~LYRA'S POV~
Shadowfang's grief didn't look the way I'd expected grief to look.
I'd expected something visible, the heavy, saturated kind of mourning I'd seen in the days after the battle, people sitting in corners and not getting up, the quiet collapse of people who had been running hard for too long and had finally been given permission to stop. I'd seen that in Silverclaw, in Moonveil, in the packhouse halls where warriors had sat against walls with their heads back and their eyes closed and just breathed.
Shadowfang's grief looked like silence and controlled anger.
It looked like people standing very straight when they didn't have to. Like conversations that stopped the moment you entered a room and resumed at a slightly different pitch when you left. Like the particular quality of a pack that was still deciding what it was going to do with the thing it was feeling, and hadn't finished deciding, and wasn't going to be rushed.
—
