The next morning, Oryen woke earlier than the others so he could shower alone. This routine had served him well so far—he'd managed an acceptable level of hygiene without being seen naked.

The aqueducts, built centuries ago according to Aryeta, pumped water through a hole in the ceiling. The existence of any plumbing at all was a luxury for which he was grateful. With his increasingly powerful sense of smell, he'd hate to find out what a barrack full of werewolves smelled like after even one day of unwashed training.

Once certain he was alone, he stripped and let the water—warm enough from the summer and the rocks—to sluice over him and strip away the dirt and sweat of the past day. He touched a hand to the cuts Beau had scraped along his tattoo the night before. Unlike the scratches he earned in basic training, these had not healed, the effects of the silver long lasting.

He shuddered. Once upon a time, this tattoo had been a source of such pride. Now it threatened his life. The shame that brought surprised him more than anything. He'd been doing his job, but he'd also been doing the right thing, hadn't he? Quarantine was nothing like the pamphlets claimed. The collar he carefully soaped around was a barbaric practice, but after seeing the way werewolves tore one another apart... Was it a necessary measure?

Werewolves were dangerous, unpredictable and contagious. The decision to quarantine them had seemed the only reasonable one until they could be cured. But, as he lathered soap over his body, and his hand passed over the leather of his collar, he had to admit that the solution he'd been sold was only a half truth at best.

The implications of which he couldn't allow himself to ruminate on.

He swallowed down the tangle of thoughts and dried off with the small, itchy towel provided him along with his new clothes.

Perhaps he could find a way to purchase or trade for makeup that could cover the tattoo. He couldn't tattoo over it. Even if there were tattoo artists inside, he'd have to trust them to keep it secret and not gut him first, and getting his hands on a tattoo machine was unlikely bordering on impossible. A stick and poke method wouldn't cover it due to its size. Besides, an indistinct blob would raise suspicions over what had been there before. He was no artist.

He could try to...cut it out.

The thought nauseated him. He didn't know if he could manage that, and the scar would be suspicious too. The other wolves would smell the wound. Serove would want to know where he got it. Everyone would.

Getting his hands on some makeup was the safest option. Resolving to find a means, he dried off and dressed, leaving the shower and the burgeoning conflict in his heart for another day.

He resolved to ask Aryeta about the logistics of commerce in quarantine over breakfast, but she didn't arrive. Instead, Serove stood at the front of the mess hall, arms folded over his chest, waiting. Next to him, a tall, distinguished figure waited. She wore a white, hooded robe embellished with silver, and from her laced hands hung a silver thurible. Even from here, the scent of incense smoke hung heavily over her.

Her presence had soaked the mess hall in a sombre air. Normally loud with the din of morning conversation, now only the clink of cutlery and muted whispers echoed therein. Oryen searched for Jezarri and took a seat with her instead.

"What's going on?"

She flashed a shy smile and gestured to the robed individual. "I'm not sure. I feel like I missed out on a lot while I was gone."

Oryen considered that with his head cocked. It had always struck him as odd that Jezarri chose a spot amongst Kappas when her parents were the Qaelish Alphas. While she'd claimed it wasn't fair, given Oryen wasn't afforded the same privilege, he suspected there had to be more to it than that.

"Your parents didn't catch you up on everything?"

Her smile faltered. Tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, she answered, "They... They aren't really speaking to me right now."

"I take it they're not jazzed about your choices."

"No," she agreed. Even her dry laugh was high and tittering in a nervous, musical way. "Definitely not."

"No offense, but given you nearly drowned in a fountain with me, it doesn't seem like the choice a smart person would make."

She shot him a challenging look. "You think I'd have been safer up on that throne with my parents?"

He shrugged. "Power usually comes with a few perks."

Jezarri's lips pulled back from her teeth like she was searching for a smile but couldn't muster one. After a pause, she blinked and pulled her hands into her lap from their place on the table.

"Power doesn't protect you," she said. "Not here. It just paints a bigger target on your back."

"Hey, sorry. I didn't mean—"

"It's fine. You're not entirely wrong anyway."

At the front of the hall, Serove cleared his throat. The last of the Kappas had trickled in. He addressed them in his booming voice, devoid of its usual sardonic tone.

Training, he explained, had been cancelled for the day. There was no time for excitement though, as this news was followed by the order that they spend the day...digging graves.

Oryen could hardly believe his ears. Yesterday, a wedding. Today, a funeral. Several, from the sounds of it.

"Finish your breakfast if you've got the stomach to keep it," Serove barked. "We head for the gates to Kolraga in oh-five-thirty hours."

Several werewolves dropped their cutlery to their plates, regarding their half-eaten breakfast with wary eyes. Oryen considered abandoning his own, but training left him ravenous. He doubted grave digging would be the only thing Serove threw at him either. Besides, his appetite increased exponentially the closer he got to his first full moon.

The phantom of that date kept haunting him, and he kept exorcising it from his mind. It was inevitable. Not worth dwelling upon.

Jezarri shoved her nearly empty plate away. "Wish he'd said something earlier."

Just then, a man appeared at her back, leaning close to intone something in her ear. Her expression flattened, gaze flitting to Oryen for a split second before returning to the messenger. She seemed to deliberate for a moment before finally standing up from the table.

"See you later, Oryen," she said, then left with the messenger.

She didn't explain where she was going, though Oryen could hazard a guess. Jezarri's parents had only just gotten her back. They didn't want her leaving Kolraga to dig graves.

After finishing his meal, Oryen joined the throng of Kappas flowing out into the thin, dawn light. A blush of pink lit the sky above the canyon walls, but all inside them remained in night shades. Few lights warmed the windows of homes as they passed, most werewolves still asleep. Oryen yawned and found himself longing for his hammock.

