Chapter 12

Wren’s POV

They keep her in a root cellar under a house with no smoke.

Isen goes down the steps first with a lamp. Maren comes last, which puts me between them, and I have enough of my wits left to notice that neither of them planned it any other way.

The cellar is cold and dry and smells like earth and old apples. Someone has put a real bed down here, and a chair beside it, and a shelf with a cup on it, and all that care makes what’s on the bed worse instead of better.

She’s a woman about forty. Small. Grey at the roots and dark at the ends. Her hands are folded on top of a blanket that has been tucked in by someone who does it every day, and her eyes are open, and she is not in the room with us at all.

“Nell,” Isen says. “I’ve brought somebody.”

Nothing.

“Eleven years?” I ask.

“Eleven in the spring.”

“Does she eat?”

“If you put it in her mouth.” He sets the lamp down. “She walks, if you walk her. She sleeps when it’s dark. She’s a body doing the things a body does, and everything else is under about a mile of stone.”

“Who bound her?”

Isen doesn’t answer.

“Who bound her,” I say again.

“My sister did,” he says. “Your mother.”

The cellar tilts. I put a hand on the doorframe.

“Why?”

“Because Nell was going to be sold, and a bound wolf sells for a tenth of what a whole one does.” Isen pulls the chair round and sits down heavily in it, like a man who has told this story before and never once enjoyed it. “That was Alva’s answer to everything at the end. Make them worthless. She did it to Nell and she did it to two others I know of and then she did it to you, or had it done, which amounts to the same. Your mother spent the last four years of her life spoiling merchandise.”

“Merchandise.”

“Wolves, girl.”

“Somebody sells wolves?”

“Somebody has sold wolves for longer than either of us has been alive.” He rubs his face. “You want to know what our blood is worth? Here it is. There are men who move wolves the way other men move cattle, and a wolf that fights is a problem. Cages, dosing, handlers, losses. Expensive. But a wolf that’s bound is luggage. It walks where you point it and it doesn’t bite and it doesn’t run, and if you can bind it and loosen it at will, then what you’re actually selling is an obedient wolf that turns back into a real one when the buyer’s paid.”

He looks at me.

“Maren’s craft takes three people, a night’s work, and a great deal of luck. Ours takes blood and a hand. That’s it. That’s the whole difference, and that difference is why your mother ran north with a scar on her back, and why they were still looking for her sixteen years later, and why the price on you is what it is.”

I sit down on the cold floor because my legs have stopped negotiating.

“Then I’m a tool.”

“You’re the last one that works,” Isen says.

“That’s the same sentence.”

“It is.”

Maren, from the steps: “Tell her the rest.”

“I’m getting there.”

“Tell her now, Isen, or I will, and I’ll do it uglier.”

Isen’s jaw tightens. “It goes both ways. Loosening and setting. Same hand, same blood, and it does not come with instructions. A girl who’s never been taught can reach for one and get the other.” He nods at the bed. “So if you touch Nell today with no training and no idea what you’re doing, there’s a fair chance you don’t wake her. There’s a fair chance you push her the rest of the way down, and there’s some chance you take yourself with her.”

“And you brought me down here anyway.”

“I did.”

“Because you want her back.”

“Because I have sat in that chair for eleven years,” Isen says, and his voice finally cracks somewhere in the middle of it, “and she is my wife, and you are the first thing that’s happened in all that time.”

Nobody says anything for a while.

I look at the woman on the bed. At the tucked-in blanket. At the cup on the shelf that somebody fills and empties and fills again for a person who has never once asked for it.

“What was she like?” I say.

“Loud,” Isen says. “God, she was loud.”

And that’s what does it. Not the pull, not the story, not the price on my blood. It’s a man in a cellar using the past tense about somebody who is lying right there in front of him.

I stand up.

“Don’t,” Maren says sharply.

“I’m not touching her.” I go to the bed and crouch beside it and put my hands flat on my own knees where everyone can see them. “Nell. My name is Wren. Apparently it isn’t, but it’s the one I’ve got.”

Nothing.

“I’ve been buried six years,” I say. “You’ve been under eleven. I don’t know if you can hear a word of this. But I know what it’s like to be in a house where everyone talks about you and nobody talks to you, so I thought somebody ought to say your name at you instead of over you.”

The lamp flame stands straight up.

Isen comes out of the chair so fast it goes over.

Nell’s hand moves. Not much. Two fingers, curling in on the blanket, the way you’d take hold of a rope you couldn’t see.

And her mouth opens, and what comes out is dry and cracked and barely a voice at all, and it is unmistakably a question.

“Alva?”

“No,” I whisper. “No. I’m hers.”

Nell’s eyes come round. Slowly. Wrongly, like something turning under water. They find me and they focus, and eleven years comes into them all at once, and she says one more word before they empty again.

“Run.”