The rumors began subtly, the way such things always seemed to — a traveling merchant repeating a secondhand story in a market three territories distant, a coven elder receiving an anonymous letter warning of "unnatural children" growing stronger by the season, a pack alpha hearing whispered concerns from neighbors who claimed to have heard troubling things from travelers passing through.

"It's deliberate," Corin said, laying out the pattern he'd traced across nearly a dozen territories over the past month. He had pinned the reports to the war table in careful rows, each one marked with a date and a location, and the shape they made together was impossible to dismiss....