The Song of the Fen

Wren Ashby left Ashby Fen at seventeen and never meant to come back. She comes back anyway, to bury her grandmother, and finds the fen dying — sour water, no eels, and the old wolves silent in the reed beds. The landowner says it is drainage. Wren is a hydrologist, and she knows drainage does not leave iron in the mud. What she pulls out of the reed bed is a wolf that has been chained to the family's water rights for thirty years, and a mate bond that arrives like the tide, whether either of them wants it or not. Ewan has forgotten his own name. Wren has spent a decade telling herself she has no pack. Between them there is a contract that stole a village's water, and a parish meeting where it is going to be read out loud.