Hans had been stuck between sleep and wakefulness before, but this was different. He could control a dream, bend the narrative, turn a locked door into a thing made of cake he could eat, turn himself into a bird snapping up a trail of breadcrumbs. He had always been able to wake himself if he needed to.

This was nothing like that. He was drowning in a river of pain and he could not rise. Even when he felt the needle pierce his skin and mend it, one agonizing stitch at a time, he could do nothing more than squeeze Sabine’s hand.

He could smell her and Ursula. Smell the fire. The blanket on top of him. The hands that had made it. The hands that had stolen it. The bodies it had covered and the sweat they had shed into it. It was a world woven of scents, and he was trapped in the darkness of it, shivering.

He could not smell his sister. Her scent had faded like smoke on the wind. He wanted to howl but couldn’t. The wound in his chest was a pit, a fissure in the world after an earthquake, fathomless, hungry.

Was this punishment for killing the horse? It felt like it. Hans wanted the pain to stop, but he also wanted to suffer as he deserved. He was an animal, but he had never thought of himself as a beast. Not until now.

Then, when he thought he might die, a sound rang, high and sweet. The music found him where he was trapped, note after note, as steady as stitches, footsteps, a pulse. Cappella.

Hans focused on the sound. He forced himself to wake. He needed his consciousness the way lungs need air after a plunge into the deep. The music grew louder, but his eyelids were made of stone.

At last, he opened them. White sky stung through silhouetted branches and trees. Where was Cappella?

Across the clearing, softened through the green of long grass, a glint of metal. He blinked. Focused. She sat cross-legged at the base of a tree, her eyes closed, her fingers shaping breath into notes that had stitched his insides as surely as Ursula had repaired his flesh.

“He’s awake.” Sabine’s voice, then her hand on his muzzle, turning his snout back toward hers. There was kindness in her eyes and also worry and sorrow.

He struggled and shifted into his human form.

“Shh, Hans. Stay still,” she said. “Don’t shift.”

But he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. He pulled down the blanket. He sat, pushing away Sabine’s hands. And then he was standing, wrapped only in the blanket, staggering across the clearing. His vision tunneled, and he felt people moving aside.

When he reached her, he fell to his knees and rested his head on her lap. The music stopped, and she put her hand on his back. It was exactly the right weight and size.

“Hans,” she said.

She’d been crying. He pushed himself up, holding the blanket around his waist.

“I heard the music. Every note, even when I couldn’t open my eyes.”

“Where’s Greta? Ursula won’t tell us what happened.”

And now he was hot, hot and shaking with rage. “Albrecht. Albrecht took her.”

Hans spent most of the day in the cottage, resting in Greta’s bed. He hated staying still. He wanted to go back to the kingdom. To fetch his sister. To tear out Albrecht’s throat if he had to. He knew full well the dangers. None of it mattered.

If Cappella hadn’t sat next to him, he would have gone mad, if not from the feeling of his muscle fibers healing, then with the memory of killing the horse. He’d done it without thinking as soon as he realized that Albrecht meant to abduct Greta. The animal reared up and he’d leapt, jaws wide. He’d struck the poor creature in its neck, and the feeling of his teeth tearing through the hide, the taste of sweat and dusty fur, the hot saltiness of blood exploding in his mouth … Killing in rage was like nothing he’d ever experienced.

He’d killed small animals from time to time for his family when they’d been hungry. Rabbits and such. That had been a different matter. There was a need for those deaths. His family needed to eat. With this horse, Hans intended only destruction. The hatred he felt for Albrecht, he’d turned on the horse, not because the horse had done anything to him but because it was in his way. And even then, he’d failed to save Greta. He was disgusted with himself.

Cappella put a hand on his forehead. “I know you have reason to be worried, but try to focus on healing.”

Hans didn’t reply. He’d torn out a living thing’s throat. Torn it out and swallowed its windpipe. Soaked his muzzle in its blood. He couldn’t stop thinking about the sounds it had made while dying. About the smell of its blood. About the thump of its body when it dropped. The horse was not a human, to be sure. But it had not loved its life any less.

The distance between life and death was short. The length of a fang, an arrow, a sword.

He’d never given much thought to Cappella’s throat, but now he couldn’t stop looking at hers, thinking of how he’d feel if someone had done the same to her. What if he got that angry again and acted on his wolfish instinct? Perhaps it was right that weres had been required to sleep in cages. That they’d been prevented from shifting outside the Row.

