The following morning I was sitting on the stone balcony alone looking down into Silverclaw territory. The horizon burned gold where the moon faded and the sun clawed its way up, as if day and night were at war.

I was so too.

I had a baby inside of me that I did not plan to have, yet now could not imagine my life without.

And in the walls behind my guest chamber my mother, a once-dreaded healer of the White Fang line, lay insensible, only now beginning to revive after more than ten years of magic-sapping and cage-imprisoning.

I had not heard Leon come up, yet I was very...