Sir Waylon had loved Celestine since they were both children, and she believed him dead. For eleven years he had lived quiet in a small cottage at the village edge, chopping wood and mending armor no one asked him to wear. He wanted three things: her hand, the crown, and the dragon's head on a pike. He had done nothing about any of them. This morning he pressed his forehead to his cold sword and admitted the truth. A dead man wins nothing. He took the silver locket from a nailhead by the door. He had engraved it himself, slow nights, her face from memory. Inside he tucked a folded note. Three words. He whistled, and his falcon dropped from the rafters to his glove. "Take it to the princess," he said. "Only her hand." The bird's dark eyes fixed on him. He tied the locket to its leg, walked outside, and threw his arm to the sky. The falcon climbed and turned toward the distant towers. He should have felt lighter. Instead his stomach knotted. Now she would know. Now there was no hiding behind a grave marker with his name on it. He cut roses from the wild bushes by his fence to bring in person, as the note promised. Reds, blues, yellows, all colors at once. His hands shook. He had never given a woman a flower. Then the falcon screamed. Waylon looked up. His bird wheeled hard, veering back, and behind it something huge broke from the treeline. Silver fur caught the sun. Golden eyes. The werewolf ran on two legs, then four, faster than any horse, jaws open toward the falling shape of the falcon and the locket it carried. It had smelled the silver, or the man, or both. Waylon dropped the roses. He drew his sword and ran into the field. The werewolf reached the falcon first. It leapt, snapped, and missed the bird by a hand's width. The locket's cord tore loose. Silver flashed once and dropped into the tall grass. "Here!" Waylon roared, to pull the beast off his bird. It worked. The werewolf turned and charged him. He set his feet and swung. The blade bit its shoulder. It howled and struck him flat, then bounded away toward the towers, wounded and furious, in the exact direction he had sent his message. Waylon rose, bleeding, and searched the grass. He found the falcon, alive, one wing bent. He did not find the locket. He walked the whole field twice. The note with his three words was gone. Celestine would never receive it now. But a silver-furred monster was running straight toward her walls, cut and screaming, and it had come from his doorstep. He wrapped the falcon against his chest, took up his sword, and started after the beast on foot. If he could not reach her with love, he would reach her with a warning.