. And to her original purpose here. She had only meant to reassure herself that she'd not dreamt him into being — that, in truth, Renic was back from the dead and not just a cruel cantrip of her mind's bedevilment.

No, she could see that he was real. She'd heard his laughter; seen the distinction in the preternatural colors that ebbed and flowed around him; and felt her blood thrum with certainty.

For the time being, though, it was time to go. Brenna stood, careful not to bring attention to herself. Renic was by now dangling Freki from the boy's feet as they walked, the child's giggling piercing as it rang across the vale. The four of them had begun to make their way back to the longhouse, and it was time she too got herself out of the chilling wind.

She turned on her heel, back towards the longhouse, her courage now sufficiently roused for this all important reunion, but was stopped dead in her tracks when her gaze collided with Aila's.

"I've been looking for you," said Aila.

"How did you know where to find me?" This was not a place she was known to frequent. And she'd been careful in coming here, confident in the knowledge that she'd not been followed.

"The wind told me," she said with a wink and a shrug.

Aila's movements were almost feline as she glided across the space that separated them, peering down through the foliage at the foursome perambulating below. With a knowing smile she turned back to face Brenna. "You've been avoiding him."

"Yes. Have you spoken with him? Where has he been?! Why did he not—"

"These are answers you would now be in possession of had you stayed..." Evidently, though, she took pity on Brenna and recapitulated Renic's tale as told to them earlier. Once she had repeated all she knew, Aila released a wearied sigh. "He also mentioned that he would not be staying long." A sad smile parted her lips briefly as Renic's laughter was heard over the wind. "Perhaps if you spoke to him ... perhaps if he could see you, he might change his mind."

"You know, as well as I, that Renic will put his clan above his own wants; even if he loved me enough to want to stay. But it is not ... we are not attached in that way, Aila."

"Oh, but I think you are. I think you could be if you would but try."

"You have been speaking to my mother," Brenna mumbled, thinking of the vision of the bear through the mist. She understood what it meant now. "But a change in futurity is but the work of a moment and my visions are not always clear; nothing is set in runestone."

"Speaking of visions," said Aila, "I suspect the gods have sent you another. And I wager it is not one I wish to hear; for it is not only my son whom you have been evading, is it?"

"No," she admitted. "And it was not a vision, exactly, but more of a sensation. A glimpse of a shadow." Whatever she'd seen and felt when she'd touched Aila the night before had disturbed her dreadfully.

"A glimpse of what?"

Brenna shook her head, wearily. "You are different now, Aila."

The mother of werewolves had always glowed with steady shades of strength and vitality; of rectitude. Of humanity. And those hues were still discernible, but of late they appeared to move ... differently. Diametrically to their original course. Her colors were now become almost empyreal. But it was more than that her colors were ... otherworldy. Overall, they had altered so slowly, over years in fact, that it had been nothing shocking to witness. Nay, something else had disturbed her.

"Ay, but that is not why you evade me," said Aila, guessing rightly.

"No. I saw ... I saw something yestereve, when my guard was down. I felt ... such excruciating pain. It affrighted me."

"And what did you see?" Aila tucked an auburn lock behind Brenna's ear before resting her hand reassuringly on the younger woman's shoulder. "Tell me."

"Death. Aila, I s-saw your demise." And that was not all she'd seen that night. She'd been studying her dearest friend closely, disbelievingly, when she'd stumbled into Aila last night and dropped the bread. Heida too was different now.

Brenna could feel something coming — like the snap of thunder charging the air moments before a storm. Change was upon them. And the earth was trembling with the force of it.

"Death?" Aila dropped her hand limply to her side. "But I thought...?" Blue eyes, almost violet, disengaged from Brenna's and drifted blankly athwart the fields before she raised them askance to the heavens. "A life for a life," she whispered, a dawning realization steeling into her somber countenance. "Yes, I see now."

But what Aila saw, the seeress was not to know.

❦

The conference with Aila had unsettled her thoroughly, more so because Aila had withdrawn almost instantly and disappeared as quietly as she'd come. Much like Loki would ofttimes do. Thankfully, she had seen nothing of The Wicked One. That god disturbed her above all others, and she would not soon, if ever, seek him out again.

Renic, however, was another matter entirely. Him she sought eagerly, her eyes flitting diligently through the smokey room and rowdy occupants.

unfortunately, one man, no doubt bethinking himself smooth-tongued and charming, leaned his large chest against her back as he dunked his drinking horn into the butt of mead beside which she was standing. He reeked of sweat and smoke, and his cheeks were ruddy with his obvious and exuberant potations.

"By the gods! It is Freyja herself!" said he with a belch of appreciation. "Such beauty" — And he gave another belch into her ear, his feet unsteady and his arm heavy at her shoulders — "has left poor Grimmar," he said, pointing to himself, "with a tongue of heavy iron."

"Would that you'd swallowed it instead of poking it in my ear." Brenna rolled her eyes, and then continued probing the hall for one man in particular, dismissing the prating giant beside her.

