Two years passed the way years tend to pass once the worst of a story has finished, quietly, unevenly, full of small ordinary days that never would have made it into any account of the coalition's most dangerous winter, and Marina found, looking back on them from the vantage of a warm summer evening, that she remembered the ordinary days more clearly than she remembered the danger.

She remembered Wren's first season as a full member of Bloodfang, tentative and watchful for months before she finally let herself believe the pack meant to keep her rather than simply tolerate her usefulness, the day she asked Renna to teach her the...