A Bond of Frost and Fury

Brielle

“Look what the forest coughed up. Still playing with weeds, Brielle?”

Sasha’s voice is like shattered glass. I don’t look up. My fingers continue their work, carefully separating the petals of a moonpetal flower from its stem. It’s delicate work. The petals are for the tea, the stem is for the poultice. Useless if you mix them up.

“I heard the Haze makes some wolves deaf,” another voice sneers. Mara. Sasha’s shadow. “Maybe it broke her ears before it broke everything else.”

A ripple of cruel laughter follows. There are three of them today. Sometimes there are five. It doesn’t matter. The words are always the same.

My focus remains on the flower in my hand. One petal, two, three. I place them gently into the leather pouch at my hip. My mother taught me this. ‘Respect the gifts of the earth, and they will respect you.’ Her voice is a faint echo in my memory, a whisper of calm in this storm of mockery.

“Leave her alone,” a third voice, Kyla’s, says with a sigh. “It’s like talking to a rock. A cold, useless rock.”

“I’m not leaving her alone,” Sasha snaps, and the crunch of leaves tells me she’s taken a step closer. Her scent, cloying and sweet like overripe berries, fills the air. It makes my nose itch. “The Haze is in three days. Three days until every real she-wolf in this pack honors her nature. And what will you be doing, Ice Maiden? Hiding in that dusty little cottage your strange parents left you? Praying the moon goddess magically makes you whole?”

My fingers still. I have all the moonpetal I need. My gaze lifts from the forest floor, but not to her. I look past her, to the tall, silent pines that mark the edge of our territory. My face is a mask. I’ve practiced this for years. A blank canvas for them to paint their insults on. It gives them nothing to hold onto.

“My nature is my own business, Sasha,” I say, my voice low and even. “Just like your desperation is yours.”

The air goes still. Mara gasps. Even the birds seem to fall silent. I’ve broken my own rule. I never engage. I never talk back. But her mention of my parents, of being whole, it struck a nerve I thought was long dead.

Sasha’s perfect, sculpted face twists into a snarl. “Desperation? I’ll have my pick of the strongest males when the fever hits. I’ll be screaming my mate’s name by the first night. You’ll be what? Meditating? You are a flaw, Brielle. A genetic dead end. An insult to the pack. You’re broken.”

Broken. The word hangs in the air between us. It’s the name they’ve given me, more so than Brielle. The Broken Girl. The Ice Maiden. The only nineteen-year-old virgin in the history of the Silvermoon Pack.

I rise slowly to my feet, brushing dirt from my trousers. I meet her eyes now, her furious amber gaze. I let her see the utter lack of fear in mine. It’s not a lie. I’m not afraid of her. I’m afraid of what she represents. I’m afraid of the mindless frenzy she craves, the loss of self she calls tradition.

“I’d rather be broken than be a slave to instinct,” I say softly, the words meant only for her. I see them land. I see the flicker of confusion in her eyes before the rage smothers it.

She takes a half step forward, her hands clenched into fists. For a second, I think she’ll shift. Her wolf is always just beneath the surface, hot and reckless.

“You just wait,” she hisses, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper. “When the Haze comes, your principles won’t keep you warm. And no one will be there to save you when your body finally remembers what it is. But by then, no one will want you.”

She turns on her heel and stalks away, her two followers scrambling to keep up. Their laughter floats back, brittle and sharp, but the threat is gone.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. My hands are trembling slightly. Not from fear. From anger. I clench them until my nails bite into my palms, the small sting of pain a welcome anchor. She’s wrong. It’s not about being wanted. It’s about being in control.

I turn my back on the path they took and move deeper into the woods, my true task for the day only half done. The moonpetal was a decoy. What I really need grows in the darker, more secluded parts of the forest.

I find it twenty minutes later, a cluster of dark purple flowers with silvery leaves, growing at the base of an ancient oak. Wolfsbane. Not enough to be lethal, but potent. The core ingredient for the spell. A spell of suppression. A birth control potion so strong it can fight a werewolf’s biology during its most fertile, most frantic peak. My mother’s last and greatest gift to me, the recipe carefully penned in her journal.

I harvest what I need, my movements quick and efficient now. The confrontation with Sasha has stolen too much of my time. The air is already starting to feel different. Thicker. A strange, electric hum thrums just beneath the surface of everything, a prelude to the coming storm. The Haze.

My small cottage is set away from the main den, on the edge of the village. It suits me. I prefer the quiet. Inside, the scent of dried herbs and woodsmoke greets me like an old friend. I don’t pause. I walk straight through the main room to the hearth. The stones are cold now, but one of them, the third from the left, is loose.

