What the hell had happened last night?

That was the first thing Greg wondered when he came to himself. He was naked. He was naked, cold, and in considerable pain. He was also lying on the street. On the cold cobblestones. The weirdest part was the blanket, though. Someone had gone through the trouble of covering him with a white sheet.

Not an eiderdown or a decent quilt, no. Nothing that would have actually warmed him. Just enough to cover his naked arse. As if whoever had done it had been worried about public indecency.

He was fairly sure he was lying in a puddle of his own blood.

“Hey, Greg,” a voice whispered behind him. Thoko?

“Are you awake?” she asked.

“Where am I?”

“You’re on the courtyard in front of the University Hospital of Deva. You fought a Rot brute here. The doctors should be out in a moment. They were too scared to leave the building while you were a wolf.”

Doctors. They’d have something against the pain, right?

It wasn’t until later, when he was upstairs, bandaged, given a gratuitous amount of opium, and lying in a comfortable bed in a ward of the hospital that it hit him: he was in a public hospital, in a public ward, with regular doctors—not vets—fussing over him on the day after full moon. And for once, there wasn’t a mob in the street screaming for his blood.

Well, he had already spread that all over the stones outside. Fighting a Brute. And then, crucially, not fighting Thoko. Behaving like a wild animal rather than a rabid beast, she had said.

Maybe it was a good thing that David hadn’t seen that. It would only make him feel more guilty about everything.

His oldest brother showed up right before dinner with the evening newspaper edition tucked under his arm. He was looking tired, and contrite, and frustrated as he stopped at the foot of the bed.

“Sit down,” Greg growled at him, half to show that he was awake, half to forestall whatever apology David had prepared. It hadn’t been him who had ordered the werewolves out of Deva, after all.

And in any case, mostly Greg hated that it appeared to have worked.

“How bad was it?” he added.

In answer, David held out the newspaper.

“Rot-attack: Death toll in Deva reaches 237—rescue efforts ongoing,” the headline read, and in smaller print: “Who authorised the removal of the werewolves from the capital?”

“No fucking way,” Greg muttered. “They cannot seriously…”

“They very much are.” David ran a hand through his braids. “The blame is neatly getting divided, though. Not much falling on us right now, given that Lane warned everyone about this very move. There are, of course, still idiots blaming her for not saying it louder, and me, for ‘allowing’ Morgulon to leave at all.”

He glanced at the paper. “I don’t think we’ll have any protests on our front door in the future.”

Right. And only two hundred people had died for it. So far.

It was cold, even by David’s standards. But it hadn’t been his idea, and for Duke George Louis, it was probably nothing.

“What are they saying about the duke?”

David didn’t say anything, just opened the newspaper up. “Duke Stuard vows: last time I listen to the streets,” said a Header on the inside.

Greg nodded slowly. A sudden suspicion hit him. “Do we have any idea where that brute came from? Is Fenn alright?”

“Two brutes,” David said. “And a bunch of creepers. They’re still pulling out bodies from the rubble.”

“Wait—where?”

“The second brute went to shore on the other side of the river, went down Lackland Road—went through the walls of the villas there, actually. It bounced off the Imperial church’s protection and careened into the Mills Field, smashing barracks to bits, all the way to the Free Hospital.”

“Which it smashed to bits, too?”

“No. Thanks to, well, Bishop Larssen. He managed to stall it with fire and magic until Morgulon got there. As to where the Rot came from, the answer is most likely sabotage. Rust followed the trail back to a small inlet and found a bunch of slaughtered chickens.”

“Chickens didn't do that,” Greg grumbled.

“No,” David agreed. “The best theory we have right now is that the Rot picked up power on the way downriver. And when I say best theory, I mean that Pierre hasn’t called me a fool yet for suggesting it, so we’re running with that. Whoever had my office searched probably couldn't believe their luck when we moved Morgulon to Courtenay.”

“You think so?”

“I think the timing is no coincidence,” David said. “They probably expected you to go on a killing spree after destroying a few creepers. Depending on how they interpreted my notes, they might not even have realised that you can kill a brute.”

David's notes could get rather, well, confusing, so Greg supposed it was possible. And he could see the point. If someone's goal was to sow sedition, then this might have looked like a good plan: show that the werewolves couldn't reliably protect people but would kill people on full moon.

Even someone who usually acted as human as he.

But Greg couldn’t quite shake off the thought that maybe, Duke Stuart had created himself an excuse to never listen to the public again.

“Last time I listen to the street,” could totally mean he wasn’t going to listen to any of the more democratic demands that were arising in the wake of the Revolution, couldn’t it?

But Greg wasn’t quite drugged out enough to say that aloud.

***

The next morning, Greg awoke to Dr. ibn Sina berating one of the hospital’s doctors for not having set Greg’s broken right arm properly the day before. It was a rather painful awakening, because ibn Sina was showing the “embarrassment to the profession” just where Greg’s forearm bones were out of alignment. As gentle as ibn Sina was being about it, there was simply no way to do it painlessly.

