The third day brought the first difficulty.
Not a crisis. I want to be precise about that, because the word crisis had lived in my vocabulary for a long time and with specific weight—applying it to something manageable would be its own kind of inaccuracy. It was difficult. A wolf in the outer settlement, older, established, someone who had been at Black River since before I arrived, who saw Alaric in the market square and whose wolf-sense produced an instinctive alarm.
He didn't act on it. He stood still and then removed himself from the situation with the self-possession of someone who understood that his instinct was not the same as the truth. But Alaric felt it. He came and found me an hour later with the contained expression of someone working through something.
"Someone feared me,"
