Beatrice had never before left the provinces, and in truth, she’d never much hoped to. They were home, and home was everything. Safe. Beautiful. Tame. Known. And now home was falling away behind her, fading into the horizon, and she hadn’t the faintest idea if or when she’d ever return.

“Would you like a drink?”

She turned from the view of rolling, rain-drenched hills to glance up at Lord Stagston, at her fiancé, who held a decanter of golden liquid in one hand and a crystal glass in the other. Before she could meet his gaze, however, she cast her eyes down to his hands. At her hint of a nod, he poured a measure with a fluidity of practice that was as lovely as it was concerning.

Taking the glass, she brought it up to her lips—happy for an excuse to hide even just a part of her face. She hated the thought of how she must look, nose red and eyes puffy from crying. After all those goodbyes, the whole of her self felt like a wound. Raw and open and bleeding all over the skyship’s velvet seat cushions. The honeyed liquor burned down her throat, kindling a warmth in her belly that was almost comforting.

“Would you tell me something of yourself?”

Beatrice looked up to meet Lord Stagston’s gaze for the first time since her engagement to his pack had been made official. Her lips parted, but then she just shook her head, a hand going up to worry at her new Spirit Stone. There was too much whirling through her mind, and too little…a blur of fears and regrets and the tattered shreds of dreams newly dashed. It was like being caught up in a raging storm with nothing to grasp onto.

“I understand if you don’t wish to talk. It’s just strange, being so compelled—to look after a person, to take them into your home—when you know so little of their nature. You can’t imagine. Or can you?”

It seemed he found answer enough in the lost look in her eyes, but she spoke anyway, Theodor’s words echoing harshly in her memory. It’ll be the quiet one. Can’t recall her name.

“I…I can imagine it. But I haven’t yet felt it myself, and I don’t understand how it is that you do. After all, you’re not…” she faltered. Perhaps it would have been better not to talk after all.

The gentleman’s brow furrowed.

“The Call is a human trait. The way of pack and pride is the human way. I am no less a person because I’ve never shifted, and it is not the shift that enables such instincts, but maturity.”

“I’m sorry,” Beatrice nearly spilled her drink in the effort to gesture away the implication of her words. “I didn’t mean—”

“Never mind it. I’m used to such…misconceptions. But don’t mistake me.”

A gasp escaped her as, still grasping the decanter in one hand, the Silver closed the space between them, grasping her free hand in his and placing it to his chest, just beneath the collarbone. He pressed her palm down until realization sparked in her eyes.

“Your stone!”

“Yes. It took. It accepted me. Its color changed. Though my form, of course, did not.”

Beatrice had never heard of such a thing. Either the stone accepted you and the shift came, or it did not. But this was something bafflingly in-between.

“Then what…”

“The type doesn’t matter. I am a person, a man, and I would like for you to respect and know me as I am. Not as the shadow of what I might have been.”

She stared at him, hand held in place over this practical stranger’s Spirit Stone as his chest heaved with his breath, slowing gradually. The fire in his eyes faded, and his skin paled.

“Forgive me,” he said, pulling away and running a hand through his hair. “I am not myself. I’ll—I must go and speak with the mages.”

And before she could protest, he turned and left her—the cabin door shutting heavily between them.

~*~

Sleep was an elusive creature, frightened off by the storm raging in Beatrice’s mind. So she watched with half-lidded eyes as the gentle curves of the world she’d always known fell away below her, replaced gradually by a new landscape. A land of sharper edges and higher peaks. Of night-black fir trees that drank away the moonlight and cascades of water spouting from caves like eyes sockets, as though the mountains themselves were weeping.

Gradually, Beatrice began to reshape the fairytale she’d envisioned for herself—the childhood creation she’d never quite cast away—and adapted it to fit the rough outlines of what she knew lay ahead. She took up her embroidered satchel of Most Necessary Effects, which she’d separated from the rest of her luggage as it was being transferred from family carriage to fiancé’s skyship. From this she withdrew pigment pencils and the most recent of her journals, letting it fall open in her lap and flipping through the pages of sketches and scrawls until at last she came to a blank one.

Her eyes flicked from paned-glass windows to the journal as she worked, taking control of her future then and there in the only way she knew she could.

When the door creaked open once more and Lord Stagston leaned in to inform her they’d arrive “sometime within the hour,” the barest hint of a bloody dawn was beginning to show at the edges of the world. But all else was pitch black now, the moon heavily shrouded. All else, that was, save a glimmer of light far off in the distance, nestled in the prickly darkness of a forested mountainside.

As the light grew closer, full realization of what lie ahead finally took hold, and Beatrice began to tremor from head to toe. Without her willing it, iridescence fractured the air and swallowed her up, dissipating to leave her four-legged and furred and a great deal smaller. Curling into a ball between seat cushion and the lacquered armrest, she waited for the wave of overwhelm to pass.

The skyship dipped in the air, and she squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to focus. To return to human form. But it was no good. The ship shuddered and came to a stop, and Lord Stagston returned shortly afterwards to find her huddled and shaking in her seat-corner, still very much vulpine of form and quite undone. His lips parted in a silent “oh” of surprise at the sight, then he dipped to his knee to extend a steady hand.

“Just breathe, Ms. Baraclough. Just breathe,” he soothed, his voice deep and rough even when hushed. “Breathe, and think of yourself on two legs once more.”

She held his gaze, and her next inhalation came in a shaky rush. But with that breath his aroma—sharper and more assertive now, but no less pleasant for it—filled her lungs, and something inside her shifted. It wasn’t the blanketing, forced emotional control of a wolf mage that she felt. It was something simpler, more natural. It was the comfort of a pack Silver at attention. The scent of safety.

The next thing she knew, she was curled on the velvet cushion, her two very human legs folded beneath her and the skirts of her travel gown billowing about her waist to cover them.

Accepting his hand and his help because she knew she needed it, Beatrice rose to her feet, bending briefly to shove her journal and pencils back into her satchel and slinging it over her shoulder. Together they stepped down the skyship’s unfolding stair and out onto the bare, rain-glossed dock. Craning her neck, Beatrice peered up through the pre-dawn mists to the manor that loomed beyond, clinging to the mountainside.

“Welcome to Highreach, Ms. Baraclough,” murmured Lord Stagston, taking a deep, savoring breath of the cold mountain air. “Ah, but it’s good to be home.”

As she watched, another light glowed to life in one of the manor’s many darkened windows. And then another, and another.

The household was waking to greet them.

The ship’s small crew hurried to unload their luggage and other goods, wheeling it all off to the lift at the far end of the airdocks. Her arm still looped in his, Beatrice allowed Lord Stagston to draw her along after them. The lift hauled them upward to spill out onto the house’s main landing, and all the way she fought to maintain her fragile sense of safety. Then the manor door flew open, and fury personified filled its frame.