The wolves hit the clearing from the rider's blind side.
Not all at once. That would have been cleaner. This came in pieces. A blur between trunks, grey fur cutting low through snow, then a horse screaming and rearing so violently the mounted man nearly went out of the saddle backward.
The first wolf did not go for Peter.
It went for the horse's throat.
The second came in from the left, teeth bared white against winter-dark fur, and launched itself at the axe-man before his limp could let him recover enough to plant his feet.
Everything that had been human tension a second ago broke into animal panic.
The horses lost their minds. One bolted immediately, crashing through brush with reins flailing. The mounted rider still on the other one hauled back hard enough to nearly pull the bit through the animal's mouth. The archer swore and dropped his knife in the snow reaching for the bow he had no room to use. The spearman, to his credit, moved toward the wolves instead of away.
Peter had exactly half a second to decide what kind of person he was going to be here.
Run.
It was a real option. Maybe the smartest one. The men were distracted. The woods were open behind him. He could vanish into the trees, take his chances with the cold and the map and the sensor, leave them to their own world and its own problems.
Except that one of those problems was currently attached to a horse's neck.
And the other was trying to drag a man face-first into the snow.
Peter moved before the thought finished forming.
He crossed the clearing in three strides and drove the butt of the staff into the first wolf's ribs just behind the shoulder. Hard enough to knock it sideways off the horse without pulping the animal underneath it. The wolf hit snow, rolled, came back up with a sound that was less a bark than a tear in the air.
The horse thrashed, front hooves striking out.
"Easy, easy, easy," Peter said automatically, which was insane because horses from medieval fantasy death forests did not, as a rule, calm down because a bruised stranger from Queens asked nicely.
The second wolf had the axe-man by the forearm now, jaws locked on leather and fur and probably skin beneath. The man screamed once, guttural and furious more than afraid, and hacked downward with his free hand too wildly to do much except invite himself to lose fingers.
Peter pivoted and vaulted through the churned snow.
The world narrowed.
Cold air. Wolf's back. Axe-man's blood on the wind. Staff in hand. Pain in his shoulder like a bright thread through everything.
He brought the staff down across the wolf's spine with enough force to stun, not kill. The blow landed. The wolf let go. Twisted instantly, faster than anything that size should have been able to move, and came for him instead.
Good.
Better him than the man on the ground.
The leap was all muscle and teeth. Peter met it halfway, one hand shooting out by reflex. He caught the animal at the chest and neck and for one ugly second stared straight into yellow eyes rimmed in white frost.
The wolf was bigger than any he'd seen in zoos. Leaner too. Hunger stretched over bone.
He redirected rather than stopped. Turned with the momentum and hurled it sideways into a drift where it vanished in an explosion of snow.
That was too much strength. He knew it as he did it.
No time to care.
The spearman shouted something to the others. The word came through clear enough this time.
Back. Or behind. Hard to tell.
Peter looked up.
A third wolf had appeared at the edge of the clearing.
Then a fourth.
He saw now what the howls had been warning of. Not one or two opportunists. A hunting pack, spread out and smart enough to use panic as a weapon. They had circled in while the men focused on Peter. He was not the only thing in these woods capable of reading distraction and exploiting it.
The rider who had nearly been unhorsed was on the ground now, tangled in reins and cursing as his horse bucked away. One of the new wolves veered toward him.
Peter swore and moved.
The spearman got there first.
He drove the spear two-handed into the wolf's shoulder. Not a kill shot. Enough to turn it. The animal snapped around the shaft, snarling, and the spearman nearly lost his footing in the snow. Peter closed the last distance and hit the wolf broadside with the staff before it could climb the weapon into the man's hands.
The wolf yelped and rolled.
The spearman looked at Peter, close enough now that Peter could see frost caught in the man's beard and a burst blood vessel in one eye.
No gratitude there.
Only shock. Then renewed suspicion. But laced now with the kind of unwilling recalculation that came when the thing you thought was a threat saved your life in front of you.
"Left!" Peter shouted in English, because apparently his brain had given up on consistency under stress.
The spearman did not understand the word, but he understood Peter's head turning and turned with him in time to catch another wolf trying to angle through brush toward the horses.
What followed had no clean shape.
Just fragments.
Snow kicked high by hooves and boots.
The archer finally finding enough room to get a shot off and planting an arrow into a wolf's flank at near point-blank range.
Peter using the staff like an extension of his own bad decisions, striking low, redirecting lunges, driving animals away from throats and bellies instead of toward cleaner kills.
