Smoke was already curling under the door by the time Wren understood that the pounding outside was not a neighbour's late delivery but something far worse, and for one suspended heartbeat she stood frozen between the cradle and the window with a child in each arm and nowhere at all left to run.
That was hours later. First, there was the birth.
Wren had laboured for the better part of a night in Nora's back room, gripping a knotted cloth in each fist and biting down every sound that might carry through the apothecary's thin walls, because a woman in her position could not afford to be heard. When it was finally over, when the second small, furious cry had joined the first, Nora had laid them both against Wren's chest, one after the other, and gone very quiet in a way that made Wren's exhausted heart stumble with fresh fear.
"What," Wren managed, "is wrong."
"Nothing is wrong." Nora's voice had roughened with something Wren did not have the strength yet to name. "Look at their shoulders, dear. Both of them."
Wren looked. Beneath the ordinary softness of newborn skin, faint and silver, a crescent mark curved across each small shoulder blade, identical on both children, glowing faintly in the low candlelight before fading to something that looked, in ordinary light, like nothing more than a birthmark.
"That is the Thornwood crescent," Nora said. "I have seen it once before, on the old Alpha, the current one's father, when I was a girl. It marks blood that is meant to rule."
Royal blood. Wren pressed her lips to the crown of the nearest small head, feeling the word settle over her like a sentence rather than a blessing. "Then they are not only his," she whispered. "They are heirs."
"Which means," Nora said grimly, "that whoever finds them will not merely be finding your children. They will be finding a claim on the Blackthorn throne, and there are people in this kingdom who would rather see two newborns dead in their cradle than see that claim exist at all."
Wren named them that same night, in the exhausted, tender hour before dawn, because she had learned young that a name given quickly by the person who loved you was worth more than one given later by anyone else. The boy, quieter, watchful even hours old, she called Finn. The girl, who had come into the world already furious and squalling, she called Briar.
"Finn and Briar Ashby," she murmured against their small heads. "Not Thornwood. Not yet. Not until I am certain the world will let you keep that name and still let you live."
She had six peaceful weeks. She would spend the rest of her life grateful for exactly those six weeks, and furious that they were not permitted to be more.
The attack came at night, the way Nora had always warned her these things did, torches first and then the smell of smoke curling under doorframes before anyone thought to scream. Wren woke to shouting in the street below, harsh and unfamiliar voices demanding, house by house, whether anyone had seen a woman with twin infants pass through in the last two months, and beneath the fear that seized her whole body she felt something colder settle in, the certainty that this was not a random raid but a search conducted with purpose, and purpose meant someone had told them exactly what to look for.
She was out of the bed and wrapping both children before Nora reached her door.
"Sable's men," Nora said, breathless, already pressing a small satchel of coin and dried herbs into Wren's free hand. "They are burning the eastern row to flush anyone hiding. You cannot go out the front."
"Then I will not go out the front." Wren's voice had steadied into something flat and functional, the voice of a woman who had run out of room to be afraid and found only the will to move instead. "Thank you, Nora. For all of it."
"Thank me by living," Nora said, and shoved her toward the back stairs.
Wren went out through the apothecary's rear garden with a child bound tight against each hip, moving low along the hedgerow while behind her the eastern row of Fenwick Cross began to burn in earnest, flame climbing the old timber frames with a hunger that turned the night sky the colour of a wound. She did not stop when Finn began to cry, muffling the sound against her shoulder with a desperation that felt like it might crack something permanent in her chest. She did not stop when her bare feet found the frozen edge of the millstream and had to cross it anyway, cold enough to steal her breath entirely.
She stopped only once, at the crest of the hill above the burning town, to look back at the only home she had built for her children in their short lives going up in flame behind her, torches moving through the smoke like something hunting with purpose and patience.
They will not stop looking, she thought, watching a column of riders wheel toward the millstream she had just crossed, close enough now that she could hear the specific words being shouted, the Alpha's bastards, find the Alpha's bastards, and feeling the full, brutal shape of what those words meant land on her all at once. They know exactly whose children you are. Which means I cannot ever again make the mistake of staying in one place long enough for anyone to be certain.
She ran until the fire was a distant orange smear behind her and the riders' voices had faded into the ordinary sounds of a cold, wide night, and only then did she allow herself to stop, sink down against a fence post at the edge of a wood she did not recognise, and hold both her children against her chest while she wept, silently and completely, for the home that had just burned and the years of running she now understood lay ahead of her.
Somewhere three hundred miles north, in a throne hall he had begun to despise for its emptiness, Kade Thornwood woke from a dream he could not fully remember, gasping, both hands pressed flat to his own chest as though something vital had briefly, impossibly, been in danger and then, just as suddenly, was safe again.
He did not know why. He knew only that it had felt, for one unbearable heartbeat, exactly like the moment on the dance floor five months before, and that whatever thread connected him to that feeling had just pulled taut enough to nearly break.