Daughter of the Winter Pack

Frozen scree skids under Freydis Bjornsdottir's boots. It is not yet dawn, she is on the wrong side of the Frostfang border, and she is cutting frostmoss off a granite cliff with a harvesting knife because the moss is the only thing that will slow the wasting sickness hollowing out her brother Ulf. Eirik Jarnsson, the Winter Pack medic, taught her to take the whole root without breaking the fronds. He could not teach her what to do if a patrol found her first. One does. A grey-black wolf steps into the clearing and shifts into a broad-shouldered man with white streaks at his temples: Torben, patrol leader for this stretch of border. His sister Yrsa opens the pouch, counts four patches, two of them deep-grade, and says the thing that keeps Freydis breathing - *Whoever taught her knew what they were doing.* Torben is unmoved. *She'll be judged at moonrise.* Judgment turns out to be an offer. The best moss grows in the contested valley that neither pack controls, and Torben has spent years trying to negotiate shared access to it rather than raid for it. He proposes a blood oath, plainly and without ceremony: Freydis finds him someone in her own pack who will actually talk, and he supplies enough deep-grade frostmoss to treat Ulf for a full season. She takes it. Her pack does not forgive her for it. Five hands go up in her own longhouse for banishment, and Gunnar Vargsson, who intends to be alpha by Solstice, takes charge of her brother. What she and Torben assemble after that - out of a journal hidden in a cave, a bundle of letters his sister sat on rather than hand him, and a hunter's knife marked the same way as a silver wolf-fang pin - is not a border dispute. Gunnar is the face of it. Signe, his sister, who fills a cup at every feast and never drinks from it, is the hand. She was dealing with the assassin guilds before Torben was born, and she has already sold the valley to mercenaries waiting in the north. To stand with Freydis, Torben has to face down his own council and an uncle who tells him to execute her. To stand with Torben, Freydis has to walk back into the pack that voted her out, under a truce that comes apart the moment Signe fails to arrive. *I'm not doing this for the alliance either*, he says, and she kisses him like someone who has been surviving so long she had forgotten what being alive felt like. A shifter romance set across a hard northern winter of rival wolf packs, treaty law and pack politics - closed-door, with a mate bond that is bargained for rather than granted, a brother worth crossing a border for, and a villain neither pack is looking at.