Moonbound

The first thing I noticed about the wolf lying on my table was that he was dying wrong.

I'd seen dying before. I'd seen it slow, from wasting sickness, the body eating itself in careful order, fat first, then muscle, then whatever the mind could spare. I'd seen it fast, from the kind of wound that doesn't wait for permission. I knew what dying looked like on a human body, because Fenmarch didn't have money for a healer who only wanted to treat the easy cases.

This wasn't either of those.

The man on my table, because he was a man now, all long limbs and too-pale skin, though Beren Ostler swore up and down he'd dragged in a wolf, had a wound in his side that wasn't healing and wasn't festering. It was just emptying. Every time I packed it, the packing came away dry, like the wound was drinking the substance out of the cloth instead of bleeding into it. The skin around it had gone the color of old parchment, and when I laid my palm flat against his ribs I felt something I had no name for: not fever, not cold, but a kind of hollowness, like pressing my hand to a drum with no air behind the skin.

"He's not from here," Beren said, hovering by the door like he thought the sickness might reach out and grab him. "Found him past the Fenmarch stones, other side of the creek. Middle of the road, half-shifted. Never seen anything shift halfway before."

"Neither have I," I said, which was true, and unhelpful, which I also knew.

I'd been Fenmarch's healer for six years, since my mother died and left me her house, her herbs, and a debt of trust from every family in three miles that I still wasn't sure I'd earned. I knew fevers and breech births and the particular rattle a lung made before it gave up. I did not know shifters. Nobody in Fenmarch did, not really, we lived close enough to pack land to smell woodsmoke from Blackthorn watchfires on a clear night, but the Marches held an old and mutually convenient fiction that the Free Towns and the packs simply didn't see each other. We didn't pay tribute. They didn't send wolves through our fields. Nobody asked what happened at the borders, because asking meant someone had to answer, and answers cost more than silence.

Which meant I had exactly no business having a half-shifted, hollow-wounded stranger dying on my table, and exactly no idea what to do about it.

"Is he pack?" I asked.

Beren's mouth did something complicated. "Didn't have colors on him. No collar-mark, no cloak-pin. But you don't just become half a wolf, Wren. That's not a fever. That's not a curse a hedge-witch could throw. That's, " He stopped himself before he said the word, but I heard it anyway, the way you hear a held breath.

Marchwitch business.

My mother's business. Not mine. I'd made that very clear to Fenmarch for six years, ever since I'd watched her die of a fall from a horse she'd ridden a thousand times before, on a night with no moon and no wind and no earthly reason for a mare that gentle to bolt. I'd made it clear I fixed bones and fevers and nothing that required the particular, dangerous attention my mother used to give to things that had no business being wrong.

I looked at the wound again. Watched it not-bleed. Felt that terrible drum-skin hollowness under my palm, and underneath it, fainter, like a second heartbeat out of time with the first, something that pulled at the healer-sense I did trust, the ordinary kind, the kind that had nothing to do with my mother's ledgers of names and knots and words in a language I'd never let myself learn.

Something was eating this man from the inside. Not his flesh. Whatever came before flesh.

"Get me clean water," I said. "And find out if anyone else came through with him. If this is catching, I want to know before it finds a second bed."

Beren went. I stood over the stranger and did not touch my mother's shelf, the one at the back of the stillroom with the jars I never opened, and told myself that not touching it was a choice and not a wall I didn't know how to climb.

His name, it turned out three days later when the fever finally broke enough for him to speak, was Sten. He was Blackthorn pack, an outrider who ran the northern boundary line, and he did not remember crossing into Fenmarch at all, only running, and running, and a cold that started in his chest and spread outward like frost eating a window from the corner in.

He also wasn't the last one.

By the end of that first week, I had two more wolves in various states of half-shift lying in my stillroom, both Blackthorn, both found stumbling and confused inside Fenmarch's boundary stones like something had chased the pack-sense clean out of them and left only animal panic behind. None of them could explain how they'd crossed miles of pack-patrolled border without anyone stopping them, which told me two things: whatever was doing this was strong enough to slip past a warded line, and Blackthorn's watch, famously, notoriously thorough, hadn't caught it happening.

