Chapter 32: Your Queen Does

Naya read the report a third time, checking the name against her map again in case she’d simply missed it somewhere along the border. She hadn’t. The village asking for aid didn’t exist on any current royal record.

"Is this a mistake?" she asked the aide who’d delivered it.

"The request came through the eastern relief network," he said. "According to the message, the people there are starving."

Ronan took the report from her hands, and she watched his expression shift the moment he read the location.

"This territory was abandoned," he said.

"Why?"

"Because no one lives there anymore."

Except, apparently, someone did.

Naya wanted to send supplies immediately. Ronan refused, explaining that the region had been abandoned decades earlier due to dangerous wolf activity and boundaries that had never fully stabilized.

"Then why did someone send us a request?" Naya asked.

He didn’t have an answer to that, and for the first time since they’d started working as partners, they genuinely disagreed.

"If we’re responsible for this kingdom," Naya said, "we can’t ignore people because they’re inconvenient."

"And if it’s a trap?"

"Then we find out."

Ronan’s jaw tightened slightly. He wasn’t used to being challenged on decisions involving the crown, especially when the danger was uncertain and the consequences could extend beyond them. Yet Naya didn’t back down. She wasn’t asking him to ignore the risk. She was asking him to acknowledge that doing nothing carried one too.

He studied her for a long moment before finally agreeing to investigate himself.

Darius objected the moment he heard the plan, arguing that the King shouldn’t walk into abandoned territory based on an anonymous request with no verification behind it. Naya pointed out that sending soldiers instead would likely terrify whoever actually lived there, assuming anyone did. Ronan settled it by deciding on a small royal party rather than a full guard, and Darius reluctantly agreed to come along despite his objections.

Kael found them as they were preparing to leave, immediately teasing Ronan about dragging his wife into another dangerous expedition.

"Should I start placing bets on how this ends?" Kael asked.

"No," Ronan said.

"I could come."

"No."

Kael laughed it off easily, wishing them safe travels before wandering back toward the palace, and Naya found herself smiling despite the tension of the morning. His presence lasted only a moment, but it was enough to break the heaviness that had settled over them.

The journey took them through territory that grew increasingly wild the further they traveled. The royal road eventually disappeared into overgrown paths, and old boundary stones began appearing at irregular intervals, some cracked with age, others still bearing carvings Naya didn’t recognize at all. Wolf symbols, worn smooth by weather, arranged in patterns unlike anything she’d seen in the palace archives.

"What are these?" she asked, slowing her horse beside one of the stones.

"Older than the Veyr dynasty," Ronan said.

She dismounted and touched the surface of the stone, tracing the worn edges of the symbol with her fingers. For a brief moment, something strange washed over her, an inexplicable sense of familiarity that made no sense given she’d never been anywhere near this territory in her life. It wasn’t simply recognition. It felt almost like remembering something she had never experienced.

She pulled her hand back quickly.

"What happened?" Ronan asked, watching her.

"Nothing," she said.

His eyes remained on her for another second, clearly unconvinced, but he didn’t push. That small restraint made her more uneasy than questioning would have.

She didn’t understand it herself, and there was no way to explain something she couldn’t put words to, so she let it go and climbed back onto her horse.

They reached the village by late afternoon. It sat tucked into a clearing surrounded by dense forest, small and poor, homes built from whatever materials the land had offered. People were genuinely living there, thin and weathered but alive, moving between houses with the quiet efficiency of a community that had survived on its own for a very long time.

There were no royal banners, no marked roads, no signs that anyone here had expected visitors from the outside world. It felt less like they had discovered a forgotten village and more like they had accidentally stepped into a place that had deliberately remained forgotten.

The moment they saw Ronan’s royal insignia, the atmosphere shifted entirely. Not respect. Fear, immediate and visible, rippling through the small crowd that had gathered.

An elderly man stepped forward, his eyes settling on Ronan with something between resignation and dread.

"You shouldn’t have come here," he said.

"Who sent the request for aid?" Ronan asked.

The man looked at Naya, then back at Ronan. "We didn’t."

Silence spread through the clearing. Someone had used their name, their location, without their knowledge, to bring the crown directly to their door.

While Ronan continued questioning the villagers, Naya noticed an old woman standing apart from the others, staring at her with an intensity that made Naya’s skin prickle. Unlike the others, the woman didn’t seem frightened of Naya. She seemed to be searching her face for something.

The woman approached slowly, studying Naya’s face for a long moment before finally speaking.

"You’re one of them."

"One of who?" Naya asked.

The woman’s expression shuttered instantly. "Nothing." She backed away before Naya could press further, disappearing into the small crowd before Ronan even noticed the exchange had happened.

Naya stood there, unsettled, turning the woman’s words over without finding anything to attach them to.

Ronan’s questioning revealed something else entirely. The villagers weren’t rogue wolves living outside the law by choice. They were descendants of a pack officially declared extinct generations ago, surviving quietly beyond the reach of royal records ever since.

"Why hide from the crown?" Naya asked the elder.

"Because the last time the crown found us," he said, "it didn’t come to help."

Ronan’s expression tightened at that, something clearly landing that he hadn’t expected, a piece of history that didn’t match whatever version he’d grown up believing.

For several seconds, nobody spoke. Naya watched Ronan carefully, seeing the question form in his eyes before he finally asked what had happened. The elder only shook his head.

"That is a story your kingdom chose to forget."

Before they left, Naya noticed a symbol carved into the wood above one of the houses, worn with age but unmistakable. The same symbol she’d seen carved into the boundary stone on their way in.

"What does this mean?" she asked Ronan.

He studied it for a long moment, his brow furrowing. "I don’t know."

The elder, standing nearby, spoke quietly before turning to walk away.

"Your Queen does."

Naya turned toward him instantly. "What?"

But the old man was already retreating into the trees, leaving her standing beneath the symbol with a question she had no answer for, and a growing certainty that something about this place, and about herself, ran far deeper than anyone had bothered to tell her.