Chapter 8

Wren’s POV

They come for me before the sun does.

I hear the key at about the hour when the light starts thinking about it, gray at the edges of the window, everything in the house still. Two sets of footsteps in the corridor. Garrick’s, which I know like my own heartbeat.

And another, lighter, that stops outside my door and waits.

The lock turns. Garrick doesn’t come in.

“Ten minutes,” he says to somebody I can’t see. “Then it’s done, and you’re gone before he’s back.”

“It takes as long as it takes.”

A woman’s voice. Older than I expected. Flat, tired, with an accent from somewhere further north than this valley has ever cared about.

And something in me lurches at the sound of it, hard, the way your foot goes through a stair you thought was solid.

I know that voice.

I don’t know where from. I don’t know when. But my body knows it, my hands have gone cold, and there’s a taste in my mouth like copper and rain.

She comes in and shuts the door behind her.

She’s small. That’s the first thing. Smaller than me, gray hair cut short like a man’s, a canvas bag over one shoulder and a coat too big for her. She has the face of someone who has slept badly for years and stopped expecting otherwise.

She sets the bag down and looks at me for a long moment.

“You’ve grown,” Maren says.

“You were there.”

“I was.”

The room tilts. I put a hand on the cot frame and hold onto it.

“You held me down.”

“No.” She says it plainly, without hurry. “That was Ivo and the boy. I was the one working. I couldn’t hold you and work at the same time.” She crouches, opens the bag, starts taking things out and setting them on the floorboards. A bundle of dried something. A shallow copper dish. A knife with a handle wrapped in leather. “You bit Ivo. Took a piece out of his forearm, actually. He never stopped complaining about it.”

“Stop.”

“You want me to stop talking or stop unpacking?”

“Talking.”

“Then you’ll not learn anything,” Maren says, “and we’ve got about eight minutes.”

I stare at her. “What?”

She keeps laying things out, and she doesn’t look up, and her voice drops so low I have to come a step closer to catch it.

“Your brother thinks I’m here to sink the binding deeper. That’s what he’s paying me for, and I let him think it, because a man like that only stops watching you when he’s satisfied. So listen, girl, and don’t waste it on being shocked at me.”

“Why should I listen to anything you say?”

“Because I’m the only person alive who knows what’s in you.” She sets the knife down last, deliberately, out of her own reach. “And because Ivo’s dead.”

The room goes very quiet.

“The man I bound you with. Six years, he took the money and kept his mouth shut and drank most of it, and last week somebody put a note on his table telling him the arrangement was concluded, and four days ago they found him face down in the shallows at the eastern crossing.” She sits back on her heels. “Ivo could swim. I taught him.”

“Who killed him?”

“The people who paid us.”

“Garrick paid you.”

“Garrick never had that kind of money in his life.” Maren’s mouth twists. “Your brother wrote the numbers down. That’s all he did. Somebody else opened the purse.”

I sit down on the bare frame of the cot because standing has stopped being an option.

“Then why,” I say. “Why would anybody pay to take a wolf out of a sixteen year old girl.”

And Maren finally looks up at me, and there’s something in her face I don’t have a word for. It isn’t pity. It’s closer to apology.

“They didn’t,” she says. “They paid me to kill you.”

I can’t speak.

“Two men came to me the night your parents died. Not pack. Company men, the kind with clean boots and a folder. They said there was a girl in the Thornhollow house with the wrong blood in her, and there was a price on the blood, and it would be simplest for everyone if the girl went into the ground with her mother.” Maren’s jaw works. “Your brother had already agreed. He’d already agreed, girl, before I ever walked through that door. He was standing in the hall with his hands shaking and he’d already said yes.”

The gray place in my head is roaring.

“I told them no,” Maren says. “So I made them a different offer. I said a dead bloodline girl is a body somebody eventually digs up. I said a bound one is nothing. No scent, no wolf, no worth. I said I could put her so far under that she’d never come up, and she’d be no use to anybody, and they could pay me by the month to keep it that way.”

“You made me nothing,” I whisper.

“I made you not worth killing,” Maren says. “It’s not the same as kindness. I never said it was kindness. But you’re twenty two and you’re breathing, and Ivo isn’t, and neither is anybody else who was in that hallway.”

Footsteps in the corridor.

Maren moves fast for a small woman. The knife goes back in the bag, the copper dish goes into her palm, and she’s on her feet with her hand around my wrist and her mouth at my ear before Garrick’s shadow reaches the gap under the door.

“When I say run, you run east, not north. East, through the passage behind the pantry, and don’t stop at the treeline.”

“Why are you helping me?”

“Because the payments stopped,” she says. “You understand what that means? They stopped paying to keep you buried. Nobody stops paying for a thing unless they’ve found a better use for it.”

The door opens.

“Well?” Garrick says.

Maren turns with the copper dish held out and her face gone slack and bored, and she has never in her life sounded more like a woman being paid by the hour.

“It’s worse than you told me,” she says. “This isn’t a binding coming loose. Whoever pulled at it, pulled from the outside.”

Garrick’s face empties.

“That isn’t possible.”

“You keep saying that.” Maren tips the dish so he can see whatever’s in it. “Somebody’s been calling her, Alpha Thornhollow. For weeks, by the look of this. And they got an answer last night.”

And over Garrick’s shoulder, out in the dim of the corridor, standing perfectly still where he has clearly been standing for some time, the thin man from the treeline says, “Yes. We did.”