Chapter 12

The Long Night lanterns were still up in Ashgrove town.

They stayed up from the solstice to the full moon every year: paper lanterns in every window and strung across every lane, red and gold and green, lit at dusk and left to burn down by morning. I had seen them only from the kitchen yard, as a glow over the orchard wall. I had never walked under them.

I walked under them now. It was the first time in eight years I had gone down into the town in daylight, and the first time in my life that nobody could send me back.

Ashgrove was a small place, and an old-fashioned one. The pack had voted twice against running the internet up from the valley, and the only telephone most of them ever used was the one in the post office. One main street, a mill-pond, a smithy, a butcher’s with a stag’s head over the door that had been there so long the moths had made a home in it. Eight hundred wolves, and not a human among them; Ashgrove didn’t hold with outsiders. On the frozen mi