(Rhea POV)

Lily turned eight on a Tuesday.

We celebrated with what we had. Dried fruit and flatbread and a cake that Isla had somehow made from rationed flour and wild honey. No frosting. No candles. We'd run out weeks ago. Torren had carved eight notches into a stick of birchwood, and Lily blew on each notch like it was a flame, her cheeks puffed out, her eyes squeezed shut with the concentration of a child who took imaginary fire seriously.

Twenty wolves in the yard. The inner circle. Sera leaning against the fence with her arms folded, watching the way she watched everything, measuring. Torren standing near the gate, clipboard under his arm even now. Maren, one-armed, holding the cake steady on a board while Lily blew. Kieran beside me, close enough that his shoulder pressed against mine.

Soren came last. He moved slowly now. Slower than the winter, slower than the spring. His joints were swollen past what Isla could manage with the herbs she had left, and he walked with the careful, deliberate gait of a man negotiating with his own body for every step.

He held something in both hands. Wrapped in cloth.

Lily saw him and went still. She knew. She always knew with Soren.

He knelt. Slowly. Painfully. His knees protested, and his face said he wasn't sure they'd let him back up. He held it out.

She unwrapped it. A bear. Carved from dark wood, the grain running through the body in stripes that looked like fur. Heavy for its size. The paws were wide and flat and the head was tilted slightly, the way a bear tilts its head when it's listening. A wolf, then a bird, and now a bear. Three animals from a man who carved the world one creature at a time.

"Bears are patient," Soren said. "They don't run. They don't hide. They sit where they are and they wait for the world to come to them."

Lily held the bear against her chest. "Thank you."

"You're welcome, little wolf."

He couldn't get up. Kieran crossed the yard and helped him, one hand under the elbow, lifting without making it look like lifting.

I watched my daughter hold a wooden bear and smile at an old man who loved her, and I thought: this is the part that matters. Remember this part.

Because the rest of the day would not be this.

The territory had grown. That was the problem.

Not the kind of problem I was used to: siege, starvation, isolation, the slow knife of an embargo designed to make us irrelevant. This was the opposite problem. Ashenmoor was expanding, and it was expanding faster than we could absorb.

Since the south gate, since Lily's wolf had reached into Aldric's specialists and cracked the obedience in one of them, wolves had been arriving. Not a flood. A steady current. Two here, three there. Lone wolves, pairs, small groups who'd left their packs and walked for days or weeks, following something they couldn't name.

"Something opened," they said. All of them said it. Different wolves, different packs, different distances. The same words.

We were at two hundred and ninety now. Thirty more than five weeks ago, thirty more mouths, thirty more bodies that needed space in a structure that hadn't been designed for growth. Maren was building new quarters along the north wall. Torren was restructuring the food rotation. Sera was integrating new wolves into her patrol groups, testing them, watching for anyone Council might have sent.

The gardens were producing. The compound was holding. The walls were strong.

But thirty wolves in five weeks. And the rate was increasing.

The scout found me after the birthday gathering, when Lily was in our quarters arranging the bear beside the wolf and the bird on her shelf. Kieran was with her. I was in the command room, looking at the map that had changed so much since the first time I'd stood at this table.

"Three wolves at the eastern border," the scout said. Young woman. One of Sera's. Breathless from the run, but not alarmed. Three wolves wasn't alarming anymore.

"Where from?"

"They say Redfall. Mid-sized pack, three hundred. In the eastern ranges, near the coast."

I looked at the map. The eastern ranges were far. Two hundred miles, at least.

"How long did they walk?"

"Two weeks. They say they left when something changed. When something..." She paused. I could see her trying not to repeat the word that every arriving wolf used, because repeating it made it sound like a pattern, and patterns were what Council used as evidence. "Opened."