This chapter arrives Friday. Until then, a taste of what is coming:

By daylight Wrenna plays the good daughter while Tomas Beck courts her with threats dressed as concern: the Wolf has taken girls before, he warns, and left them ruined and raving. Kael answers in his own language — a warm stone, a feather, three claw cuts on the path marker — and Wrenna answers his by wearing red to market, letting the whole village watch her choose the color of her supposed shame.

Then Mother Ysolde confronts her at last — not with horror, but with the family truth: the cloak was sewn for a woman who intended to be found. The chapter ends on the question Wrenna has avoided for three years: what really happened to the last girl the Wolf hunted?