Chapter Seventeen: The Ones Who Came East

The promise on the packhouse floor comes true: the bell Fenna rang empties the holdfasts and the freed come east in a column, and Wren opens the gate with her own hands, the best hour of her life. And Dain, still the careful one, still not wrong, begs her to take the win and shut it. She keeps it open one more day. And that night a freed wolf she welcomed with her own hands stands over the cradle with a blade she cannot lower, weeping, because the bell didn't free them. It only unlocked the door. The Warden was in their hands the whole way east. Comment if your heart stopped, and add to library.