The axe-man back on his feet, arm bleeding through a torn sleeve, swinging short and ugly and effective.
The mounted rider finally getting his horse under enough control to wheel it across the edge of the clearing and break the pack's line.
For maybe thirty seconds they were not strangers or enemies or accusations.
They were just men trying not to get eaten.
Then one of the wolves made the mistake of going for Peter's leg.
His spider-sense finally cut clean through the noise.
Too late to be elegant. In time to be final.
Peter stepped aside. Caught the wolf by the scruff and hindquarter mid-lunge. The animal twisted, claws raking across his jacket, and Peter's body did the rest without asking permission from the part of his brain still trying to appear human.
He lifted it.
One-handed.
Not high. Not dramatic. Just enough to break the line of attack and slam it bodily into the trunk of a pine hard enough that bark exploded and the wolf dropped limp into the snow.
Silence hit the clearing in patches.
Not complete silence. Horses still blowing hard. Men breathing. Wind moving through branches overhead.
But enough.
The surviving wolves broke first.
The one with the arrow in its flank gave a sharp, awful bark and backed into the trees. Another limped after it. Then the rest were gone, grey shapes swallowed by trunks and distance with the speed wild things always have when they decide a fight is no longer worth the blood.
Peter stood in the middle of the wrecked clearing with the staff in both hands and his breath burning in his chest.
Blood dripped from the sleeve where claws had cut through the jacket.
Not deep. Probably. He didn't feel deep. Everything hurt too much in general to parse specifics.
No one moved.
The horse nearest him rolled an eye white with terror and backed away.
The axe-man spit blood into the snow.
The archer lowered his bow slowly.
The spearman was still watching Peter.
Watching his hands. His stance. The broken bark on the pine where the wolf had hit. The impossible set of details that did not add up to any kind of man he understood.
Peter lowered the staff first.
Not all the way. He wasn't suicidal. But enough.
"Everybody alive?" he asked, then remembered himself and switched clumsily into the local tongue. "Alive? You?"
The axe-man barked a laugh that had no humor in it. "Mostly."
That one Peter understood in full.
The rider on the ground got to his feet using the horse's saddle for leverage. He was younger than Peter had guessed, maybe only twenty-five, with a fresh split in one eyebrow and a look on his face that had not yet decided between rage and fear.
He pointed at Peter and said something fast. Too fast. The local language blurred when delivered through adrenaline and winter and blood loss.
Peter only caught enough to know the shape.
Not man.
The old accusation had gotten promoted.
The spearman said one sharp word and shut the others up.
Then he bent, picked his dropped spear out of the snow, and turned the point toward Peter.
Not lunging. Not attacking. Just there. A line between them. Definition.
Peter looked at the spear.
Then at the three men now spreading out subtly despite their injuries. The archer with his bow back up. The axe-man favoring one arm but still very much able to swing. The younger rider moving to recover the horses.
He could leave.
Still.
They were tired. Hurt. Off balance. He was faster than all of them, stronger than all of them, and if he wanted to disappear into the Wolfswood before they recovered enough to stop him, he probably could.
But probably had become a dangerous word in the last twelve hours.
Also, and this was the really infuriating part, leaving after that would make everything worse. Not just with them. For him. He needed roads. Shelter. Human information. Winterfell. He needed people, and people had just watched him catch spears bare-handed and throw wolves around like furniture.
There was no version of this now where he got to be normal.
The North had made up its mind on that.
The spearman stepped forward once, spear still raised, and spoke slowly enough for Peter to understand every word.
Drop. The staff.
Peter looked down at it.
Dorje's impossible weapon. His extra reach. His best defense that didn't rely on web fluid or miracles. The one thing in this forest that made him feel less naked.
He thought about refusing.
The archer drew his bowstring another inch.
Peter thought about how many arrows these men likely had and how bad it would be to get pinned in the snow because he was sentimental about a magic stick.
He let out a breath and planted the staff upright in the drift. Let go.
That got him exactly zero trust, but it did lower one layer of immediate murder from the clearing.
Now the spearman pointed at Peter's wrists.
Bind him.
That one Peter understood before anyone moved.
"Come on," he said before he could stop himself. Then, because English was not doing him favors, he tried in their language. "No need. I will walk."
The axe-man, bleeding and limping and in no mood for reason, said something that did not require full translation. Rope. Now.
The younger rider produced it from his saddle.
Of course he did. Medieval men on horseback just had rope. Peter would have respected the preparedness under different circumstances.
