What He Knew

Chapter 16:

Margaret got me inside and put the bar down and I stood in the middle of Mrs. Avery's front room with my hands hanging at my sides and my heart going like a bird in a box.

"Jane."

"Don't."

"Jane. Sit down."

"I don't want to sit down." I turned around. "I want to know what he knew. Margaret. What did he know that he shouldn't have known?"

Margaret's face was grey.

"He said he sat with her," I said. "The night before. He said he asked her not to do it. He knew her. He knew my mother and you never said a word about him and now he's standing on a doorstep in the dark telling me things about my own mother that I've never heard from you—"

"Because I didn't know," Margaret said.

I stopped.

"I didn't know he was there." Margaret's voice was very quiet. "I didn't know he sat with her. I didn't know he asked her not to." She sat down in the chair by the fire and she looked old in a way I hadn't seen yet — not old like an old woman, old like a thing that's been left out in the weather. "I've read that letter a thousand times. She never wrote his name. Not once. The second page is about a man who takes girls and she never put a name to him, and I knew who she meant because I knew the stories, but she never —"

"She never told you it was him."

"She never told me anything about him," Margaret said. "She never told me he was near her. She never told me he came to the house."

The fire cracked.

Mrs. Avery came out of the back room with the baby in her arms and the baby was still asleep and Mrs. Avery's face was wet.

"She's cool," Mrs. Avery said. "She's been cool for ten minutes now. She's not just quiet, Margaret, she's well. She was burning up yesterday and I couldn't get her to take a drop and now she's — look at her. Look at her color."

Margaret looked at the baby.

I looked at my hands.

"Jane," Mrs. Avery said. "Jane, I don't know what you did in there but I've had that child on my hands for two days and every woman in this lane has been through my kitchen and nobody could do a thing—"

"Mrs. Avery," Margaret said. "Sit down."

"I'm fine."

"Ella." Margaret's voice went flat. "Sit down."

Mrs. Avery sat down.

Margaret got up and went to the kettle and did the thing she did when she was thinking, which was not making tea properly. She put the water on and stood over it and didn't move.

"He knew where she was," Margaret said, with her back to us.

"What?"

"Cole Maddox. He said he sat with your mother the night before she died. That means he knew where she was living. He knew where the village was. He knew the house." Margaret turned around. "Four and a half years ago. He knew, and he didn't take her, and he didn't take you."

I stood very still.

"Your mother was a healer with the gift and she was in a village with a daughter who had it too," Margaret said. "And Cole Maddox was in that house and then he left and she died and he didn't come back for nineteen years. Why?"

The kettle started to talk.

"Because she was protected," I said.

"By what? By who?"

"I don't know. You're the one who knows things."

"I don't know everything, Jane. I've been sitting in a cottage for nineteen years, not in a council chamber." Margaret took the kettle off the hook and set it down hard. "But I know a man doesn't walk away from a thing he wants unless something bigger is standing between him and it."

The baby made a small sound in her sleep.

"Mrs. Avery," I said. "When Cole came to your kitchen. When he asked you about the coat. What exactly did he say?"

Mrs. Avery's hands were tight on the baby.

"He said he was looking for a girl who'd left the ceremony," she said. "He said he'd heard there was a girl who'd gone off into the woods and he wanted to know if she was all right."

"And you lied."

"I told him I gave the coat to a girl from the village who'd fallen on hard times and I didn't know where she went." Her chin came up. "And then he asked me a thing that I've been thinking about all day."

"What thing."

"He asked me if the girl had any people." Mrs. Avery looked at me. "He asked me if she had a father or a brother or a pack that would come looking for her. And I said—"

"You said no."

"I said she'd been thrown out in front of three hundred people and if she had people they weren't the kind worth having."

Margaret sat down.

"Ella," she said.

"Well, it's true. It's what everybody's been saying." Mrs. Avery's voice cracked. "And he smiled when I said it. That's the part I keep thinking about. He smiled and he said, 'Well then,' and he went out into the lane like a man who'd had good news."

The fire popped.

"He's not going to take her," Margaret said. "He can't take a woman out of a village. There's laws."

"There's laws about unlicensed healing," Mrs. Avery said. "There's laws about registration. There's laws about a lot of things and none of them stop a man like that."

"Ella—"

"Margaret, I've lived in this village fifty years and I've never once seen a law stop a man from doing a thing he'd already decided to do."

---

The baby woke up at dawn.

Not crying. She woke up and made a sound and Mrs. Avery picked her up and she was pink and warm and she took a bottle and then she lay in her grandmother's arms and looked around the room like a woman taking notes.

