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But it wasn’t.

It was at the bottom of the river, too deep and the current too strong to retrieve.

I couldn’t stay on the island without an axe. Trying not to panic, I considered my options. There weren’t many.

Leave the island early and show up before the Godless without an axe? I couldn’t; I wasn’t ready. The idea made my heart race and my stomach squeeze. Besides, I would not be a burden to what I hoped would be my new clan. I had to arrive ready to carry my own, to take care of myself, and that meant showing up with my own axe.

That left me with only one choice. I needed to sneak back to Toke’s village. I knew exactly where Roan kept his axe.

And I was going to steal it.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Roan

Tovin had promised to send word if Fenli showed up.

So far, there’d been nothing.

I’d become more pathetic than I’d ever thought I was capable of. I spent my days looping through the underbrush, not even pretending to hunt game, just searching for her. And I spent my nights a mess, drinking too much, Jory cutting me off and depositing me into my too-big hut to sleep it off.

“I don’t deserve your friendship,” I told him as he dropped me into a chair. “I was an ass. I abandoned you like you meant nothing to me.”

“Yeah, I know it,” he said, “but we were kids. Kids are asses. And you have plenty of time to make it up to me.”

The nights alone in that hut were the worst. I took to spoiling the dog and telling him all my woes until I noticed he’d nodded off and it hit me I was just talking to myself. I’d abandoned the loft and slept with him in her bed, smelling her on the blankets and in the place where she had laid her head.

It had been two weeks since I’d seen her last, since she’d rolled her eyes at my foolishness or scoffed at me to my face, even longer since she’d yelled at me, told me where I could go and what I could do there.

Gods, I missed it. I wanted nothing more than to get scolded by her.

Every day, the odds seemed less likely.

I couldn’t get that image of the deer femur—broken in half and laying in my path as Fen walked away from me—out of my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about the ending it signified, the omen it proclaimed. She’d succumb to the forest. A bear or wolves. Maybe a twisted ankle or broken bone. Fever. Exposure. It was getting colder at night. She wasn’t the type to get lost, but it could happen to the best of them.

The woods could be cruel.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to think of something else, but it never worked. Laying there on her mattress, Goose pressed into my side, I promised myself one thing.

If I saw her again, I wouldn’t hesitate. I would take her face in my hands, and I would kiss her for all I was worth.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Fenli

Ineeded to go back to Toke’s village, and I needed to steal Roan’s axe.

I went over it again and again in my mind. The hinges were silent. If I was slow and careful, I could open the door without a sound. The axe would be hanging right there on the two nails. I only had to reach in with one hand and take it off the wall, then close the door and slip away into the night. He’d be up in the loft, anyway. He wouldn’t hear a thing, and in the morning, he’d be scratching his head when he found his axe was not where he’d left it. And I’d be long gone.

I could do it.

Goose would pose the biggest risk, I thought. But he slept like the dead most of the time, and I wasn’t even sure if Roan would still be putting up with him this long after my departure. He’d likely sent him out on the streets, another dog in the pack.

The thought made my heart squeeze, and I tried to shake it off. I couldn’t have brought him out with me, not so close to the wolves, and they’d take good care of him whether or not he was in the hut. Roan would still play with him, and Ess would make sure he was well fed. Iwould swing back and get him before I headed off to join the Godless, quiet and unseen.

It would have to be enough.

I made it through the water by the light of the gibbous moon. I didn’t bother trying to hide my canoe in the brush. I needed to get in and out as soon as possible; if I wasn’t back before someone discovered my stolen vessel, it was already too late.