Lily couldn't sleep.

It started the first night of the blockade and got worse. She'd lie in bed with the wooden wolf pressed to her chest, eyes open, watching the dark.

"What is it?" I asked on the third night.

"I can feel them." Her voice was small. "The wolves outside. They're angry."

"Feel them how?"

"My wolf can hear them. Not the words. The feeling. There's too many and they're too loud." She pressed the wooden wolf tighter. "She doesn't like it."

I didn't know what to do with that. A six-year-old sensing the emotional state of four hundred wolves through something I had no name for. I added it to the list of things about Lily's wolf that didn't match anything I knew.

"Close your eyes," I said. "Focus on my wolf. Can you feel mine?"

Quiet for a moment. Then a nod. "Yours is calm."

"Stay with mine."

I lay beside her and pushed my wolf down to the lowest, steadiest state I could hold. A slow hum. The emotional equivalent of breathing deep in a dark room. I used to do this when I was alone in the wild, those first months after exile — push everything flat until the grief and the rage were just a vibration I could live on top of. I'd never used it for someone else before.

It worked. She drifted off around midnight, her breathing slowing into the rhythm of a child who'd found a safe frequency to tune to.

Then, past two in the morning, her body shifted.

I felt it before I saw it. A pulse of warmth where she was curled against me, then the familiar stretch of a wolf coming through. Silver-white fur replacing skin. Small hands becoming paws. A wolf cub pressing into my side, nose tucked under its own tail.

But not small.

Three weeks ago, the last time Lily had shifted in her sleep, her wolf had been the size of a large house cat. Now it was closer to a medium dog. Wider paws. Denser fur. Twenty pounds heavier at least.

Three weeks. That kind of growth in three weeks.

I held her carefully. Felt the rise and fall of wolf-cub breathing against my ribs. Her tail twitched once in a dream.

I didn't wake her. I didn't call Isla. There was nothing to diagnose, nothing to treat. Just a wolf growing faster than it should, inside a child who'd already been through more than any child should survive.

I lay in the dark and held her and added this to the list of things I was keeping track of. The list was getting long. The answers weren't getting any closer.

Torren found me in the command room at dawn. I hadn't slept after Lily shifted back.

"No change," he said. "Patrols consistent. No signs of preparation for assault."

"They won't assault. Not yet. A siege this organized — they're planning to wait us out."

"Then the math is simple." He looked at the map. "If we don't find an outside supply line or an ally, three months from now we're choosing between starving and surrendering."

I traced the border with my finger. Red lines. Sealed routes. Four hundred patient, well-supplied wolves with nowhere to be except right where they were.

"Then we solve it in three months."

"How?"

He deserved an honest answer. He always had — from the first day he'd walked into my camp with a broken sword and no pack and the quiet decision to stay.

"I don't know yet."

He nodded. Not disappointed. Torren had never expected me to have every answer ready. He expected me to find them, and he expected to be standing next to me when I did.

He left. I stayed with the map. Three months of food. Six weeks of medicine. A hundred and twenty fighters behind walls that were built to shelter, not to withstand a professional army. A daughter whose wolf was outgrowing the word "cub."

And outside, a blockade that ran exactly the way the manual said it should.

Twelve minutes on the north ridge. Eight everywhere else. Probably terrain.

I looked at that section of the map for a while longer than I needed to. Then I moved on.