He, predictably, did not pay her the same favor. "But it is a tongue I know well how to wield," said he, making vulgar motions with said tongue, "and how to poke at a woman's—"

"Ha!" Brenna, wholly disinterested by how that remark might end, slipped agilely from his side and shoved him forcibly away, felling him like a giant oak so that he slammed to the floor amidst raucous laughter. Even Grimmar himself was beset with hoots of laughter, wholly unperturbed by her rejection of him. He perforce righted himself and then staggered to the mead to replenish his horn ere he took himself off to 'poke his tongue' at another maiden's ear.

Whatever Grimmar's fate, Brenna remained indifferent to it. Renic was not here. That much she could see, and that was all that occupied her. But she had an idea of where he might have got to.

With her cloak pulled tight across her shoulders, Brenna flew into the night. Renic would not be far away. A man, though gone for many years, would not have changed his habits overmuch. He was still the solitary thinker he had always been.

There was an old yew that stood a ways from the hall where they had liked to play as children. She and Heida had used to climb it when they were younger and Renic had sometimes joined them in the loftiest boughs. But he had, just as often, gone there to ruminate on his own as well. Brenna was sure that he was there now. She felt keenly that he was.

But it was dark out and she had not bought a lamp with her. The branches of the stately tree were only just discernible. Suddenly, however, the clouds swept off the half-waxed moon and all was bright. But only for a moment, for just as quickly they converged on it once more and the landscape was again thrown into darkness.

It had been enough, however, for she'd seen him.

His frame was as bestial and large as she remembered it. Though he was shrouded in gloom, she directed her gaze to where she'd seen him reposing against the yew, his peculiar eyes bright as he'd watched her. Inhumanely blue. Impossibly canine.

She caught a flash of white in the darkness, his teeth gleaming strangely as he smiled. But no words did he utter.

"So this is to be my greeting after all this time?" She strained her eyes and picked her way over knotty roots as she approached him. "You have nothing to say?"

"No words were ever needed with you, Brenna." His steely hand caught her wrist as she stumbled in the dark, and then he guided her to seat herself on a root beside him.

"Have I disturbed your solitude?" But that was silly, of course she had!

"That is not to say your company should ever be unwelcome," he answered with another flash of pearly teeth.

The silence that followed tautened her nerves and leavened the evening air with a strange disquietude. Neither spoke, and yet there was so much left unsaid.

"You must despise me?" he said at last.

"You always assume that," she replied, "and at each occasion you have been wrong."

"Then surely you must wonder why I did not return when I was well enough to make the journey? Why I allowed myself to be thought dead."

"I do not wonder," she assured him. "I saw how you were changed when you returned from the Klanerting ... that year that Roth killed Arnar. You watched him lose control; you stood witness to his savagery; and in your brother — in your other half — you saw yourself. A reflection of what was inside you."

He swallowed audibly, but said not a word as she went on. For his part, he seemed almost spellbound by her words as they left her. She had no need of light to perceive that. Brenna could feel how he'd suspended his breath to listen.

"I watched as it ate at you day and night and every full moon that followed the next. I wept for you, Renic, every time you ... were denied control of your own mind, and body. Every day that you withdrew, I feared that you would leave us eventually. You hated yourself since that day, and were never carefree thereafter.

"It is only to some extent that Roth loathes himself; there is, nonetheless, something of acceptance, and even hubris, in Roth that you have never possessed. Were he to have the choice between complete humanity and that which he is now, I am not altogether sure that he would give that terrible power up. But you — you have always yearned for a mortal life.

"So my answer is no. I do not wonder why you stayed away. You stayed away because you had charged yourself with a grave undertaking: to learn to live with yourself. And I can well understand the need." Freyja knew, she was still learning to do so.

"Control is everything to me, Brenna." His voice was gruff with strong emotion. It vibrated coarsely between them.

"I know that." She herself could not control the sight she'd been benighted with; the gods and goddesses had cursed her too. "But after all this time have you found what it is you sought?"

"I think so," said he.

"Then there is nothing more to say. All is as it was meant to be. The gods were guiding you—"

"You may well say that," he snorted grimly. "I feel as though I am caught in a perilous game that I can neither name nor understand." The moon swiftly appeared once more to wash his beautiful face in silver light. Renic raised his glare to Mani, more than halfway filled now. "I shall stay only till after..." he said at long last, still watching the moon god.

She knew to what he referred. Till after his cycle. "Ay, your mother mentioned that you mean to leave us." She wanted so much to know more, but she knew that he would not elaborate. Not unless he wished to.

"There is nothing for me here now."

"Are you so sure of that, Renic?" Brenna lifted her cold fingers to his cheek — it was as warm as though the sun itself had chafed his flesh — and turned his face back to hers. The moon's glow appeared to have charged his eyes with an eerie luminescence. How it terrified and excited her. "Because," she went on, "I am of a different opinion."

🌟This chapter is dedicated to cutthisout Not only are her comments fun to read, but she has inspired a lot of edits and additions. And one of those comments actually inspired part of this conversation between Renic and Brenna. She gets these characters so well. And sometimes she's said things that have caused me to have profound epiphanies! So thank you! And thank you all for supporting this book so far.🌟