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Chapter 2

Between Straw Keeping a secret in a pack is like keeping a spark in a stack of tinder: everything wants to catch. My hut was a square of stolen privacy; The walls wept with age and the roof shivered as rain fell, but it was mine by custom if not by law.

I spread the blue scrap on my knees and tried to talk myself into sense. He had been there and then he had been gone — the world returned to its ordinary cruelties. Why should a scrap of cloth matter?

Because someone else had noticed. On the third day after I found him, I returned to the outer gardens to fetch nettles and a handful of wild thyme when Maris and two of her cronies circled me like predetor ambushing prey

Maris’s nails had grown long and poisonous; her smile was honey that had gone bitter. “You’ve been sneaking out,” she said, like a truth she had been dieing to say. “Tell me who you met, Ivy.”

“I—” My breath sanked . “No one.” “You hides things,” Maris hissed. Her hands dug into my hair and she yanked my head back, exposing my fresh and innocent soft neck. The brand, the mark of the forsaken, gleamed, very obvious at this point.

“Surely even a gutterpup has secrets.” They dragged me toward the servants’ yard. I struggled because I had learned from pain that fighting could sometimes earn respect — or at least make you less of a target. But their hands were practiced. Mine were not.

“Careful,” called a voice. Kellan stood on the kitchen steps, sleeves rolled, cloak tossed aside as if the small elegance of it was a thing he rarely had to muster. He watched us with an expression that meant he was choosing to do nothing and also choosing far more dangerously to just watch us.

Maris pushed me down and shoved something into my palm. A blue, folded small scrap. “Tell,” she said. “Who were you hiding?” I looked at Kellan. For a ridiculous, foolish half-second I thought of asking him to save me, then saw the distance of his face when the servants laughed and the Betas drank in the far hall.

He had not moved, he had only watched, so I lied; “I found it in the yard,” I said, though my voice trembled as if it had been cut. Maris laughed like a thing with no mercy and tossed my hair. “Liar,” she spat. “You would have been skulking to meet him, maybe you were planning to move him into your little shack! How cute, maybe the Alpha’s heir will adopt you!.”

A quick ripple of embarrassed laughter rolled through the crowd. I swallowed the urge to scream. It tasted like rust. Later, as punishment, I was forced to scrub the gutters with my bare hands under the thin, slicing sun. My skin blistered and the shouts of the pack became a drone that lived behind my ribs

The blue scrap burned in my pocket like a coal I could not throw away. That night a half Moon. I was on my knees, hunched over a shallow brazier mending a torn seam in my shawl, when a soft footfall halted me.

I straightened, hands blackened, and saw him. He looked wrong and right at the same time; too clean to have been tossed out of a fight, too tired to be someone who belonged in the palace. He limped when he walked and the corner of his lip bore a thin, angry cut.

Most importantly, he did not try to hide. “I told you to go,” I whispered, because the fear in my voice was a reliable thing. “You told me to go away,” he countered, pressing both palms to the doorframe. “You patched me up and then…you let me go like a thief.”

“You should never have been here,” I said, the words were steadier than my hands. “I could be killed for this.” He smiled then — small and crooked, but bright enough to cut through the dark. “Perhaps,” he said. “Or perhaps you’ll be rewarded.”

“I prefer not to rely on perhaps.” I stood and stepped close. He smelled faintly of rain and forest and something else I couldn’t name — memory, maybe. “Who are you?” He lifted his face, the moon light shone part of his face . “Call me Rowan,” he said. “But names mean different things to different packs.”

“Rowan.” The word felt foreign on my tongue. He winced and lifted his hand like he wanted to touch the blue scrap in my pocket but didn’t. “Why did you help me?” he asked, softly.

My reply surprised me as much as it did him. “Because someone once saved my life,” I said. “Because I remember what it’s like to be left bleeding, and because sometimes…sometimes I think kindness is an act of revenge against a world that wants us small.” I softly but firmly said

The air shifted between us then, not charged like a mating storm but like weather before it decides whether to be kind. Rowan looked at me as if trying to locate me inside myself, as if I might be an illusion he’d been dreaming.

“You will get caught,” he said finally. “If the Alpha’s heirs learn you harbor rogues, they will make an example of you.” “And if they don’t?” I asked. I knew the answer, I also knew I would not let him leave again, not willingly.

Rowan touched my hand for a moment - no longer a healer’s roughness but a stranger’s careful heat. “Stay hidden,” he said. “I’ll come at dusk,bring me more of that bitter root; it helps the fever.”

I hid the blue scrap beneath my mattress. And somewhere in the dark things started to move — the pack like a sleeping animal, shifting, whispering,

When dusk came, Rowan arrived alone,he limped worse, collapsed against the hut and let me tend him like a woman who had no room in her life for neatness but had room enough in her marrow for the act of saving.

He spoke of nothing at first; stories of the road, of windmills that weren’t holy but useful, of the small cruelty of soldiers who stole socks from corpses. When he finally spoke of the pack; of Ravencroft’s southern hunts and of the political tethers that pulled at the royal houses — his words were sharp as knives.

“You saved me because you wanted to,” he said. “Not because you were commanded. That makes you dangerous.” “Dangerous?” I laughed once, that was literally the first time someone called me that, the irony in the word Dangerous,I laughed “I’m dangerous like a footstool.”

“No.” He took my hand and looked at me with those blue eyes again, and in them I saw an echo of the looks Kellan gave me; guarded, curious, sharp, “You are dangerous like a spark in dry straw.”

We spoke then of plans, of ways he might buy time.

He taught me to braid a splint and to bind without leaving obvious marks. He taught me the names of herbs that made the fever reduce or slow the negative effect.

Under his hands the cottage became a tribunal of hope and worry. He said nothing of the pack’s laws, of the punishments for those who sheltered rogues,he simply sat and let me act.

Hours later, when the moon had gone to a long blade and the embers lay like scatered stars, he slid his hand into the pocket of his coat and brought out a small coin.

He held it out to me like an apology.

“For your trouble,” Rowan said. “For the bread you gave me and the silence you kept." He said as I stare in silence "Take it.” I shook my head. “I can’t accept-” He pressed the coin into my palm anyway. The metal was warm and stamped with the sigil of a far northern town I’d never heard of.

“If they come asking, say you bought it,” he murmured. “And Ivy-” he paused, and the hush between us felt like a window someone had left open forgot to close, “If you hear wolves on the wind that aren’t ours.....run.”

The sound he made when he said run was not a jest. The night outside the hut seemed to lean in and listen. We heard the wolves before we saw them

They were not pack wolves; they were different, sharper, multiple. Rowan’s face tightened. He pushed himself up with a groan. “You should go,” he said.

“No.” My voice was a wild thing. “I will not leave you.” He looked at me then, and something like a secret crossed his face, a shadow that pulled the corners of his mouth into a line. “Then you will die with me,” he said, not unkindly.

We stepped out together,from the hedgerow, two figures watched us with faces covered in soot and malice.

One of them carried a lantern,

“Get them,” someone hissed. “The Alpha’s orders don’t matter if the rogue’s blood is hot.” A net unfolded from the bushes and a rope flashed up — and as Rowan lunged to shield me, something bright and cold clipped my ankle.

I tasted iron.