Chapter 10. The Silent Pact

The sky was a bruise of indigo when she slipped away. Stars lay low and dense, each a silvery bead pressed against the velvet expanse, as though drawn from some secret brim of the world below. They hovered above the orphanage grounds like silent sentinels, neither waning nor wandering, but fixed—waiting to see if she would answer the restless thrum that stirred in the earth beneath her feet, a pulse she’d sensed since the courtyard, since the sting of the whip, since the wolf’s howl trailing her dreams.

She moved without shoes. Her bare soles pressed into frost-hardened earth—cold crystals crackling under each step, then sliding over patches of emerald moss that curled between cobblestones. No lantern glow marked her passage; no sentry’s footfall echoed on the southern walls. The last embers in the courtyard brazier had dimmed to charcoal, and the Matron’s chamber lay in shadow. Aeryn’s own cot sat empty, its thin blanket undisturbed, though Aeryn knew her friend Sera had not