The Ironclaw Alpha was dying in a bed too big for him.

That was my first thought walking into that tent, ducking under the flap with Kael's broad back in front of me — that the man propped against the furs had once filled a frame this size, and didn't anymore. Illness had hollowed him out. His skin had gone gray. But his eyes, when they found me, were the most alive thing in the room.

Silver eyes. Like Kael's. Like a whole pack of them, I'd learn.

"Closer," he said. His voice was a ruin, but it still had the weight in it, the thing that made wolves obey without deciding to. "I can't smell you from over there anymore. The sickness took that too, mostly. Closer."

I looked at Kael. He gave me the smallest nod.

I stepped to the side of the bed.

The old Alpha breathed in. Slow. Eyes closing. And I watched something move across his ravaged face like a wave — disbelief, then grief, then something so much like hope it hurt to look at.

"Say your name," he said. Eyes still shut.

"Mira."

"Mira what."

"Just Mira. I'm an orphan. I don't have a—"

"Don't." His eyes opened. "Don't tell me you don't have a line. I'm dying, girl, not stupid. I have smelled exactly one wolf in eighty years who carries what you carry, and I buried her." His hand, all bone and loose skin, lifted off the furs toward me. "Where were you raised."

"The Blackthorn pack took me in as a baby. I was left at their border. No note, no scent trail, nothing. The healers raised me." My own voice had gone strange. "They said a bloodless pup is bad luck. They only kept me because I was good with herbs. I earned my place every day of my life. And then they—"

"They threw you out for tainted blood." The old Alpha laughed, and it turned into a cough that bent him in half, and Kael moved fast to steady him. When it passed the Alpha waved him off, eyes streaming, and looked at me like I was a ghost. "Tainted. Oh, that's — that is the cruelest joke the Goddess has ever played. They threw you out for the opposite of tainted. They threw out the rarest blood on this continent because they were too ignorant to read it."

The tent was very quiet. The fire snapped.

"You have a gift," he said. "Don't you. Something with blood. With poison. With reading what's inside another wolf."

The hair rose on my arms.

"I can taste what's wrong with someone," I said slowly. I'd never told anyone it like that. "When I treat a sick wolf. I put my hand on them and I can — taste it isn't the right word. I know what's killing them. Poison, fever, a bad heart, bad blood. I always thought everyone's healer could do that. They can't. I found out they can't." I swallowed. "How did you know."

"Because her line could do it." His eyes were wet now, openly. "My sister. Lyra. She could read a wolf's blood like you read a track in snow. Strongest healer-gift the Ironclaw line ever threw, and the line only throws it in the heir-blood, girl, never in a common wolf, never once in our whole history. It runs in the ones born to rule us."

The fire popped. I couldn't breathe.

"Test me," I said. The words were out before I'd decided to say them. "If you think I'm — if you really think — then test me. You're dying. I can taste why." I held out my hand toward him, palm up, steady. "Let me put my hand on you and tell you what's killing you. If I'm wrong, I'm a fraud and a stranger and you can send me away. If I'm right—"

"If you're right," the old Alpha said, "you're my blood." He looked at my open hand for a long moment. Then he laid his own withered one into it.

I closed my eyes.

It came the way it always came — not in words, in knowing. The wrongness rose up his arm and into me, and I read it the way I'd read a hundred dying wolves, and what I found made my breath catch.

"It isn't age," I said quietly. My eyes were still shut. "Everyone thinks it's age. It's not. There's something in your blood that doesn't belong there. Slow. Bitter. It's been building for years — small amounts, over and over, so slow no one would ever catch it." I opened my eyes and looked at him, and at Kael, and back. "You're not dying, Alpha. You're being poisoned. You have been for a long time."

The tent went utterly silent.

The old Alpha stared at me. Then, impossibly, he began to laugh — soft, wondering, tears running down into the white of his beard.

"Thirty years," he breathed. "Thirty years I've waited for that gift to come home. And the first thing it does is tell me the one thing not a single healer on this continent could find." His hand tightened on mine with sudden strength. "Who were your parents, child?" he said, and his whole gray face was shaking now with the force of needing the answer.

And I had to tell him the truth, the only truth I'd ever had.

"I don't know," I whispered. "I never knew. Nobody ever knew."

The old Alpha closed his eyes.

And smiled.

"Then let me be the one to tell you," he said, "what you've never been told in your whole life."