I pry it open with my fingertips. Behind it is not stone, but a dark, iron-banded door, no bigger than a cupboard. Faint silver runes are carved into the wood, glowing with a barely perceptible light. My father’s work. He wasn’t a warrior, but he was a master of wards and protections. He understood my fear long before I could name it. He and my mother, they saw the war inside me, the battle between the girl and the wolf. They didn’t call me broken. They called me strong.

I unlatch the heavy door and slip inside. The safe room. It’s small, barely big enough to lie down in. The walls are solid stone, lined with shelves holding jars of preserved food, skins of water, and candles. It’s a tomb. It’s a sanctuary. For the three days of the Haze, it is my whole world.

I place the wolfsbane on a small stone mortar and begin to grind. The rhythmic scrape of pestle against stone is calming. As I work, I mix in the other ingredients from memory. Dried nightshade, a drop of my own blood, and crushed ironwood bark. The Haze isn’t just a biological event. It’s magical. The potion needs to fight on both fronts.

While the mixture steeps, I get to work on the wards. My father taught me how to recharge them. I run my fingers over the silver runes on the door, tracing their ancient shapes and whispering the words of power. They hum under my touch, the faint light growing a little stronger. These wards block scent. They muffle sound. They are my first line of defense.

My second line is the door itself. I check the heavy iron bolts, the thick bar that slides into a bracket drilled deep into the stone frame. It will hold. It has to.

I saw what the Haze can do, once. When I was a child. A she-wolf, new to the pack, hadn’t prepared. Or maybe she thought she wanted it. A male, driven mad by her scent, cornered her. Her screams… I can still hear them sometimes in my nightmares. The old Alpha, Marcus, punished the male afterward, but it was too late. The damage was done. She was never the same. She left the pack a season later, her eyes hollow, her spirit gone.

That will not be me. I will not be a victim of my own body. I will not have my choices stolen from me by a biological imperative I never asked for. This self-imposed isolation isn’t weakness. It’s a declaration of war against the very nature of my species. My willpower is my weapon, and this room is my fortress.

Sasha and the others, they see submission in the frenzy. They see power in attracting the strongest male. I see a cage. A beautiful, primal cage, but a cage nonetheless. I refuse to enter it. I will not be ruled by base instinct.

I finish the ritual, pouring the pungent, dark liquid into a small vial. One sip each morning of the Haze. It will taste like dirt and fury, but it will keep my wolf quiet. It will keep me, me.

As I slide the vial into a secure pouch, a sudden noise from outside shatters the silence. Not a single shout, but a wave of them. A roar of surprise and anger from the center of the village. It’s followed by the deep, urgent toll of the pack alarm bell, a sound reserved for dire emergencies. A rogue attack. A fire.

My heart leaps into my throat. I quickly exit the safe room, replacing the stone in the hearth. Whatever is happening, I can’t be found in here. It would raise too many questions.

I open my cottage door just a crack and peer out. Pack members are running toward the central clearing, their faces a mixture of confusion and fear. The air, already thick with pre-Haze tension, is now electric with alarm. I hesitate for only a moment before pulling my cloak tight around my shoulders and slipping out, melting into the growing crowd that’s converging on the clearing.

Old Beta Theron stands on the Alpha’s rock, his face grim. He holds up his hands for silence, but it takes a full minute for the panicked murmurs to die down. Where is Alpha Marcus?

“Quiet!” Theron’s voice booms, laced with an authority I’ve rarely heard from him. “Quiet, all of you!”

The pack finally falls silent, a sea of anxious faces turned up to him.

“There has been a challenge,” he says, his words dropping like stones into the sudden stillness. A collective gasp ripples through the crowd. A challenge? Now? So close to the Haze? “Alpha Marcus has… stepped down.”

The words don’t make sense. Stepped down? An Alpha doesn’t step down. An Alpha is deposed. Beaten. Killed. But Marcus is old. His wolf has been weakening for years. Maybe it wasn’t a fight to the death. Maybe it was a surrender.

“Who is it?” someone shouts from the back. “Who is the new Alpha?”

Theron’s gaze sweeps over us, and for the first time, I see real fear in the old wolf’s eyes.

“The challenge did not come from within,” he says, his voice heavy with dread. “Our pack’s instability has been noted by our neighbors. An alliance was invoked. A treaty our grandfathers made was called upon.”

He takes a deep, shuddering breath. He looks like a man about to announce the end of the world.

“Alpha Marcus has been deposed by order of the council. Silvermoon is now under new leadership. Our new Alpha comes from the Stoneclaw Pack.”

A wave of shock and horror washes through the crowd. Stoneclaw. The name itself is a threat. They are a northern pack, known for their size, their ferocity, their absolute discipline. They are everything we are not. They are hard, unforgiving wolves, carved from the mountain ice and stone they call home.

Before anyone can process the news, before the protests and questions can erupt, Theron raises his voice one last time, his words cutting through the rising panic like a blade.

“He is here. Alpha Grant of Stoneclaw is arriving now.”