His jaw stiffened but he only nodded in response. He looked like Cora did, his expression somewhere between sadness and anger. But I knew this trial had only just begun – pleading guilty was the start of it. They were going to make an example out of me whether I liked it or not.

“Commence questioning.”

My father waved his hand and slumped back in his seat, as though he couldn’t quite believe what was happening. A man stood up next to him – I recognized him as Rand Charles, who had been one of the many to teach me the history of shifting over my years in the clan – and came down the steps towards me.

The makeshift courtroom was still deathly quiet, like a grave, save for the sound of his footsteps echoing off the stone walls around us. He finally arrived in the box with me, pausing next to me for a moment and looking into my eyes before he spoke. There was no hint of apology or sadness at what he was about to do. I imagined that, like the rest of them, he really believed I deserved this.

Maybe I did.

“So you plead guilty to releasing one of our political enemies, is that correct?” he asked, a sneer audible in his voice. I met his gaze steadily, letting him know that I wasn’t going to let him intimidate or humiliate me.

“I do,” I replied, and there was another flurry of whispering around the court. What had they expected me to say? They all knew what I was here for, what I had done. And I would do it all again in an instant if it meant sparing the life of an innocent child.

“A MacLaren, no less?” Rand continued.

I nodded again. “That is correct.”

The man looked away from me and shook his head in something that looked like disgust, and I fought the urge to lean forward and slap that expression off his face. How dare he pull that face at the thought of a boy?

James MacLaren was a child. A child. That was the thought I hadn’t been able to shake from my head, ever since we took him hostage. I knew that the feuds with the MacLarens went back further than I could ever really know or understand, but that didn’t mean that we were required to abuse their child-folk just to make things right. I couldn’t imagine anything as foul as stealing that kid and using him as a pawn in a political game.

James was twelve, maybe thirteen, and every time I saw him being moved from one cell to another, I could see the terror etched on his face. He truly believed that he was going to die here. He looked so very young, so very childlike – I wondered if he had so much as had his first shift yet. If he would ever experience that after we were done with him. But I could at least pretend it wasn’t happening as long as I knew he was unharmed. Many of the others in my pack felt as uncomfortable about having him as I did, but they also knew that the son of the clan’s chief would give us the political leverage that we needed to move this stupid land feud along. He had been safe, if scared…until it happened.

I wasn’t on the inside of the political machinations of the clan, no matter how much I tried to convince my father that I should have been, but even I was unable to avoid the stories that sprung from the latest delivery from the MacLarens.

I supposed my father had an inkling as to what it was when it arrived – a small, sturdy wooden box that was delivered by hand and left outside the walls of the keep. I had a bad feeling about it as soon as I saw it being whisked away and into my father’s quarters; call it a sixth sense, but there was blood in that box, metaphorically and maybe literally. I made sure I was nearby when it was delivered and, while I didn’t see what was inside, the rumors moved fast in a community like this one and it didn’t take long for me to figure it out.

A head. Not just a head – the head of one of our finest men named Ansel. He had been one of my father’s closest companions growing up and I supposed the MacLarens must have known that, because they swiped him when he was out for a run one evening and had held him hostage ever since.

I could still remember the look on my father’s face when he came crashing out of his living quarters; I couldn’t tell whether he was more angry or devastated, but I knew that whatever he had seen in there had changed him profoundly and for good. He had seen a lot of violence in his time – who among us had not? – but the head of his best friend delivered to him in a box like some kind of twisted gift was something else entirely. It was hideous. It was monstrous. It was the kind of statement that a man like my father couldn’t ignore or take lightly. He had to do something about it. And his advisers were all too happy to point him in the direction of the boy we still had in captivity.

I listened in at the door to find out what they were going to do to him as soon as I gleaned that his name had been thrown around as a potential way to wreak revenge on the people who had done this to Ansel. I felt my heart clench with terror at the thought. I couldn’t allow them to do that, not to some innocent child. Yes, he was part of their clan, but he was too young to know anything, to have done anything. If we let him go now, perhaps he would show us leniency in the future. Perhaps it was a way for us to begin to rebuild something between the two clans once more. But I knew they would never listen to me. I needed to free James myself, and I needed to do it before they could commit the same hideous act on him that their enemies had committed against our friend Ansel.

I supposed Cora may have guessed what was on my mind, since she seemed keen to dissuade me from whatever it was I was leaning towards.

“You won’t do anything stupid, will you?” she asked me as we returned from a run one evening. “You won’t…get yourself into trouble?”

“Of course not,” I lied to her, knowing that I was being untruthful, but unwilling to implicate her in my plan. I knew I would be punished for it, and harshly, but I had to release that boy. The thought of a child as small and slight as he was being beheaded just to make a point was too much to bear. I could look the other way on a lot of the shit that had gone down as part of this ridiculous war, but that was a step too far, even for me. I needed to put a stop to it. It was the only thing I could do to live with myself in clear conscience.

