(Rhea POV)

They didn't attack. That would have been simpler — violent, bloody, but at least it would have forced a quick decision. Instead, Kieran did what any competent commander would do with a four-to-one advantage.

He waited.

By noon on the first day, every approach to Ashenmoor was sealed. North pass, east ridge trail, the southern trade route, the two hunting paths along the creek. Council patrols in overlapping circuits, spaced tight enough that a rabbit would have had trouble getting through. The supply caravans that came weekly from the neutral settlements to our west — turned back at a checkpoint I could see from the watchtower if I squinted.

Classic siege doctrine. Don't spend lives breaking walls when you can let time do it.

Torren and I did the assessment that afternoon. He spread Maren's inventory sheets across the command table — handwritten in her shorthand that nobody else could read until she translated.

"Food: three months at current rations. Could stretch to four if we cut portions."

"Don't cut yet. People panic when you start measuring meals."

"Water's fine — the spring inside the perimeter is still flowing. Medicine is the problem." He tapped the sheet. "Six weeks. Maybe seven. Isla can substitute some things with what's growing in the garden, but antibiotics, wound antiseptic, the fever medication she uses for the children — those run out first."

Six weeks of medicine. I thought of Old Soren's hands, how they swelled in the cold, how Isla gave him something for the pain every morning. I thought of the three pregnant wolves in the inner ring. The twelve-year-old with the lung condition who needed inhaled medication twice a day.

A siege doesn't starve you all at once. It picks off the vulnerable first.

"Hidden caches?"

"Two inside the perimeter. One outside, near the creek bend. Their patrols are sitting on top of it."

I looked at the map. Every border painted red. Sealed.

Torren had mapped their patrol patterns from the east watchtower with a stopwatch — counting seconds between sweeps, tracking rotation changes. The coverage was tight, disciplined, exactly what you'd expect from Council-trained wolves.

"One thing," he said. "The north ridge runs twelve-minute sweeps. Everywhere else is eight."

"Terrain?"

"Probably. That ridge is steep and the sightlines are bad. Harder to maintain tight rotations." He circled it on the map with a pencil. "Not exploitable for a group. But a single person who knew the ground could get through between passes."

"Note it."

He did. We moved on.

The hunters came back empty-handed on the second day. By the third, they stopped going out.

That was when the siege started to show. Not in the walls — in the routines. The foragers couldn't forage. The children couldn't play near the outer ring. The simple things that hold a community together — morning patrols returning with game, afternoon trades with passing neutrals, walking to the western creek without checking over your shoulder — all gone.

The compound got quieter. Not the focused quiet of preparation. The held-breath quiet of people waiting for something to happen and not knowing when.

I made rounds every evening. Not giving orders. Just walking. Checking on families in the inner cabins. Sitting with Soren while he carved a bird he'd been working on for days, his swollen hands moving slowly but never stopping. Listening to Kael describe the perimeter reports in full detail, because the seventeen-year-old needed to feel like his observations mattered, and they did.

These were the things that held territory together. Not walls. The knowledge that someone was paying attention.

On the fourth evening I found one of the younger mothers sitting on the step outside her cabin, staring at nothing. Her two-year-old was asleep inside. She'd been a perimeter scout before the blockade, running the east ridge every morning. Now she had nowhere to run and nothing to report, and the energy that used to keep her sharp was turning inward, eating at her.

"I keep thinking about what happens when the food runs low," she said. "Who eats less so the kids eat more."

"Nobody's eating less yet."

"I know. But I keep thinking about it."

That was the real weapon of a siege. Not the soldiers outside. The math inside your own head.

Every day burned through supplies we couldn't replace, and three months sounds long until you start counting everything that runs out sooner.