What if he hurt Cappella? What if someone else did? She was mortal. Breakable. She would someday die. He had seen it happen to his parents; it would happen to her too, and the sadness of knowing this overwhelmed him.

“I’m going to try to sleep.” He closed his eyes, thinking she’d leave, but she didn’t. He let himself become a wolf while she was still there.

When he awoke, she was gone, and night had fallen. Within weeks, the shortest, darkest days of the year would be upon them. Those had been his favorite when he was a little boy. He missed that time intensely, the hours spent indoors by the fire with his family, talking, mending things, making plans for spring.

He sat and took his human form again. His chest was still tender but much better than it had been. He forced himself out of bed and into his clothing and boots. He watched everyone through the window, sitting around the fire, faces grim in the orange light, gazing the longest at Cappella. The sight of her made his heart hurt all over again.

When he opened the door and walked outside, conversation stopped.

“Hans,” Cappella said.

There was room to sit by her, and he took it.

Sabine had her arm splinted and strapped to her chest. “How are you feeling?”

“No worse than you,” he said.

She smiled, but there was no happiness in it.

Ursula turned to him. “We were just discussing what King Albrecht might have planned for your sister.”

“Planned?”

“We think he took her for a reason,” Sabine said.

“What reason?”

“We hoped you’d know,” Ursula said.

“I didn’t share a womb with him.” His heart stung again.

Cappella’s fingers brushed his. He took her hand and she squeezed, as if to let him know she was on his side.

Ursula rubbed her hands together to warm them. “You have spent a great deal of time with him.”

“Not as much as you.” Hans knew he was being surly, but he didn’t care. What was she going to do to him? Nothing. She needed him. He looked around the campfire. Everyone was staring at him, even the children.

Sabine exhaled. “This is what we think, Hans—that he took her to lure us in to rescue her. He plans to kill us on his own turf.”

“Are you suggesting that we leave her there?”

“If it’s a trap, we don’t want to be snared by it,” Ursula said.

“Fine. I know the castle well. I’ll save her myself,” he said.

“I can’t allow it,” Ursula said.

“She’s my sister.” He could not speak aloud his fear about what Albrecht would do with his devices, some of which Hans had built himself. The idea that Greta might suffer and bleed—that he would have had a hand in it—it was too much.

“I am your queen.”

The fire popped, sending a spray of angry sparks into the darkness. No one spoke. Sabine looked angry, though Hans couldn’t tell if it was with him or with Ursula.

“You are,” he said. “And this is why your concern should be with my sister, who is also your subject and who has been taken”—he needed to steady his voice—“taken by your brother.”

“But, Hans,” Ursula said, “we don’t even know if she’s—”

“Don’t say it,” Sabine warned.

Ursula’s expression changed. She held up a hand. “Shh.” She’d heard something.

The hair on Hans’s neck prickled. He felt the wolf coming on. That scent. He knew it: Jutta.

Ursula and Sabine leapt up just as Jutta emerged, limping, from the woods.

“Your brother sent me,” Jutta said.

“Where’s Greta?” Hans advanced until she pulled a knife from her belt and brandished it at him.

“Your sister is well.” She stepped around him and stopped in front of Ursula.

“Your brother wants you to know that he and Greta will be married. This is a kindness he’s showing you and your”—she looked at the survivors, her gaze stopping on the children—“your people.”

“Greta wouldn’t want that,” Hans said. “She’s never wanted that. Not with anyone. And Albrecht, especially—he can’t do that to her.”

“She has agreed,” Jutta said. “And if I could give advice on the matter, Ursula, it would be to let her go. Let this go. Let your brother have this. Let his kingdom have this. You will be safer.”

She turned to Hans. “Our future queen had a message for you in particular.”

Hans knew what it would be before Jutta said it—that he wasn’t to rescue her. It would be very like Greta to want to keep him safe. When Jutta said the words he feared, it was all he could do not to weep.

“Is that all?” Ursula said.

Jutta glanced at Sabine’s feet. “Those are my boots.”

“You left them behind when you shifted,” Ursula said. “You forfeited them.”

“And you always wanted them,” Jutta said. “So why are they on her feet?”

“She needed them.”

“Is that how it is?” Jutta said. “They’re hers now. I hope that makes you happy.”

And then she left, limping into the darkness.