I snuck to his cell in the middle of the night, pulled back the grate, and left the door open for him; I made sure he did not see me at work, in the vain hopes that I might get away with this kind of action, but someone must have, for a mere day later I was cast into the very same cell myself and left to rot. But I knew the child was safe – I had watched him, hurrying up to my room at the top of one of the towers of the keep and keeping a careful eye on him as he fled from his cell in the dead of night and into the woods, no doubt back to his family and friends. The ones who could keep him safe. As soon as he was gone, I felt something tighten in my chest as I realized that I may have given up my freedom for a boy who probably hated me and my family.

Had it been worth it?

“And you dare sit here, in front of the entire clan, and not show a single jot of remorse?” he demanded, gesturing up to the crowds around us and shaking his head at my apparent insolence. “You must understand how betrayed we all feel by your choice, Arianna.”

“I do.” I lowered my head and closed my eyes for a moment, so aware of all the gazes bearing down on me.

“Can you at least offer the people here an apology for your actions? For the actions that endangered the well-being of the entire clan?”

I met his gaze as steadily as I could, and knew in my heart that I should just apologize. Maybe things would be different if I told them I recognized what I’d done was wrong and told them I would take it back if I could. Maybe I would get an ounce of the leniency that I so desperately craved. But I knew that what I had done wasn’t wrong. Two wrongs didn’t make a right, no matter how badly they wanted to believe otherwise.

I kept my mouth firmly shut, and the longer my silence went on, the deeper it seemed to weigh on everyone in the room. The place filled with whispers and I didn’t dare look around, knowing that they probably hated me even more now that I had refused to answer. But I knew I had to say something.

“I’m sorry if I put any of you in danger,” I began, my voice filling the room and flattening the rest of the noise around me. “But he was a child, a victim of this war as much as any of us, and I couldn’t in good faith let him die for it. I would do it again if I had to.”

I glanced up at my father and saw his face crumple at once – it was just for the briefest second, but it was enough for me to know that he had prayed with all his heart that I would offer him something that he could base my reprieve on. But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I had to stand by what I had done and would do so another thousand times should I have to. He drew himself to his feet and held his hand up, and the room silenced itself once more.

“I sentence the accused to exile,” he announced, not meeting my gaze.

The word took a second to settle into my head – exile? I had assumed death was the only punishment for what I’d done. But exile was worse. Exile was the cruelest thing he could have done to me or anyone in this room, and the flurry of gasps that followed his announcement let me know that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. My entire world had shifted on its axis, my life turning upside-down in a moment. I couldn’t leave the clan. It was all I had ever had…all I knew.

“The sentence is effective immediately,” he continued, forcing himself to look away from me, as though meeting my gaze would have been too much to bear, even for him. Even after everything he’d done, he knew that what he was doing to me now, doing to his own daughter, was darker than all of it.

I felt two sets of hands on my arms, dragging me backwards, and for the first time I actually began to put up a fight. My words were trapped in my throat but that didn’t matter – I threw elbows, kicking my legs up, trying to scramble and wriggle out of their control. I wouldn’t stand for this. I couldn’t.

“No!” I yelled up to him. “Please, don’t-”

But before I could finish what I was saying, I was being dragged from the hall and out into the courtyard. I passed Cora as I went, and her eyes were wide as they met mine – she was as stunned by my sentence as I was, that much was clear. The air was cold and crisp but now felt frozen and intimidating instead of welcoming and fresh. I was being led to the gates, to the gates that led to a world outside this clan, a world that I never thought I would have to face without their backing.

I turned to one of the guards on my arm, a man around my age. “Don’t do this…”

“I don’t have a choice,” he replied, but I could hear the regret in his voice, like he knew how much this must be hurting me. I could hardly blame him. The punishment would be at least as severe as my own if he dared disobey orders from on high.

My head sank to my chest as they scraped the gate open, and then heaved me over the threshold.

As soon as the gate closed behind them, I felt it – I had heard tell of it before that moment but had never really thought that I would have to face something so unthinkable. A severing, that was the best way to describe it. After all those years in the clan, all those bonds I’d formed were cut off at once. It felt as though I had been cast adrift, every connection I’d made over the last twenty-two years ripped out from beneath me just like that. I wondered, briefly, if it hurt them, too – but soon, the pain overwhelmed me, the weight of what had just happened bearing down on me, and I fell to my knees in the snow, dropping the pack that they had given me to keep me alive to the ground next to me.

Tilting my head back and letting out a long, low howl, I felt it happen, that familiar tug at the bottom of my stomach. Before I knew it, I had shifted, vanishing into a form that couldn’t feel the intensity of the agony of leaving behind everything I had ever known.