Sera had not been back to wolf territory in three years, one month, and approximately eleven days, which she knew because she had counted.
She had promised herself, when she left, that she would not count. She had broken that promise almost immediately. Counting was something the wolf part of her did reflexively, and the wolf part of her had opinions about this particular absence that the human part had spent three years carefully not examining.
She crossed the border at dawn, which felt pointed. Wolves were creatures of the in-between hours; leaving at dawn three years ago had been deliberate, a statement. Returning at dawn was probably meaningful in some way she didn't want to think about.
The border was a ridgeline above the valley. On one side: her small apartment in Carrow, the human city she'd found for herself, with its noise and density and wonderful, total indifference to what she was. On the other: sixty thousand acres of Pack Ironvale territory, its forests and settlements and the complicated hierarchical machinery she had grown up inside and spent three years consciously decompressing from.
She stood on the ridgeline for longer than was strictly necessary and then went down the other side.
---
The territorial dispute was with Pack Keldra, which occupied the eastern ridge. Keldra had been expanding incrementally for two decades — not aggressively, not with force, but with the slow, steady patience of people who understood that the geography would eventually work in their favour. Three years ago it had been a political concern. In the past eight months, according to the emergency communication that had reached her through channels she'd been specifically trying not to maintain, it had become a jurisdictional crisis.
Sera was not a diplomat. She was not a senior pack member. She held no formal rank in Ironvale and had, when she left, held the specific distinction of being a late-shift wolf in a culture that considered late-shift wolves — those who shifted later than the pack average — to be a variation too marginal to accommodate.
She had not been rejected formally. That was the polite fiction. What had actually happened was that she'd been made to understand, through the specific architecture of social exclusion that packs had perfected over centuries, that her continued presence was a complication rather than a contribution. She had taken that information and done the only thing that had seemed survivable: she had left.
The person who had sent the emergency communication was her aunt.
Her aunt was the Ironvale mediator. She was seventy, had more political capital in the valley than anyone with a formal title, and had spent the three years of Sera's absence sending her, on alternating months, a brief and carefully non-pressuring check-in message and a grocery coupon for a human supermarket chain that her aunt found incomprehensible.
*I need you specifically,* the message had said. *Not pack muscle, not a formal negotiation team. You. Your particular skill with the in-between spaces. Keldra is willing to meet with a mediator's representative — not a full pack member. Your status is an asset for once.*
Sera had read this three times and then replied: *I'll come.*
She had then spent four days being furious about it, which she recognised as a necessary stage of the process.
---
The first Ironvale wolf she saw was a younger man she didn't know, running a perimeter check in human form, who stopped when he scented her and gave her a look that she translated, accurately, as *why is there a stranger here and why do they smell like pack.*
"I'm Sera Ashmont," she said. "I have an appointment with the mediator."
His expression adjusted to the specific recalibration of someone who had heard a name used in a certain kind of sentence. Not frequently, she suspected. "We were told you might arrive at the east access," he said. "You came over the ridge."
"I know the territory," she said.
He nodded and fell into step beside her without further comment, which she appreciated.
---
The mediator's house was where it had always been, at the edge of the pack's main settlement, slightly separate in the way that certain roles required separation. Her aunt was on the porch, which she probably wasn't, except she was — sitting in the chair she'd had for twenty years with a cup of something hot, watching Sera come up the path.
"You look well," her aunt said.
"I'm not," Sera said.
"I know. You look it anyway." She stood and opened her arms, and Sera, who had been composing herself carefully for the past two hours, walked into the hug and allowed herself, briefly, to be held.
She was fine. She was entirely fine.
She was aware that her aunt did not entirely believe this and was choosing not to press it.
"Come inside," her aunt said. "The situation is more complicated than the message conveyed."
"When isn't it."
"This is specifically more complicated." Her aunt held the door. "Alpha Ashford is also coming."
Sera stopped.
"He requested it," her aunt said. "He knows you're the representative. He had questions about working with an unaligned wolf." She paused. "He's not what you expect."
Sera had no expectations. She had specifically, carefully cultivated no expectations about any member of Ironvale's current senior hierarchy. "When does he arrive?"
"An hour."
An hour was enough time to eat something and remind herself that she was a grown adult who had built an entire life on the other side of a ridgeline and was not going to be destabilised by pack politics.
She went inside and asked for tea and began preparing, quietly and thoroughly, to be destabilised anyway.
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