I sat in the chair and watched her.

I was so tired I couldn't see straight. It wasn't sleep tired. It was down in the bones, in the marrow, and every time I moved my arms it felt like lifting them through water.

"How do you feel?" Margaret said.

"Fine."

"You're grey."

"I'm always grey. I'm a grey person."

"Jane."

"I'm fine, Margaret."

She looked at me for a long moment and then she got up and went into the back room and I heard her talking to Mrs. Avery, low, in the voice people use when they don't want the person in the next room to hear them.

I sat in the chair.

I reached for her.

The room behind my ribs was empty. I'd stopped being surprised. That was the thing I'd noticed in the night — the reaching had stopped feeling like reaching and started feeling like a habit, like checking a pocket you know is empty.

But this time there was something else.

Not her. Not a wolf. Just — a place where something had been. Not the old cold empty room. A place like a footprint in mud, the shape still there, the water already filling it in.

I sat forward.

"Margaret," I called.

She came out of the back room.

"What is it."

"Come here."

She came and sat down across from me.

"When I healed the baby," I said. "What did you see?"

Margaret looked at me. "What do you mean?"

"My hands. You saw the glow. But you saw something else. You looked at my face like you'd seen the ground move."

Margaret was quiet.

"Margaret."

"You went grey," she said. "Not all at once. It came up out of you. It started at your throat and it went up to your face and you went the color of ash, and your eyes—"

She stopped.

"What about my eyes."

"They went flat. Not your eyes. The light in them. The shine. It went out like a lamp and then it came back." She folded her hands in her lap. "Your mother's did that too. Near the end."

The room was very quiet.

"Near the end," I said.

"Jane—"

"Near the end, Margaret. What does that mean. What end."

Margaret didn't answer.

The baby made a sound and Mrs. Avery said something soft to her and I sat in that chair with my hands in my lap and my heart going and the old woman across from me who knew things she wouldn't say.

"Margaret," I said. "Is it killing me?"

The knock came on the door.

Not three slow knocks this time. Two hard ones and then a voice through the wood, a man's voice, young and scared and familiar.

"Mrs. Avery? Mrs. Avery, it's Dell Harper. Open up. I've got something you need to hear."

Margaret was on her feet and at the window with her hand on the shutter before I could stand up.

"Dell," she called through the wood. "You alone?"

"I'm alone." His voice cracked. "Margaret, please. I've been riding all night."

She opened the door.

Dell Harper stood on the doorstep with his hat in his hands and his face grey and his coat wet through. He looked at Margaret and then past her at me and his mouth opened and closed.

"Jane," he said. "You're alive."

"Barely," I said. "Dell, what's happened?"

He came in and Margaret shut the door behind him and put the bar down, and Dell stood in the middle of the room with his hat in his hands and his chest going.

"He's been to the Hall," Dell said.

"Who."

"The scarred man. Cole Maddox." Dell swallowed. "He went to the Hall last night after he left here and he asked to see the Alpha. And Roderick wouldn't see him, so he stood in the courtyard where everybody could hear and he made an offer."

Margaret's hand closed on the back of a chair.

"What offer," she said.

"He said there's a girl in this territory who's been thrown out of her pack and she's got no people. He said he's been tracking her and he means to claim her under the old law. He said—" Dell looked at me. "He said there's no man in this village who's going to stand up for her because there's no man in this village who thinks she's worth standing up for, and he's willing to be patient about it, but he's got a right to be told where she is."

The fire popped.

"What did Roderick say?" Margaret asked.

"Roderick wouldn't come out. Karl came out."

I looked up.

"Karl?" I said.

"Karl came out onto the step with his father's guard behind him," Dell said, "and he stood there in front of the whole courtyard and he said—" Dell swallowed again. "He said, 'She's not my problem. She was never my problem. If a lone wolf wants to claim a rejected mate with no people, that's between him and the law.' And he went back inside and shut the doors."

The room went cold.

I sat in the chair and looked at Dell Harper's grey face and I heard my own blood and it was loud.

"The old law," Margaret said. "Dell. What's the old law?"

Dell's hat turned in his hands.

"The old law says a lone wolf can claim an unclaimed mate if no male of her pack objects," he said. "It's old. Nobody's used it in a hundred years. But it's still on the books and Karl just stood on his father's step and said he wouldn't object."

Margaret turned around.

She looked at me. Old woman's face, grey and hard and wet at the eyes.

"Jane," she said. "You have to leave."

Chapter (16) Ends