The night was for dreams.

Sometimes they’d bring tears as I’d lain awake in agony, knowing he would have moved on many times over. Sometimes they’d bring laughter and moans, muffled by pillows and blankets. Regardless of what I did, no matter how much I painted or drank or tried to be of use, the wolf would find a way to creep in.

Always and over and over, the inescapable imaginings would come.

Alone, I’d wake and struggle to find the strength to so much as climb to my feet. Alone, I’d force myself to eat. To move. To do anything other than surrender to that stalking darkness that had nearly swallowed me whole.

The attacks on our people and the failed missions to breach our royal lands had lessened.

Rorn and his warriors knew better than to believe the mortals were at last done with tormenting us. The unease we’d lived with that had stifled the towers for too long soon lowered to a steady, hesitant impatience.

For even after almost two months without a single skirmish reported, all of us knew it was only a matter of time.

Nesalla’s voice rose in volume out in the hall. “What do you mean? Of course he’s doing something about it. He has to be.”

I crept back from the basket of clean bandages I’d been rolling at hearing Carelda’s hushed response. “He’s said nothing to me, but he’s been locked in the council chambers for weeks with talk of it.”

“I say better them than us,” Milla, another healer commented. “Stars forgive me, but we desperately need this reprieve.”

“Easy for you to say when you do not have relatives across the sea,” Nesalla snapped, leaning against the door to the infirmary while biting into an apple. “All of it needs to stop, period. He must act now while they’re preoccupied and end this.”

“What do you speak of?”

None of them expected the queen who’d remained mostly silent for months to interrupt their conversation. They’d grown accustomed to having me organize things that didn’t really require it, and loitering like an unwanted chaperone, forever in search of something to give my attention to.

“Majesty.” Nesalla blinked, then blinked again. “We were just talking about how quiet it’s been on the isle. How…” He grimaced. “Unusual it is, I suppose.”

Carelda frowned at the healer and hoisted Helvectus higher upon her hip. “Rorn has been attending all these meetings with his council, discussing the whereabouts and the possible new motives of the mortal terrorists.”

“The whereabouts,” I repeated and walked closer. “New motives?”

With a look at Milla and Nesalla, Carelda then jerked her head to the hall, indicating that I walk with her. Eyes fell upon us, waiting and anticipating. Likely expecting me to snub the mother of my husband’s son.