Toward Lily.

I shifted mid-stride. The gray wolf hit the ground and I crossed the courtyard in seconds, catching the runner before he reached the inner gate. I brought him down hard — weight, teeth, the fury of a mother who'd been through this once already and was not interested in doing it a second time.

He went still under me. Not frozen — Lily wasn't nearby, wasn't doing the fear command. Just overpowered. I held him until Torren's fighters secured him.

Four wolves. Underground passage. Headed for Lily.

"Where did they come from?" I asked Torren. I was back in human form, breathing hard, standing over the passage entrance that gaped like a wound in my supply building floor.

"Old route. Pre-dates your construction. Runs northeast under the ridge." He was checking the passage, blade first. "Natural cave system. Someone knew it was here."

"Not us. Not anyone who built this territory."

"No."

Someone who'd known the land before I built on it. Someone who'd lived in this region for decades. Someone who knew every passage, every gap, every approach that my sentries couldn't cover because I hadn't known they existed when I built my walls.

"They have an informant," I said. "Someone sold them our terrain."

Kieran was at the passage entrance. He'd come down from the wall when the underground breach was reported. He looked at the opening. At the angle of the passage. At the northeast orientation.

"Not an informant," he said. His voice was quiet. "This isn't current intelligence. This is old knowledge. Someone who knew this land before Ashenmoor existed."

He looked at me.

"Vera."

The name hit me the way the horn had hit me that morning — a sound that changed everything. Vera. Declan's mother. The woman who'd planned to get rid of Lily from the beginning. Who'd been exiled with silver shackles six months ago, three hundred miles from here.

"She's in exile," I said. "Silver restraints. Council jurisdiction."

"Aldric has Council authority. If he wanted information from an exile, he could authorize contact." Kieran's jaw tightened. "She grew up in this valley. She knows the old passages — the ones that existed before you built over them."

I stood at the edge of the hole in my supply building floor. The passage went down into dark. Somewhere at the other end, it connected to the surface outside my walls, and Aldric had sent a team through it because a woman in silver shackles had drawn him a map.

Vera. Six years since I'd last seen her. Six years since the night Torren carried Lily out of Declan's house and I ran with blood on my face and a daughter in my arms and a promise that I would never let any of them touch her again.

And Vera, from three hundred miles away, had found a way to reach into my territory and point a team at my child.

"Seal it," I said. "Collapse the passage. Fill it with stone."

Torren was already moving.

I looked at Kieran. "How many more does she know?"

"I don't know. But Aldric wouldn't stop at one."

No. He wouldn't. The assault on the wall was the visible war. The passages were the invisible one. And the invisible one had a map drawn by a woman whose hate had been refining itself in a stone cabin for six months.

I went to check on Lily. She was in the southern tunnel, safe, Isla's apprentice holding her hand. The wooden wolf was in her lap.

"Is the loud part over?" she asked.

"Almost," I said. "Almost."