For one long moment, the wolf stood frozen, only his ears trembling; then he bolted, tearing away into the dark.

Rae watched him race across the moonlit land, a leaping leaping leaping, his body and tail long and flat and stretched in great hurdlings over the earth. She clenched her teeth to keep from crying out, but he was already gone—a pale speck in the darkness, then only the darkness itself.

She was alone.

Heart pulsing all through her limbs, Rae scanned about. Lanterns burned here and there in doorways, and a few voices sounded raucously, but mostly the streets were quiet, cast in the last dregs of the moon’s eerie glow. She could see no clear direction—one lane looked very like another—but the horse, without waiting for heel or rein, turned, trotting down one of the narrow streets.

City. Rae had known the word for what seemed like always, understood it meant busyness and people. Home of the king. But she had not known every brick and stone would seem to pulse with the life behind its walls, even the sleeping life behind its walls. The buildings crowded one another, a meshwork of boxes clambering one on top of another. Its size was nothing she—hilltop with sheep—could have ever envisioned.

The city—it’s meant to be fine, Mop had told her once, and Rae had thought it must be very fine, joyful even, to live among so many. But could it be joyful to live here? Whoever had built these homes hadn’t thought at all for the people inside. Where were the wells for fresh water? The trees for shade? The gardens to keep the people well fed?

Her breaths—from fear, from the odors clinging to everything—were shallow and quick. Food, yes—she could smell the lingering odors of cooking, dense breads and smoked meats and smoke, too, everywhere the stale smell of spent fire—but also the acrid and humid smells of animals left too long at stable, of gutters—though she could not see or name them—left uncleaned. Nothing said to her king. Nothing said palace. Nothing said fine at all. Everything carried the air of neglect. Mop and Ness, she thought, would not treat their flock so.

She saw no homes like her own—a hut, she’d heard her parents call it more than once—made of mud and straw with its one door always open to the fields and stream and sky. Perhaps mud and straw were not fine. Perhaps it was not fine to have a door wide open to the outside—all of nature left to wander in. Still. What was it Nessa had said once? The land cares for us only as much as we care to know it. What did that mean for the people here, where everything green had been cleared and cemented away? How could the land—how could nature—care for them?

City did not even seem the right word. City implied something vibrant, full of energy and life—but this… this place… In the guttering lantern light, the streets were as empty and gray as a hearth swept of its ash.