(Rhea POV)

Lily found the woman before anyone else did.

The rogue was sitting by the fire pit, alone, in the middle of a compound full of wolves who were eating dinner and swapping patrol stories and doing the normal things that normal wolves do when the day's work is over. She wasn't eating. She wasn't talking. She sat with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them and the blank, inward stare of someone whose body was present and whose mind had left.

She was one of the Thornfield refugees — I recognized her from the intake. Young. Maybe twenty-two. She'd lost her mate during the march. Torren's notes said she hadn't spoken more than a few words since arriving.

Lily walked across the compound, past the dinner groups, past the fire, and sat down next to her. Not touching. Not talking. Just sitting. The way a child sits next to someone who's hurting, because children haven't learned yet that adults are supposed to leave each other alone.

They sat together for five minutes. I watched from the porch, one hand on my cup, half-listening to Sera's briefing about the eastern supply alternatives she was exploring. Five minutes of a seven-year-old and a grieving woman sharing a fire.

Then Lily said: "Your wolf is really sad."

The woman stared at her. "What?"

"Inside. Your wolf is sad. Did something bad happen to it?"

The woman's face crumpled. Not slowly — all at once, like a wall collapsing. She pressed her hands over her mouth and her shoulders shook and she made a sound that was small and terrible and private. Lily reached over and put her hand on the woman's arm. Held it there. Didn't say anything else.

I set my cup down. Sera stopped talking.

"How did she know?" Sera asked.

"I don't know," I said. But I was already moving.

* * *

I took Lily inside after the woman had been walked to the medical station by one of Isla's assistants. Not because Lily had done anything wrong. Because I needed to understand what she'd done.

Our quarters. Door closed. Lily sat on the cot with her legs crossed, the wooden wolf in her lap, looking up at me with the patient expression of a child who knew she was about to be questioned and had decided to cooperate.

"Baby, how did you know her wolf was sad?"

"I could feel it."

"Feel it how?"

Lily was quiet for a moment. Thinking. The way she thought about difficult things — head tilted, eyes moving like she was reading something that only she could see.

"You know when you feel cold?" she said. "Like when the wind comes through the window at night. And you know it's cold. But sometimes you feel cold and it's not your cold. It's someone else's. Like their cold is leaking."

"And that's what you felt from her wolf?"

"Her wolf is really, really sad. Like it lost something and it keeps looking for it but it can't find it." Lily held the wooden wolf tighter. "Mommy, I don't think her wolf is going to find it."

My hands went still in my lap. I kept my face calm because Lily was watching and she could read my expressions better than most adults could. But inside, something was rearranging itself.

Empathic bond perception. Feeling another wolf's emotional state without physical contact, without pack connection, without any of the mechanisms that normally governed how wolves sensed each other. A seven-year-old feeling a stranger's grief through the invisible architecture of a bond she hadn't meant to form.

This was the old text. Kieran's document. "The bond that crosses boundaries." Not a command. Not an override. A connection that formed without asking, without permission, the way roots grow toward water.

"Can you feel other wolves too?" I asked.

"Sometimes. Not all of them. Some wolves are easy to feel. Some are like walls." She paused. "Darya is like a wall."

I filed that. Added it to the list of things my daughter said about the scarred woman that I couldn't verify and couldn't ignore.

"Is it bad?" Lily asked. "That I can feel them?"

"No."

"Then why do you look worried?"

Because a seven-year-old shouldn't be able to do this. Because every time her ability grew, the distance between my daughter and the thing the world was afraid of got smaller. Because a man in a stone chamber was receiving reports about her, and every report gave him more reasons.

"I'm not worried," I said. "I'm your mom. I'm always thinking about you. That's different."

She considered this. Weighed it against whatever internal compass she used to measure truth. Then she accepted it, the way children accept things that are close enough to true that arguing isn't worth the effort.

* * *

(Aldric POV — third person)

The report arrived by courier at 0600. Sealed. Single copy. Harlan's handwriting — the same precise script that Aldric had been reading for fifteen years.