Petra Jorn swung the axe until her palms bled, then wrapped them and swung again. She had cut a full cord before the other woodcutters crawled from their tents. She worked this hard for one reason: the black wolf with the silver streak on its shoulder was watching her again from the treeline, and she meant to make it stay. The wolf had followed her for months. It first appeared the night she came back from burying a man at the camp, mud caked to her elbows, shovel still in her hand. The other wolves would not go near it. Neither would the other cutters. Petra had gotten within six feet of it once. It had held her eyes and not run. She wanted it closer than that. She wanted it walking at her heel. Today she had a plan. She had traded two days of her cut wood for a haunch of venison from the cook. She carried it out past the stumps to the edge of the pines and set it on a flat stone. Then she stepped back ten paces and sat in the dirt. The wolf came to the treeline. It looked at the meat. It looked at her. It did not move. She waited. The sun climbed. Flies found the venison. The wolf lay down in the ferns and put its head on its paws, watching her the way a person watches a stranger across a road. Petra understood then. It was not hungry. The camp cook threw scraps out every night. Whatever the wolf wanted from her, it was not food. She had brought the wrong offering, and if she kept sitting here with meat between them, it would learn she had nothing worth crossing the ground for. It would drift back into the deep woods and she would not see it again. She stood up slowly. She left the venison on the stone. She turned her back on the wolf, which no one at camp would have called safe, and she walked. She walked past the stumps, past the camp, past the road, until the pines thinned and she came out above a clearing she had not seen before. A small cottage sat in it. Pine board walls, slate roof, red shutters, a porch with two steps. Smoke did not rise from the chimney. No boots stood by the door. Petra stopped at the edge of the clearing. She looked back. The wolf was behind her. Not six feet. Not ten. Thirty yards, in the trees, matching her pace. It had followed her away from the meat. She understood what it wanted now. Not food. A place. Somewhere that was not the camp, not the graves, not the other wolves. Somewhere quiet enough for it to come the rest of the way. Petra looked at the empty cottage and started toward the porch.