She ran until the running stopped being a decision.
The pines above Blackthorn go on for two days in any direction a person can walk, and Eira knew the first four hours of them better than anyone alive, because the first four hours of them were where the pack sent an unranked girl for firewood, for mushrooms, for the particular moss that Hesta used on burns. She went up the deer track past the split rock, over the shoulder, down into the gully where the stream ran under a slab, and into the dark under the slab, and she lay there on her side in six inches of freezing water with her fist in her mouth.
They came through at dawn.
She heard them: not howling — that was the thing that frightened her most — not calling to each other in the open honest way of a hunt. Quiet. Spread wide. Somebody had told them to be quiet.
Two of them stopped on the slab above her head. She knew both voices. One of them had taught her to skin a rabbit when she was ten and had let her cry about it afterwards without telling anyone.
"It'll be dead by dark. It's got no coat and no wolf."
"You saw the courtyard."
"I saw torches go out."
"Sen." A long pause. "My chain went soft in my hand. I've had that chain since my mother died."
They moved on.
Eira lay in the water until her legs stopped being legs, and then she crawled out and got up and walked north, because north was away, and because she had heard the second man say something else as they went, low, in a voice with nothing in it at all.
He had said: Ilse's sent word to the citadel.
She was three days in the pines.
The first day she was too frightened to be hungry. The second day she found the moss and ate some of it and was sick. The third day she stopped thinking in sentences, which she understood, distantly, to be a bad sign.
The thing in her did not help.
That was the part nobody warned you about in the songs. When a wolf comes, it comes as a companion — that was what the songs said, what the pups were told, what Hesta had told her once, kindly, when Eira was nine and had not shifted and had asked what it would feel like. Like finding out you were two people all along, and the other one is on your side.
This was not that.
It was in her, and it was awake, and it was interested — and it had no more interest in keeping her alive than the sea has in keeping a swimmer alive. Twice on the second day she felt it move when she was frightened, and both times something happened around her: frost across a wet rock in a spreading ring; a bird that came down out of a tree, not dead, just — stopped, sitting on the pine needles with its head on one side, unable to remember flying.
She sat and looked at the bird for a long time.
"I'm sorry," she said, out loud, in the empty forest, to a bird.
The thing in her did not understand sorry, and she felt it not understanding, and that was the moment Eira was most afraid in the whole of those three days.