Stolen by the Wolf King

Freydis is the Silvermoon Pack's healer, and this morning she is short of yarrow. She is also short of comfrey, grain, salt pork and time. The pack stores are not low. They are bare, scraped down to three strips of meat hanging from the rafters like forgotten washing, because Bloodfang raids cut the supply lines through the eastern pass and nobody told her. Her brother Gunnar tells her to find some. In the middle of winter. Somewhere. Her father, Jarl Hjalmar Ironhand, has thirty men left and a horn he has been emptying since before dawn, and an envoy arriving today from the Wolf King. Tryggve Ulfhednar wants a marriage alliance. He wants a queen out of the Silvermoon Pack. *He wants a claim on our pack. A blood tie. A mating bond that makes him our kin whether we like it or not.* So Freydis does the thing nobody in the hall expects. She challenges him. The law does not specify gender, and Tryggve names the terms himself: a Trial of Wits, three contests over three days, her choosing. If she takes all three, the claim breaks. If he takes even one, she marries him at dawn. She opens with riddles passed down through six generations of Silvermoon healers. She has beaten every challenger in the village at Wolf and Renegade. What she has not accounted for is a king who watches how she stands, how she leans into her good leg, how her left foot turns out when she walks. His adviser Sigrid notices it first and says the thing out loud that neither of them wants said: that Freydis walks the way his dead wife walked. Ingrid's portrait sits on his desk in Frosthold, painted six months before she died, her hand on the swell of her belly. He moved it off the bedchamber wall so he could shut a door on it, and he still stares at it for three hours at a stretch. What follows is not a rescue and not a romance anyone approves of. There is a cellar, a torch, a planted vial of diluted nightshade frost, and Hilda Gormsdottir screaming for the guards that the new queen has tried to kill the king. There is a fever, a hunt, a scar Freydis has never shown anyone, and a war on two fronts that does not pause for a wedding. And there is Gunnar, coming through the great hall doors with his axe red to the haft and a sentence for his sister that lands better than any crown. This is shifter romance in a northern pack world: an arranged alliance, a contest fought instead of accepted, a widowed king who has not put his first wife down, and a healer who refuses to be handed over, and it is written closed-door.