The branch wasn't the scary part.
The eyes were.
They came out of the dark between two trees, low to the ground, pale as old coins. Then the rest of the wolf followed them: long legs, gray-black fur, a head much bigger than I thought a wolf's head had any business being.
One.
Then a second pair of eyes, off to the left.
Two.
I started counting without meaning to. Three, behind a fallen log. Four and five together, slipping out of a thicket like smoke. Six. Seven. Eight.
I kept waiting for them to stop.
They stopped at ten.
Ten Gloamwolves stood in a loose half-ring across the path ahead of us, and every one of them was looking at us the same way.
I'd seen that look before. On a stray dog Tilly once found behind the stables, the winter before she started feeding it.
It was the look of something that hadn't eaten in a long time and had just found dinner.
Their ribs showed through their fur. One of them was drooling.
Wolves, I thought stupidly. Wolves don't come to the entrance. It was one of the first things anyone in Greymark learned about the Gloamwood, right after don't go in.
Naomi stopped.
For one heartbeat, she didn't move at all. Through the bond, I felt her lantern jump, the way a flame jumps when a door slams somewhere in the house.
Then it steadied, and so did she.
"Circle," she said.
The guards moved before the word was finished. Two stepped out to my left, two to my right, shields up, blades low. Sigrid's hand settled on my shoulder from behind and stayed there, heavy as a sandbag.
"Left two, hold. Right two, hold." Naomi's voice was calm. Not loud. The same voice she used to give me another hundred swings. "Nobody chases. Nobody breaks. Sigrid."
"My lady."
"He's yours."
"Yes, my lady."
"And the big one," Naomi said, raising her sword, "is mine."
I hadn't even noticed there was a big one. Then I saw it, at the center of the ring: a wolf with a torn ear and a gray muzzle, a head taller than the rest. It was watching Naomi, not me.
I didn't think that was good news for the wolf.
My hand went to my hilt.
"Sword," Naomi said, without looking back.
My hand came off my hilt.
So I did the one thing I was allowed to do. I looked.
Four guards. Sigrid behind me. Naomi in front. Six outlines of light in the gloom: white, white, white, white, white. And Naomi, white with that thread of yellow running through it.
Watch them, I told myself. That's your job. Watch them.
The first wolf jumped.
It went for the guard on my far left, the youngest of the four, the one who had hummed the same three notes the whole ride. She took it on her shield. Clang! The wolf bounced off like it had hit a wall, and her sword came down before it landed.
It didn't get up.
Then they all came at once.
It was fast. Much faster than sparring. Snarls, the scrape of claws, the heavy thud of bodies hitting shields. A wolf lunged at the right side, and a guard caught it by the scruff of its neck, one-handed, and threw it into a tree. The tree shook. The wolf didn't.
Naomi met the big one head-on.
It leaped for her throat. She stepped into it instead of away, turned her shoulder, and put her sword exactly where the leap was going to end. Plain steel. No flourish.
The big wolf hit the ground behind her and stayed there.
She was already turning toward the next one.
Something burst through the gap between two guards. Gray fur, open jaws, coming straight at me.
I didn't even have time to be scared.
Sigrid's hand left my shoulder. Her arm shot past my ear, caught the wolf by the throat in midair, and slammed it into the ground so hard I felt it through my boots.
Her hand came back to my shoulder.
"Young Master," she said politely.
"...Sigrid."
And then it was over.
It couldn't have been more than a minute. Ten wolves lay still across the path, and six women stood among them, breathing a little hard.
I remembered to breathe too.
Far behind us, I felt two candles flare. Hana and Marika had felt that minute. Whatever had gone through me, it had gone through them too.
I'm fine, I thought at them, uselessly. Thoughts didn't travel through the bond. I'd checked.
I looked at the guards again. White. White. White.
Yellow.
The young guard on the left had her arm tucked against her side. Her light had gone pale yellow, a shade darker than Sigrid's that morning.
"You're hurt," I said.
She looked at me, startled. "It's a scratch, Young Master."
"Show me."
She glanced at Naomi. I glanced at Naomi too. Rules: no healing unless she says.
"Heal her," Naomi said.
The claw had caught her forearm right where her bracer ended. Three red lines, shallow, bleeding more than they should have.
The White circle bloomed under my palm. A splash from the pitcher. The cuts closed, and the yellow drained out of her light until it was clean white again.
The guard stared at her arm. Then at me. "Thank you, Young Master."
"It was just a scratch," I said.
She smiled a little. "That's what I said."
Naomi crouched beside the big wolf.
She didn't touch it. She just looked: at its ribs, at its paws, at the gray around its muzzle.
"Starving," she said.
Sigrid crouched beside her. "All of them, my lady. Look at their bellies."
