The Luna They Buried Came Back for the Crown · Rhea Wolfe

Chapter 3: Rimewood

I lost eleven days.

Not cleanly. I came up out of the fever in pieces, the way you come up through water in the dark — a low ceiling of black rock, a smell of tallow and juniper smoke, an old woman's hands turning my foot in the light, a man's voice somewhere behind my head saying no, and then nothing again for a long time.

What I woke up to, in the end, was pain, which is how you know you're going to live.

Three ribs on the left, cracked when they lifted me out. My back was one long bruise from the gravel. Both feet had come back wrong — the toes swollen fat and shining and red as boiled meat — and on my right hand the last two fingers were black to the second knuckle and did not hurt at all, which was the only part that frightened me.

"Those go," the old woman said, when she saw where I was looking. "Today or tomorrow. Today's better. You'll write with the other hand."

"I'm left-handed."

"Then you've had luck," she said, "which will be a novelty."

Her name was Nesh. She was seventy or eighty or a hundred; she had a face like a dropped map and she took my fingers off that afternoon with a heated blade and a leather strap between my teeth, and she talked the whole time about a goat.

* * *

The place was called Rimewood.

It sat under a hanging shelf of rock on the wrong side of the north ridge, in a fold of ground so ugly and so steep that Ashenmoor had never once bothered to graze it. Forty-one people. Nine houses dug half into the slope with turf on the roofs, a long hall that was really a cave with a wall built across the mouth, a smoke-hole, a spring that ran even in the hard cold.

I had grown up eleven miles from it and I had never heard the name in my life.

Their laws took four days to learn because there were only three of them and they told me each one twice.

Nobody comes in. Meaning: a stranger who finds Rimewood does not leave Rimewood, unless she can be trusted, and trust is a thing that takes a winter minimum.

Nobody's found. Meaning: they do not go south, they do not trade under their own name, they do not shift on open ground, they burn wood that doesn't smoke, and any one of them who is seen by an Ashenmoor wolf is expected to be dead before he is questioned.

What the snow field gives up, Rimewood keeps. That one was newer. That one had a man's name on it.

"He put that in the book himself, eleven years ago," Nesh said, spitting into the fire. "He was twenty-three. That's the age men start writing laws they have to live inside afterwards."

* * *

His name was Ivar Ketch and he was Alpha of a pack that had been ash for forty-one years.

He came to see me on the sixth day I could sit up. He filled the doorway, which anybody would in a doorway that low, and then he came in and sat on the floor with his back against the wall and his forearms on his knees so that he was lower than me, and I understood that it was deliberate and I hated that I noticed.

He was thirty-four. Black hair going grey at one temple, a nose that had been broken twice in different directions, and a stillness that was nothing like Rook's. Rook was still the way a held door is still. This man was still the way a hillside is.

"You've been asked about your mother four times," he said. "You haven't answered."

"I answered. Marta Halloway. She died when I was nine."

"Where's she buried?"

"The snow field," I said. "The edge of it. No stone."

He looked at the fire for a while.

"Why?" I said. "Say the thing you're not saying."

"Not yet." He got up. At the door he stopped. "You're carrying."

"Yes."

"They knew that when they put you under?"

"I told them," I said. "In front of four hundred. The healer had her hand on my belly when she called me hollow."

Ivar Ketch stood in the doorway with the cold coming past him and he did not say I'm sorry and he did not say that's monstrous, and I have never in my life been so grateful for two silences.

He said: "How long has your wolf been quiet?"

"Since about a week before the Rite. Nearly seven weeks now."

And he shut his eyes. Just for a second. Like a man taking a hit he'd been braced for all week.

"Nesh," he said, to nobody, and walked out into the snow.

* * *

She came that night with the juniper smoke and made me lie flat and put both hands on me the way Cassia had, and it was the same set of movements and a completely different act.

"Wolf-quiet," she said.

"What?"

"That's the old word for it. The first season of carrying, the wolf goes down and won't come up. Sleeps like a stone. Some go five weeks, some go the whole three months." She pressed under my navel with two fingers. "It's the safest thing in the world and there's nothing to do about it but wait."

"That's not true," I said. My voice came out strange. "A carrying wolf is louder. Everyone knows that. Every woman in Ashenmoor—"

"Every woman in Ashenmoor, yes," said Nesh. "That's an Ashenmoor wolf you're describing. I'm describing a Rimewood one."

The fire popped. Somewhere down the slope a dog was barking at the cold.

"Say that again," I said.

"You heard me the first time, girl. You've just decided to make me be the one who does it." She sat back and wiped her hands on her skirt. "Now. Show me the shoulder."

I pulled the shift down off Rook's mark.

It should have been gone. A broken bond leaves nothing — a smear, a burn scar, a place where your skin forgot. I'd seen it on Della Wick after her mate rejected her at midsummer, and it looked like a splash of old candle wax and it made her flinch when anyone touched it.

Mine was silver. Faint, cold, thin as frost on a window, but there, and whole, and every line of it still closed.

Nesh looked at it for a long moment with her mouth pulled in.

"That's not a broken bond," she said. "That's a bond nobody finished. He put you in the ground still holding the other end of it." She let the cloth fall back over my shoulder, almost gently. "Whatever else that man is — and I've an idea — he's a coward in a very particular direction."

* * *

My wolf came back on the twelfth night, and she came back all at once, and I want to tell it the way it happened.

I am carrying water up from the spring in the dark and the moon is three days off full and the snow has that blue in it. And between one step and the next there is a heat in the small of my back like a hand laid flat.

I know it. God, I know it. I have not felt it in seven weeks and I know it the way you know a voice through a wall.

The bucket goes over. I am on my knees in the snow and the heat runs up my spine and out along my collarbones and my jaw comes unhinged at the back, and this time — this time nothing closes. This time the door two rooms away swings wide and there is wind coming through the whole house.

It hurts more than the burial. I want that understood. The shoulders go first and they go like green wood, a long splitting groan inside me, and my hips turn over in their sockets, and my face pushes out into a shape my mind has no language for. My tongue lengthens. My gums split and the teeth come down through them wet. I can hear my own spine going one bone at a time, tick, tick, tick, like a stove cooling.

And then the pain stops being pain and becomes an enormous, unbearable relief, the relief of a held breath let out after twenty-three years, and I am up on four feet in the snow, steaming, and my ears take in the whole valley at once — the spring, the dog, the shelf of rock ticking as it cools, and forty-one heartbeats coming out of nine doorways.

I look down at my own front legs.

They are white. Not grey. Not the smoke-and-iron grey of every Ashgrave and Halloway and Ferren who ever ran that ridge. White, the flat dead white of the snow I was buried under, and up the front of each leg to the shoulder there is a line of pale silver hair that catches the moon and holds it.

The doorways emptied. Forty-one Rimewood wolves came out into the cold and stopped.

And then, in a ragged wave, from the far houses inward, they got down. Every one of them, hands and knees in the snow, foreheads down, the way you do for a thing you have been told about since you were a pup and never once expected to see.

Ivar Ketch did not kneel.

He stood in the door of the long hall with his fists at his sides and his chest going, and he said, "That's not possible," and then, louder, without taking his eyes off me:

"Nesh. Get the book."

And the old woman came out into the snow with her shawl over her head and looked at me for a long time, and what she said she said quietly, almost to herself, and it went through me worse than the shift had.

"I don't need the book," she said. "I birthed that wolf's mother."