Serove and the priestly figure led them through the gates of Kolraga and out along the twisting path of the canyon. Morning dew dampened the grass, and fog hung low in the hills. It obscured, for a moment, the grim reminders of what happened here just outside Kolraga's walls. That was, until Oryen's boot kicked up a bone from the squelching grass.

It was a wolf's mandible as long as Oryen's forearm.

He recalled the battlefield as he'd seen it for the first time upon his arrival here. A blackened stain stretching from the mouth of the canyon to the woods beyond. Aryeta had said Mardero won the fight, and that it had occurred several weeks before his arrival here.

So who were they burying today?

A sombre quiet fell over the Kappas that couldn't be mistaken for early morning grogginess. They crossed the field in silence and entered the woods with anxiety written in the worry lines of their brows. A faint, sour smell drifted in the humid air. As they walked further into the trees, something about the space between each trunk and their gradually increasing height struck Oryen as odd. The trees were older and taller the deeper into the woods they got. Planted in concentric circles, they all converged in rings upon a singular point.

There were carvings on the trunks too. Initials and dates in the saplings they passed, and larger messages in the mature trees. Names, dates, and quotes. Loved as fiercely as he lived, read one. Bright as an unwaning moon, read another.

This wasn't a forest, Oryen realized. It was a graveyard.

A shiver skated up his spine at the sense of being surrounded on all sides by the dead. Not for the first time, he wondered what he'd gotten himself into by joining this pack. He'd considered himself an authority on werewolves, but the more he learned the more he realized the depths of his previous knowledge could only fill a thimble of the vast pool that lay beyond quarantine walls.

As if to reinforce his previous ignorance, their group finally reached the centre upon which all the trees converged.

The tallest trees formed a ring of columns around a towering structure of ivory stone, carved much like the gates to Kolraga into a howling wolf. Between its paws was a comparatively small, steepled building. Though it lacked the Christian iconography to which Oryen was accustomed, it was plainly a place of worship. Priests, robed like the one accompanying Serove, carried identical thuribles of lit incense and wore cloths tied over their noses and mouths. At the foot of the temple, they milled like reapers amongst—Oryen's stomach lurched—corpses. Line upon line, row upon row of corpses. Wolves, men and women alike lay dead. Many old, some young. Rancid with decay and ringed by dark haloes of buzzing flies. The priests worked to wrap them in shrouds. Wolves accompanied them, using their superior strength to help maneuver the bodies too large for priests in human form. Prayers and last rites were intoned over the dead in a hum that reminded Oryen eerily of the flies.

The combined sight and smell proved unbearable for some. Several of the Kappas turned on their heel and ran for the hedges outside the temple ring so they could be sick where it felt less blasphemous to do so. Of those with stronger stomachs, all looked grey in the face.

Oryen had seen death before, but nothing on this scale. There were a hundred bodies at the very least. By force of will, Oryen kept his breakfast down, but it was a near thing. He didn't understand why the bodies had been left to rot for the duration they had, or how they'd died in the first place. Of those left unshrouded and in human form, all wore robes similar to the priesthood, only muddied with the rust of dried gore.

Serove gestured to a pile of shovels. He pitched his tone low and quiet, nearly respectful. "Kappas from squadrons A1 through L12, pick up a shovel. The rest, transform and take instruction from the priest on who needs moving where. I'll lead the way to the gravesite."

Grateful he wasn't in the latter camp, Oryen retrieved his shovel. Tools in hand, Serove led them out of view of the temple, deeper into the woods.

As they walked, Oryen recognized Evrynne, the man who'd fed him after his first training day. His face was so palid he looked prone to joining the rows of cadavers.

"You all right?" Oryen asked him.

Evrynne startled at being addressed. An expression of mistrust crossed his features, but he answered easily, "Fine. Just another day in quarantine."

Though he could tell Evrynne didn't want to talk, Oryen's curiosity burned too much to suppress his question.

"Do you know what happened to them? Those werewolves at the temple."

Evrynne rolled his eyes. "They were slaughtered. Obviously."

"Yeah, but by who?"

"I don't know! No one does. Kahleir, probably, but even they worship Thenrir so who knows?"

"Thenrir—"

"Look, I'm not your encyclopedia to lycanthropy. Ask someone else!"

There was no one else Oryen could ask, a thought that left him embittered. His brother should be the one to answer his questions, but Lazro hadn't come to speak with him since their first meeting. Oryen felt he was owed several explanations beyond the circumstances of mysterious massacres. How Lazro wound up a werewolf, in quarantine, and now Alpha to the most powerful pack therein. Why he'd left Oryen here for a week to fend for himself.

It was one more twist to the thorn in his side.

Scowling, Oryen held his tongue the rest of the way to the site. More priests worked here too, lowering bodies into their final resting places and planting tiny saplings over mounds of soil. The odour of loam and earthworms accompanied the rot, only thickening the aura of death. A priest came and indicated to them all where plots had been outlined in chalk on the grass. Oryen picked a plot and started digging.

They dug for hours. The morning humidity surrendered to noon-day summer heat, which was no better. Sweat made Oryen's clothes cling to him, but he couldn't shuck his shirt no matter the discomfort. He focused on the methodical rhythm of sinking his spade into soil and flinging it out of the hole. At one point, he gripped the steel handle so hard that he felt it cave a little in his grip. Opening his fist and flexing his fingers, he regarded the dents in the shape of his hand with a raised eyebrow.

His lycanthropic strength was sure coming along...

His hearing too, as he picked up on a familiar voice among the throngs of humming priests.

"Should I call upon more of Mardero's numbers to help with the burials?"

Lazro.