Chapter 2

Chapter 2

They put me in the infirmary with a locked wolf, and my family's first question was what it would do to the Alpha's name.

I came up in the infirmary two days later with my wolf still down, and the first face I saw was Rev's.

She'd brought soup and two of my aunts, and arranged herself on the edge of the bed where the ward could see her sit.

She has brought me something to drink before every full moon for eleven years. A tonic for the pain, she calls it.

She makes it herself, she never lets anyone else carry it, and I have drunk it in front of my mother one hundred and thirty-two times. I did not drink this one.

I said my throat was raw and asked Cass to leave it on the side, and when Rev had gone I poured two inches of it into a sample jar and wrote the date on the lid.

"Don't blame them," she said, holding my hand. "Blame me. I should have looked after you better."

By evening the version going round the lodge was that Rev had gone to see me and I hadn't so much as thanked her.

Corin came at four with a clipboard, because the winter allocation had to be signed and he wasn't making a second trip.

"You're off the training roll," he said, ticking it as he said it. "That drops you to a half share."

"Then I'll take the duplicate."

"It's an internal roll."

He let the silence do its work.

"It's my name coming off it." I put my hand out and held it there until the ward got uncomfortable. "Carbon copy. Now, please."

He tore it off because nine people were watching, and it went into the back of my notebook before he had the board turned round.

I told him I was off the roll because I'd been carried off the field.

"You're off it because you didn't finish." He turned the board round for my signature and did not offer me the pen. "Nobody's punishing you, Wynn. It's what the column says."

Garrick came at six and stood at the end of the bed with his hands behind his back.

He asked me, in a low kind voice, whether I'd considered how hard all this attention was on my mother.

He never decides anything. He arrives after the decision and makes it sound like a kindness.

Cass Wray, pack physician, the only wolf in that lodge who has never been frightened of my mother, came at eight with two envelopes and shut the door with her foot.

She put the smaller one on the blanket first and did not say anything while I opened it.

Sample 4471-A. Aconitum. Sub-lethal. Consistent with repeated low-dose administration.

"Say it in words."

"Wolfsbane," Cass said. "Not enough to kill anything. Exactly enough to hold a shift down about nine minutes, if you took it the same night every month for years."

I read the line four times. Eleven years of being told I wasn't trying, and it fits on one sheet of paper with a lab stamp in the corner.

"Who else has seen this?"

"Nobody. It's addressed to you." Cass sat down on the end of the bed. "Wynn. That's a criminal matter in both territories."

"Then it keeps until I can put it in front of both territories."

I signed the receipt slip and had her photograph it, and that night I sent a copy north.

Then I had her seal three identical sample jars from the same batch. One stayed with her. One went into the advocate's box in the north.

The third went to a guild vault four territories over, under a number and not a name, where neither my mother nor Garrick has ever had standing to ask a single question.

Then she gave me the second envelope, which was my own file.

"You should see this."

Every pup with a condition gets an exemption lodged with the elders before the Trials. One form, one Alpha's mark, eleven minutes.

Cass files thirty a year and nobody in the territory hears a word about any of them.

Mine was not there.

"I wrote it in June. Put it on her desk on the fourth." Cass didn't sit down. "She sent it back on the sixth and asked me to leave it out of the file."

The room went a long way away for a moment.

"Out of the file."

"Her words were that she'd rather it wasn't on paper at all." Cass's jaw was doing something. "I made a note of it. I've worked for four Alphas and I'm not stupid. Page three."

Page three is eleven lines in Cass's handwriting. Alpha advised. Alpha declined to lodge. Alpha requested the draft be destroyed. Copy retained by Infirmary.

My mother's own initials are at the bottom, because she initials everything without reading it. So there was no form.

Which means that on the night of the Trials no record existed anywhere in this territory that I had ever locked, and every wolf in that ring was told the truth exactly as they'd been given it.

"Can I have a copy?"

"It's an internal file."

"Cass." I got my hand out from under the blanket. "In six years the only paper with my name and the word lock on it has been a notebook in my own pocket."

She photographed all three sheets and sent them to me before she left the ward. I sent them north the same night.

That's the first thing I ever did that they'd have called an attack, and it was a copy of a page that already existed.

Dez came after the elder sitting with a bandage on his forearm. They'd put him on report — a year's rank, which for a wolf with one rank is all of it.

"It's fine," he said, before I could start. "I had one rank."

"Dez."

He turned his forearm over and looked at the bandage instead of at me.

"Your brother spoke against me." He said it flat, the way you report weather. "He told the bench a low wolf broke rank to make the Alpha look bad in front of two territories."

"Did anybody ask him why you'd want to do that?"

"Rev did."

He almost smiled. She had said she was sure Dez meant well, and then asked whether anybody had checked how long he'd been standing near me at gathers.

That was the end of it. The letter had been in my jacket five days, two feet from his elbow. I did not hand it to him.

Instead I asked Cass for a phone and called a number I had read eleven times and never dialled.

The advocate answered on the second ring and wasted none of it.

My father had weeks, not months. The writ was lodged and could not be undone, and the moment he died I became the largest single claim in two territories.

"There is a woman in his house who has spent eleven years expecting to be that claim herself," he said.

"What's her name?"

"She doesn't use one." Paper moved. "Northern border packs, no line. Your father brought her in eleven years ago."

Eleven years. I sat in a hospital bed forty miles south and did the arithmetic on the year Rev arrived here.

Then I said nothing about it to anybody, including the man on the phone.

Do nothing, he told me. Say nothing. Let them all go on thinking they are dealing with a girl who cannot shift.

So I said nothing, and lay there nineteen days learning to hold a thing without spending it.

On the last night Cass signed me out and stopped in the doorway.

"Your mother comes down every night after the lodge closes," she said. "Stands outside that door ten minutes. Then goes home and makes the moon broth, and it goes in the bin by morning."

She waited, in case I wanted to do something with that.

On the sixth of June my mother read a piece of paper with my illness on it and asked for it to be destroyed.

On the fourth Thursday of that month she stood in front of the elders and said the Trials had been run correctly.

"Then it isn't for me," I said.

A stranger stood at the end of Cass's lane at midnight, close enough to the dispensary shutters to read the labels through the slats, and gone by the time she opened the door.