(Rhea POV)

They came through the eastern tunnel at dawn.

Fen spotted them first — movement at the secondary exit, the one that opened behind the root cellar where Gerda was still recovering on her cot. Fen pulled her blade and signaled the patrol. Torren was there in ninety seconds. I was there in two minutes, still pulling my jacket on, running on three hours of sleep.

Not Council. Not an assault force. Wolves. Shifting to human as they emerged from the tunnel mouth into the gray morning light, blinking, stretching, shaking off the underground cold. Some old. Some young. Some carrying packs, some carrying nothing. A woman with a bandaged hand. A boy no older than fifteen with a limp he'd clearly been walking on for days.

Thirty-seven of them. I counted twice.

The last one through the tunnel was the one I'd been looking for.

She was twenty-eight. Thin in a way that said efficiency, not deprivation — the body of someone who'd learned to carry nothing extra, not even weight. A scar ran across her left eye, old and white, the kind that should have taken the eye with it but hadn't. Brown hair cut short. Clothes that had been practical once and were practical still, in the way that things stay practical when you can't afford to replace them.

She looked at me the way you look at a structure you're considering buying — appraising the foundation, checking for cracks, calculating what it would cost to fix what was wrong.

"Sera."

"Rhea."

We stood in the dawn outside my root cellar, with thirty-seven exhausted wolves between us and a siege perimeter three hundred meters beyond the walls.

"You said a month," I said.

"I said prove you can last." She glanced at the walls, the watchtower, the patrol positions visible along the inner ring. "Twelve days under siege, no breach, no surrender, no panic I can smell. That's enough."

"You brought thirty-seven. Your message said fifty-three."

"Sixteen stayed to hold our territory. If I brought everyone and you collapsed, we'd have nowhere to go back to." She said it without apology. "Thirty-seven is what I can risk."

Torren had his assessment face on — the one that cataloged capabilities by reflex. I could see him counting. Fighters versus non-combatants. Ages. Injuries. What they carried. What they didn't.

"How many can fight?" he asked.

"Twenty-two. The rest are support — medic, two builders, and the ones who wouldn't stay behind." She looked at the boy with the limp. "Jace walked four days on that leg to get here. I wasn't going to tell him no."

I looked at the thirty-seven wolves filing into my territory. Some were sitting on the ground, too tired to stand. A woman in her fifties was examining the root cellar wall with the professional eye of someone who'd built structures before. Two young men were already helping Fen secure the tunnel entrance.

Thirty-seven wasn't an army. It wasn't even a significant tactical advantage against four hundred. But it was the first time in twelve days that the math had moved in our direction instead of against it. And the fact that they'd come — that someone outside these walls had looked at what we were doing and decided it was worth standing next to — that was worth more than the numbers.

"Maren handles supply integration," I told Sera. "Torren handles security clearances. Your fighters report to him for assignment."

"My fighters report to me."

"Your fighters report to you. You report to Torren on tactical deployment. In my territory, I need one chain of command."

She held my gaze. Three seconds. I didn't blink. I'd been holding gazes with wolves who wanted to test me since the first month of Ashenmoor, and I'd learned that the only way to pass the test was to not treat it as one.

"Fine." No warmth. No resistance. The word of a woman who understood the difference between authority and ego, and had decided mine was the first kind. "Where do we sleep?"

The integration took the rest of the day.

Maren folded thirty-seven new mouths into the supply calculations — her face did something complicated at the number, but the clipboard was moving before the expression finished. Torren ran Sera's fighters through a basic assessment. They weren't polished. But they moved like survivors, which was a different kind of training and sometimes a better one.

Sera walked the perimeter with me that afternoon. Sharp questions — wall thickness, sight lines, water source depth. She'd run her own defenses and understood what kept a territory alive.