Chapter 10

 Wren’s POV

I wake up with my cheek against wet wood and no memory of falling asleep, which is becoming a theme in my life that I would very much like to stop.

Everything smells like river.

“Don’t sit up fast,” Maren says. “You’ll go over the side and I’m not going in after you.”

She’s a shape against gray sky, sitting at the back of a flat boat with a pole across her knees. Reeds go past on both sides, taller than she is. My hands are in front of me, not tied, and there’s a wool coat over me that isn’t mine and smells like the herbs in her skin.

“What happened.”

“You don’t remember.”

“No.”

“Good,” Maren says. “That’s the dose working. It’ll wear off by tonight and then you’ll wish it hadn’t.”

I get myself upright anyway. My head swings once and settles.

“Where’s Garrick?”

“In his house, I expect, telling a very large man a great many things six years too late.”

“Where’s the thin man?”

Maren’s pole comes out of the water, drips, goes back in. “Somewhere behind us, and not far enough, and if you want to keep the little bit of luck we’ve got left, you won’t say another word about him until we’re past the crossing.”

“Then tell me one thing.”

“One.”

“Did I get out,” I say, “or did you take me?”

She looks at me properly for the first time since I woke.

“You screamed,” Maren says. “That’s what saved us. He came into that room and put his hand on your face like a man checking fruit at market, and you screamed loud enough to bring the whole kitchen wing running, and in the middle of thirty people shouting in a corridor I got you out through the pantry and he had to stand there and be a guest.” Her mouth does something that isn’t a smile. “You did that. Not me. Remember it later, when you decide I’m the villain of your life.”

“Somebody told me to scream,” I say slowly. “If he touched me. Somebody told me that.”

“Then somebody was smarter than he looked.”

The reeds thin out. Water opens ahead of us, wide and flat and the color of a knife, and I can see the far bank now, and a low stone bridge, and beyond it the black line of trees that means nothing to me because I have not been more than a mile from Garrick’s house since I was sixteen years old.

And that’s when it starts.

Not the growl this time. Something worse. It comes up through the soles of my feet and goes straight into the middle of my chest and it isn’t heat, it’s pull, and it’s not coming from inside me.

It’s coming from across the water.

I make a sound. I can’t help it. My hands go to my sternum like I can hold something in place.

“Maren.”

“I know.” She’s already poling harder. “I can smell it on you. Look at me, girl. Look at my face and not at the trees.”

“Something’s calling me.”

“Yes.”

“You said somebody’s been calling me. For weeks.”

“I said it to frighten your brother.” Maren’s voice has changed. All the flatness has gone out of it and what’s underneath is much older and much more afraid. “I didn’t know it was true.”

“Then what is it?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Maren, what is on the other side of that water?”

“Your mother’s people,” she says.

The boat bumps the bank.

I don’t move. I can’t. Because there are eleven words sitting in my chest that have never once been said out loud in front of me in six years, and one of them is people, and one of them is mother, and the two of them together do not fit in the story I have been carrying since I was sixteen.

“My mother was Thornhollow.”

“Your mother married Thornhollow.” Maren ties off the boat with two savage jerks of the rope. “Your mother came out of the north with a scar on her back and no pack behind her and a name she made up in a coaching inn, and she was the best liar I have ever met in my life, and I loved her, and she asked me one thing before she died.”

“What.”

“To make you boring.” Maren straightens up. “She said, Maren, if it ever comes for her, make her boring, and don’t you dare tell her why.”

Somewhere out past the treeline, faint, thinned by distance and water, something howls.

It isn’t a wolf. I have lived my whole life among wolves and I know what they sound like at every hour of the day. This is lower. Longer. It goes on far past the point where a set of lungs should have finished with it.

And every part of me that Maren buried six years ago sits up and answers it.

My knees go. The world tips sideways and I catch the gunwale with both hands, and I hear myself make a sound I have no control over at all, and the wet wood under my fingers cracks.

Not splinters. Cracks. A clean split from my thumb to my wrist.

Maren looks at my hand. Then at my face.

“Well,” she says quietly. “That’s the end of boring.”

And from the trees on the far bank, close now, not distant at all, a man’s voice calls out a name across the water in a tone of absolute delight.

It isn’t Wren.

“Hello, Elske,” he says. “Your mother told me you were dead.”