The rope looked rough. Hemp maybe. Thick enough to hurt.
He watched it in the younger man's hands and knew there was a narrow window left for this to stay nonlethal and nonstupid.
So, he made himself very still.
The younger rider approached carefully, like Peter was an injured bear that might or might not decide to stand up on its hind legs and remove his head. Up close, the man's hands were shaking. Peter saw it clearly. Saw blood on the cuffs where somebody else's injury had already transferred there.
"I'm not going to fight you," Peter said softly.
The man did not understand the words.
But maybe the tone traveled, because his grip tightened less than it might have.
The rope went around Peter's wrists.
He let it.
That was the moment the clearing changed.
Not when the wolves attacked. Not when Peter stopped the spear. Not when he threw one of the wolves into a tree.
Here. The instant he allowed the rope. Human choice replacing spectacle. Submission where violence would have been easier. Peter felt all four men reassess again, just a little, because monsters did not usually choose to be tied up by men they could break in half.
Or maybe the North had stranger monsters than he knew.
The younger rider pulled the knot too tight. Peter bit back the reflexive correction and said nothing.
The spearman circled once, collecting dropped gear.
He picked up Peter's staff and held it for a moment. Weighed it. Dark wood against gloved hands. The iron-capped ends. The perfect balance. His eyes narrowed.
Then he handed it to the archer instead of keeping it himself.
Interesting.
He was not stupid, this man. Wounded and suspicious and ready to run a spear through a stranger, yes. But not stupid. He was distributing threats. Managing variables. Acting like somebody trusted with responsibility.
Peter filed that away.
The satchel came next.
"No," Peter said before he could help it.
The spearman looked up sharply.
Peter switched languages too late and too badly. "Need that. Mine."
The spearman ignored him, opened the flap, and rummaged.
This was bad. This was all bad.
The notebook came out first.
Peter's entire Atlas lexicon, repair data, maps, letters, all of it wrapped in cloth and now in the hands of a man who could not read English and maybe not read much at all but could absolutely decide paper meant secrets and secrets meant danger.
The man flipped it open.
Stared at the first page he hit.
Then at Peter.
The page was half Atlas script, half English notation.
To a northern hunter in the Wolfswood it probably looked exactly like demon homework.
Peter tried, "Not magic."
The archer laughed once. Short and ugly.
Fair.
The spearman leafed through more pages. Maps. Symbols. Notes. May's letter was not in there, thank God, still tucked deeper in Peter's jacket. But enough was.
He closed the notebook and shoved it back into the satchel.
Interesting again.
He had not thrown it away. Had not ripped it up. Had not burned it on principle.
He wanted it. Evidence, maybe. Or value. Or answers.
Peter could work with wanting answers better than he could work with holy fire.
The younger rider gathered the web-shooters too, detached enough from modern engineering to only understand that they were wrist-mounted things on a stranger and therefore suspicious by default. He frowned at them, looked like he wanted to ask, decided language and circumstance made that useless, and stuffed them into the satchel's outer pouch instead.
The sensor followed. The first aid kit. Everything except the signal coin, still hidden in Peter's pocket, and May's folded envelope.
At least some things stayed his.
When they were done, the spearman stepped in close enough that Peter could feel the cold coming off his furs.
He studied Peter's face like he was trying to decide whether there was a sane explanation hidden somewhere under the bruises and split lip.
Then he said a word Peter had not heard yet but understood from context the instant it landed.
Prisoner.
Peter looked at the rope around his wrists.
"Yeah," he said quietly. This time he did not bother translating. "Figured that one out."
The spearman gestured toward the horses.
Winterfell, maybe. Or come with us. Or both.
Either way, the meaning was plain enough.
Peter Parker, bruised and cold and twelve hours into another reality, was not escaping into the woods today.
He was going south tied up behind armed strangers.
Honestly, there were worse outcomes.
Not many. But some.
The younger rider took the rope and gave it an unnecessarily hard tug toward the horses.
Peter stumbled once in the churned snow, recovered, and started walking.
Behind him, the clearing still held the marks of what had happened. Blood in the snow. Hoof gouges. Broken bark. The white-red weirwood watching with its carved face.
Ahead, through the trees, the North opened in long frozen miles toward a castle Peter had only seen on a map and in dreams.
Winterfell.
Good, he thought bleakly. Great. Exactly where I wanted to arrive. As a bound witch under armed escort.
He almost laughed.
Didn't.
And walked on.
[END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO]
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