That should have worried me more than it did. I had enough worry already, stretched thin across three sickbeds and a town that was starting to whisper about plague, about curses, about whether the healer's daughter had learned enough from her mother to be trusted with something that smelled this much like Marchwitch trouble.

I hadn't. That was the truth I wasn't saying out loud. I had my mother's jars and my mother's notes, half of them in a hand-shorthand I'd never cracked, and eight years of telling myself I didn't need to.

I was still telling myself that on the ninth day, when four riders came down the Fenmarch road in Blackthorn colors, and the one in front swung off his horse before the others had even slowed, and every dog in town started barking at once like they'd smelled something older than dog-sense had words for.

I was elbow-deep in willowbark tea when Beren burst into the stillroom looking like he'd seen the Marches' own ghost.

"Wren," he said. "The alpha's here. Blackthorn's alpha. He's asking for the healer."

I set down the tea very carefully, because my hands had started to want to shake and I did not intend to let them.

"Well," I said. "Tell him the healer's busy keeping his people alive. He can wait in line like everyone else."

Beren did not tell him that. I found out why when I walked out into my own front room ten minutes later, hands still smelling of willowbark and stillroom herbs, and found a man standing in the middle of it who made the ceiling feel low.

He wasn't overlarge, not some fireside-tale giant, nothing so easy to explain away. It was more that the air around him seemed to have agreed to make room for him, the way a room goes quiet before someone important speaks, except this room had gone quiet just because he was standing in it, breathing, waiting. Dark hair, cropped close. A scar through one eyebrow that should have made him look careless and instead made him look like a man who'd survived being careless exactly once and had never allowed it again. Eyes the pale amber-gold of a wolf's, because of course they were, and they were fixed on me with an attention so total it felt like being weighed.

"You're the healer," he said. Not a question.

"I'm a healer," I said. "There's a difference, and I suspect you already know it, or you wouldn't be standing in my front room instead of sending someone to fetch me like a normal person."

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, more the ghost of one, quickly filed away. "Kael Blackthorn," he said. "Alpha of the Blackthorn pack. Three of my people are in your care."

"Four, as of this morning," I said. "A woman came in at dawn, same as the others. Whatever's doing this isn't slowing down."

That got his attention in a different way, a stillness that went through his whole frame at once, like a struck bell. "Show me."

It wasn't a request. I noticed that, filed it away next to the eyes and the scar and the way three armed riders had stopped just outside my door without dismounting, waiting on his word instead of mine, in my town, on my ground.

"They're patients," I said. "Not evidence. You'll see them, because I imagine you have a right to know what's happening to your own pack, but you'll see them on my terms, in my stillroom, and you will not crowd them while they're weak enough that crowding could kill them. Are we clear?"

The pale eyes didn't blink. For a moment I thought I'd misjudged the whole shape of this, that alphas didn't take terms from Free Town healers, that I'd just handed him a reason to remind me exactly how little power I had standing in a doorway between him and his own dying people.

Then he inclined his head, a fraction of an inch, like the concession cost him something but he was willing to pay it.

"Clear," he said. "Show me what's killing my pack, healer. And then you're going to tell me why it stopped at your boundary stones instead of going any further, because in six years of watching that line, I have never once seen anything cross it that wasn't invited."

I felt that land somewhere under my ribs, cold and precise as a blade laid flat against skin. Invited. As if Fenmarch had opened a door I didn't know existed and let something walk in wearing my neighbors' faces.

"I don't know what you mean by that," I said, and it was almost true.

Kael Blackthorn looked at me for a long moment, in the particular way of a man reading weather, or tracks, or a lie he hasn't decided yet whether to call.

"You will," he said. "Show me the sick."

I turned and led him back into my mother's stillroom, past the shelf I still hadn't opened, and told myself, again, for the last time it would ever quite be true, that this was still, somehow, not my business.