"Gloamwolves don't hunt the entrance."
"No, my lady. Never."
"Then something pushed them out of the mid." Naomi stood. "And whatever can push ten wolves out of their own territory, I don't want to meet it with my brother standing behind me."
She sheathed her sword. "We're going back."
"No," I said.
Every guard turned to look at me.
Naomi's eyes narrowed. "That wasn't a question."
"I know. But listen." I held up the hand I'd healed with. "One splash. That's all I've used today. My pitcher's practically full."
"Your pitcher isn't the problem."
"Then what is?"
"You," Naomi said. "Standing in a forest that's wrong."
"Then shouldn't we find out why it's wrong?"
She didn't answer, so I kept going.
"If we turn back now, we don't learn anything. We just know wolves were here. Whatever pushed them is still in there, doing whatever it's doing." I swallowed. "And next time, we find out at the wall. With the whole town behind us."
Silence. One of the guards shifted her weight.
"You've come here every month for ten years so that nothing would surprise Greymark," I said quietly. "This is the most surprising thing you've seen in ten years. You want to know. I can feel you wanting to know."
That part was true. Through the bond, her lantern wasn't steady anymore. It was burning hot and bright and restless, the way Marika's usually did.
Naomi looked at me for a long time.
"You're using the bond against me," she said.
"I'm using it for you."
"That's worse."
Sigrid coughed. It might have been a laugh. With Sigrid, it was hard to tell.
Naomi turned and looked into the trees, toward the deeper dark where the path sloped downhill.
"The mid," she said at last. "Not one step further."
"Not one step."
"The moment we see webs, we turn around. The core starts where the webs begin."
"Where the webs begin," I repeated.
"And if I say run—"
"I run."
"You don't argue. You don't look back. You don't stop to heal anyone. You run."
"I run."
She held my eyes a moment longer. Then she nodded once, sharp, and turned to the guards.
"Same formation. Eyes up. Ears open."
The guards closed in around me again. Sigrid's hand returned to my shoulder.
As we started down the slope, the young guard I'd healed fell into step at my left. She flexed her arm once, as if checking it was still hers.
"Young Master," she whispered. "Thank you. Really."
"Don't mention it."
"Lady Hana's going to put salve on it the second we get back anyway."
"On both arms," I said. "Just to be safe."
She grinned. Then she went back to humming her three notes, very quietly, and somehow that made the forest feel a little less dark.
The mid didn't start all at once, the way the Gloamwood had. It crept up on us.
The trees got bigger. Their trunks got wider, until four of us holding hands couldn't have reached around one. The light, which had been evening-colored at the entrance, turned into something closer to night. Roots rose out of the ground higher than my knees.
And it was still quiet.
No birds. No insects. No thornhares bolting out of the undergrowth, the way Naomi always said they did.
Just us, our boots, and our breathing.
We'd been walking for maybe half an hour when Naomi raised her fist.
Everyone stopped.
She was staring at something ahead of us, at about the height of her waist. At first I couldn't see what. Then the light shifted, and I did.
A thread.
One thin silver thread, stretched across the path from one trunk to the next. It caught what little light there was and held it, glowing faintly.
"Web," Sigrid said softly.
"One," Naomi said. "One strand."
"Yes, my lady."
"We're not at the core."
"No, my lady. Not even close."
Naomi didn't say anything to that. She stepped carefully around the thread and took three more paces forward, sword out, looking up.
Then she stopped again.
I followed her gaze.
I wished I hadn't.
The thread wasn't alone.
Once I'd seen one, I saw all of them. They were everywhere. Strung between trunks. Draped over bushes like wet laundry. Hanging from the branches overhead in long, sagging sheets that swayed a little, though there wasn't any wind. Some were thin as hair. Some were as thick as rope.
And they were moving.
Not the webs. The things on them.
Spiders. Small ones, most no bigger than my fist. Black and glossy, with too many legs that moved too fast. Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe. Scuttling along the strands, pouring over the bark, gathering in clumps wherever the webs met.
The young guard beside me made a small sound in her throat.
I couldn't blame her. I was making the same sound, just on the inside.
"My lady," Sigrid said. Her voice was very calm, which was how I knew she wasn't. "Those are Gloamweaver young."
"I know."
"In the mid."
"I know."
Naomi turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. The webs above us. The webs ahead.
The webs behind us, too. I hadn't noticed them on the way in. In the dark, under the canopy, we'd walked right beneath them without ever looking up.
Through the bond, her lantern didn't flicker.
It went very, very still.
"The core starts where the webs begin," Naomi said quietly. She'd said those words to me a hundred times, the way you'd say fire is hot or don't swim after dinner.
She looked up at the silver ceiling over our heads.
"Then where," my sister said, "are we standing?"