While the two still argued about how to go about setting the bones, rightly worried that Greg might turn on them if they just went for it, Dr. Barnett showed up, too. Courtesy of deLande, who had officially hired him for the office.

The werewolf doctor had his own bag full of tricks, amongst them a leather wristband covered with a fine silver net and padded on the inside. Even with the padding, the cuff was uncomfortably cold. And when it closed, Greg felt a strange tightness around the chest, as if the leather hadn’t been wrapped around his upper arm but his ribcage.

“He won’t be able to transform like this,” Barnett explained for “his colleagues of the human specialisation” as he called them. “Personally, I’d prefer to set these bones while he’s a wolf, of course, much less fiddly if you ask me, but anyway, the patient is all yours. Unless you want me to demonstrate how—? No?”

The “human specialist” from the hospital seemed offended at the idea of having a veterinarian working on “his” patient, even if so far, he hadn’t done much beyond wrapping Greg in bandages. “Dr. ibn Sina. If you would assist me?”

Barnett rolled his eyes at Greg, while Ibn Sina took a firm hold of Greg’s arm. The other doctor ran his hands over the break to get a feel for how the bones lay. Greg pressed his eyes shut as the fingers on his arm tightened. There was a pull and then a slow torque, and a pain unlike anything he knew. The beast inside of him wanted to explode outwards, to attack whoever had dared—and slammed into a wall.

Greg screamed until he passed out.

***

The doctors of the hospital and ibn Sina kept him in bed for five days, mostly because besides his arm, he had multiple broken ribs. And possibly because the hospital staff was scared of more Rot attacks. By the time Greg left, Deva had its own werewolf pack to patrol the river, stationed right within the city. And Morgulon and the babies were back in their nest in the drawing room.

Barely two weeks after Morgulon had left the city, the mood in Deva had been turned on its head—though not enough that the neighbours would say “thank you” as they watched Greg limp over the threshold. They were staring from the windows all along the street, all the way to the bend.

It made Greg want to transform just so he could properly snarl at them.

David returned to the city to have dinner with them that evening, but he didn’t stay the night, rushing back to Fort Brunich as soon as dessert was finished. He seemed older and more grim-faced and refused to talk about what went on there.

“We’ve been killing rabid werewolves by the score,” Nathan explained as they sat together over a glass of beer. “General Clermont wants a thousand werewolves to assail Port Neaf with. A full battalion, so anyone volunteering gets the bite.”

He took a sip from his glass, turning it thoughtfully in his hands. He grimaced, and added: “Thing is, they’re only setting up a few hundred full moon cages at the war camp. That’s how many casualties they’re expecting.” Then he blinked, and forced a smile. “On the bright side, Pierre is going to teach us magic.”

“Who’s us?” Thoko asked.

“David and I, of course. Dad, if he wants to, I suppose.”

“Not Andrew?” Greg asked.

Nathan shook his head. “Lane, maybe. See, Pierre reckons it was magic that made David such a wicked hunter to get away from. What we used to think of as ‘talent’?” He grinned. “Pierre reckons it was really a talent for magic.”

A talent that Greg didn’t have. He’d been tested as a youth by a priest of Mithras, before his parents had hired Mr. Higgins to tutor him. It stung to think about, stung even more that Pierre was teaching magic to David and Nathan after telling him that he was too young, that he didn’t have the power yet.

“What are you learning?” he asked, trying to hide the hurt. “Fire? Healing?”

Nathan waved him off. “Nothing so exciting. Seems that we’re both just very good at sensing the magic. So Ragna suggested we should try to learn to listen in on when you guys talk as wolves. Pierre wasn’t happy about that idea, I can tell you.”

A shudder ran down Greg’s spine, and it took him a moment to realise that it was second hand fear he was feeling. Morgulon didn’t like the thought, either.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Nathan said. “You’ll soon surpass us both.”

“No, I—Morgulon isn’t thrilled, either.”

Nathan bumped him in the shoulder. “Whatever you say, little brother.”

“I wish I could learn to listen to you when you’re wolf,” Thoko said wistfully. “That would be so useful.”

“It’s certainly going to be useful for David in battle,” Nathan said. “If he can learn it fast enough, I mean.”

Just one more month until David took all the werewolves they could gather to assault Port Neaf.

Going to war.

“I wish he’d take me,” Nathan added. “I get why he wants me here, but damn, I don’t like the thought of him going on his own. Worse, with that idiot deVale.”

Greg nodded silently. He couldn’t imagine going to war, much less volunteering to go. But the more he learned of the werewolves, of the reality of werewolf hunting—of who David had been—the more he realised how little he knew of his brother. Of the Relentless.

If anyone could survive a war, surely it would be the man who’s mere mention could strike fear in the hearts of elders like Pierre or Morgulon? Who had nevertheless managed to assemble all the elders of Loegrion behind himself.

He still wished the whole fight was over.