CHAPTER THREE

I waited until midnight to open the shelf, because some decisions need the cover of dark to survive their own making.

The house was quiet by then. Beren had gone home to his own bed after checking the patients a final time, and the four sleeping Blackthorn wolves breathed slow and even in the next room, watched over by nothing but a low fire and my own uneasy conscience. I sat on the stillroom floor with a single candle, the shelf's little painted door open in front of me for the first time in eight years, and looked at what my mother had left behind.

There were more books than I remembered. Six of them, bound in plain leather, none labeled, stacked in an order I didn't recognize but that felt, somehow, deliberate, the way everything my mother did had always felt deliberate even when I couldn't see the reason. I'd opened the first of them once before, the year after she died, gotten three pages into her cramped, slanting shorthand, and put it away again because grief and confusion together had felt like more than I could carry at nineteen. I hadn't touched it since.

I opened it again now.

The early pages were exactly what I remembered: lists of clients, symptoms, remedies, the ordinary bones of a healer's working notebook. Old Tam Ferris and his winter cough. The Alder twins and their fevers. A woman two towns over whose baby had come early and needed more luck than skill to survive it, and had. I read for an hour and found nothing that wasn't already familiar to me from six years of doing this same work myself, and I let myself believe, for one uncomplicated stretch of time, that maybe Kael Blackthorn's instinct had been wrong, that my mother had never touched pack business at all.

Then I found the entry from thirteen years ago, and the uncomplicated stretch of time ended.

Called north again. B. insists on secrecy, which I understand better than he thinks I do. The wards along the northern line are fraying faster than blood alone can mend them now, and he does not want his council to know how much of the mending is mine rather than his father's. Old wounds heal slower than new ones. I have told him that three times now and he hears it three times as though it were new information.

He does not trust easily. I respect that more than he'd guess.

I read the entry twice, then a third time, my pulse loud in my own ears. B. Not Kael, then, if the dates were right; Kael would have been a young man thirteen years ago, not yet alpha. His father. The one whose death, according to Kael, had looked exactly like what I'd seen in my stillroom that afternoon.

I turned the page and kept reading, faster now, the candle burning lower while I worked, and the picture that assembled itself, entry by careful entry across the following years, was one my mother had never once let me glimpse while she was alive.

She had gone north to Blackthorn territory. Not once, but many times, across at least a decade, called by the alpha himself to tend the boundary wards that ran along the Fenmarch line, wards that required not just pack magic but the particular blood-reading gift that had died with the last of the Marchwitches, a gift she'd never once mentioned to me existed in a form that mattered outside our own stillroom walls. She wrote about the alpha, Bram Blackthorn, with a wary, growing respect that read, by the later entries, almost like friendship. She wrote about his son, a boy who would become the man who'd stood in my front room that afternoon, with a fondness that made something twist under my ribs.

Kael asked today why the moon pulls the wolf out of a person and not the other way around. Eleven years old and already asking questions his tutors don't have answers for. I told him the moon doesn't pull anything. It only calls, the way a door left open calls to whatever's already inside wanting out. He sat with that a long time. I think he'll be a good alpha someday, if grief doesn't get to him first. It so often does, in that family.

I sat back against the shelf, the book heavy in my lap, and felt something crack open in my chest that had been sealed shut for eight years. My mother hadn't just kept a secret from me. She'd kept an entire second life, one with its own history and its own people, one in which she'd apparently mattered to a pack alpha and his young son in ways that had never once made it into a single conversation we'd had at our own kitchen table.

I made myself keep reading, because stopping now, angry and hurt as I was, would only leave me half-informed and no closer to understanding what Kael Blackthorn needed from me. The entries grew sparser as the years went on, then, three years before her death, stopped mentioning Blackthorn at all, an absence so abrupt it read like its own kind of confession. The final entry in that particular book, dated less than a month before the night she died, was only four lines long.

is failing and none of the old remedies touch it. I have told him what I fear and he does not want to hear it, because hearing it means admitting the thing that's killing him was made, not born, and made by someone close enough to have laid hands on him without his knowing. I do not have proof yet. I am afraid of what proof will cost me to find.

I read that line four times. Made, not born. Someone had done this to Bram Blackthorn, deliberately, and my mother had known it, or suspected it strongly enough to write it down, less than a month before a horse she'd trusted for fifteen years threw her on a night with no wind to spook it.

I did not believe in coincidence. I had told Kael as much, in different words, that very afternoon, and I believed it more now than I had an hour before, sitting on my own stillroom floor with my mother's fear laid bare in front of me in ink gone slightly brown with age.

Someone had killed Bram Blackthorn. My mother had found out, or come close enough to finding out that it had frightened her into silence even with me. And a month later, she was dead too.

I closed the book with hands that weren't quite steady and sat there a long while in the candlelight, listening to the sleeping breath of four strangers in the next room, wolves who belonged to a pack my mother had apparently served in secret for a decade, dying now of the same hollow wound that had taken their alpha eight years before.

Whatever this was, it hadn't started with me. It hadn't even started with Kael. It had started long before either of us had any say in the matter, and it had already cost my mother her life once she got too close to the truth of it.

I thought about that for a long time before I let myself think about the obvious next question, which was whether getting close to that same truth myself would cost me the same price.

* * *

Beren found me at dawn, still sitting on the stillroom floor with the books stacked around me and the candle burned down to a stub, and to his credit he didn't ask what I'd found. He only crouched beside me, checked the patients with a healer's eye he'd picked up from years of watching me work, and said, quietly, "You've decided something."

"I've decided several somethings," I said. "None of them comfortable."

"Are you going with them? When the alpha sends word?"

I looked at the books, at the careful slanted hand that had kept a decade of secrets from me while somehow, impossibly, still managing to be the warmest presence in my childhood, and thought about Bram Blackthorn asking an eleven-year-old boy's question about the moon, and about made, not born, and about a mare that had never once given my mother reason to distrust it.

"Yes," I said. "I have to know what she knew. And I think, whatever's happening to them, it isn't finished. Not with the pack. Maybe not with me either."

Beren's face did something complicated, worry and reluctant understanding both at once. "You don't have to do this alone, Wren. Whatever it is."

"I know." I said it gently, because he meant it kindly, and because it wasn't quite true and we both knew it. Some things you carried alone whether you wanted to or not, simply because no one else had stood where you were standing when the weight first landed. "But I have to be the one who reads it. She left this for someone, Beren. I don't think it was an accident that it was still here, unopened, when a Blackthorn alpha showed up on our doorstep asking questions that matched her own fears almost word for word."

He didn't have an answer for that, and I didn't need one. I gathered the books carefully, wrapped them in oilcloth the way my mother always had before a long ride, and set them by my own small travel case, which I hadn't touched since the last time I'd needed to leave Fenmarch for more than a day, years and years ago, back when the world had felt smaller and safer than it apparently ever really was.

Word came from Blackthorn territory two days later, carried by a young rider with Rhian written across her collar-pin in pack script I couldn't yet read but would learn to, soon enough. The patients were strong enough to travel. The alpha would meet us at the boundary stones at dawn.

I stood in my own front room, packed and ready, and looked one last time at the house my mother had left me, at the shelf that would stand empty now for the first time in eight years, and felt the particular vertigo of a person about to walk, open-eyed, into the exact kind of danger that had already taken the person she loved most.

Then I picked up my case, and my mother's books, and went to meet the wolf who was waiting for me at the edge of everything I'd ever let myself understand about my own life.