Chapter 13

Noa’s POV

“Is it true?”

Asher didn’t answer right away. That was the answer.

Micah had already gone. He had looked at the two of us, said, “I’ll be outside,” and closed the barn door very gently behind him, the way you close a door on a room where somebody is about to cry.

I was not going to cry.

“Is it true, Asher? To yield or to the end?”

“Yes.”

“And you knew.”

“I knew.”

“When?”

He took a breath. “I’ve known that clause since I was nine years old. I knew it the night of the lake. I knew it in the great hall when Vane said section nine.”

“Your ears were pink,” I said. My voice was very calm. It frightened me how calm it was. “At the bottom of the stairs. I asked you what you weren’t telling me.”

“I know.”

“You said tomorrow. In writing. Everything.” I pulled my elbow out of his hand. “And then I wrote term six. You tell the truth the first time I ask. And you signed it.”

“I was going to tell you.”

“When?”

“When I’d fixed it.” The words came fast now. “I’ve been through every copy of the Charter in this house. I’ve been to the council twice. There’s an old amendment from eighteen hundred, a rule about mercy, a way for the Alpha to stop a fight if it goes too far. I thought if I could get them to vote it back in before the full moon, I could tell you the rule and the fix at the same time. So you wouldn’t have to be afraid for a month.”

“So I wouldn’t have to be afraid.”

“Yes.”

“For a month.”

“Noa...”

“Do you hear yourself?” My voice cracked then. I hated it. “You decided how scared I was allowed to be. You decided what I could carry. You did the lake again, Asher. You did the exact same thing again, only smaller and quieter, so I wouldn’t notice.”

He flinched. I watched it land on him. It didn’t make me feel better.

“Kezia told a whole yard of strangers before you told me,” I said. “Do you know what that’s like? To find out from her? From the woman who wants to put me in the ground?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You keep saying that too.”

“Because I keep being sorry.”

“Then stop doing the thing!”

The shout rang off the rafters. A pigeon burst out of the roof beams and flapped away through a gap in the boards. Asher stood very still in the straw, with his hands at his sides and his face white.

I picked up the thermos from the hay bale. My hands were shaking so hard the coffee sloshed inside it.

“I’m going back to the kitchen,” I said.

“Tonight,” he said. “Term five.”

I stopped at the door.

“Term five says you sit still every night for healing,” I said, without turning around. “It doesn’t say I have to come.”

I heard him breathe in, sharp, like I’d hit him.

I walked out anyway.

~

I baked until noon. Then I baked until two.

I made forty rolls and six loaves of rye and a braided honey bread so big I had to split it in half to fit in the oven. I didn’t hum once. The bread came out brown and good and perfectly ordinary, and I was glad, because I didn’t want to put anything of me into anything that day.

Ora was quiet. Every few minutes I felt her turn over inside me, heavy and slow, like someone trying to sleep after a fever.

Still hot, she mumbled. Still burning his silver. Give me time.

You have twenty-eight days.

That’s not what I meant.

At three I took the rolls out to the long tables in the dining hall and left them under clean cloths without a word to anyone. At four, I couldn’t stand the walls anymore, and I went down to the river.

~

The Ironwood river ran fast and green below the pack house, cold with snowmelt even in the fall. An old stone mill sat on the bank with its wheel long gone. Water poured through the empty race beside it in a white rush, loud enough that I could stand there and think nothing at all.

I stood on the bank with my arms wrapped around myself.

“Is it true you’re scared of her?”

I turned. Dana stood on the path above me, hands in her jacket pockets. Behind her, on the grass, Yosef and his little sister Lily were throwing sticks for a fat brown puppy.

“Everyone’s talking,” Dana said. “They’re saying the Luna ran out of the barn crying.”

“I didn’t cry.”

“They’re saying you won’t last a minute against Kezia.” She came down a few steps. “I saw her fight once. At the regional games two summers ago. I was in the ring with her for forty seconds.”

“What happened?”

Dana touched her own jaw. “I woke up in the medical tent.”

“That’s comforting, Dana. Thank you.”

“I’m not trying to comfort you.” She frowned out at the water. “I’m trying to figure out why you’re down here sulking instead of training.”

“I’m not sulking.”

“You’re standing at a river in a bake sale T-shirt looking tragic.”

I opened my mouth to tell her where she could go.

Then the puppy barked. And Lily laughed. And the laugh turned into a shriek.

We both spun around.

The stick had gone into the race. The puppy had gone after it. Lily had gone after the puppy, the way six-year-olds do, without thinking, straight down the slick grass of the bank and onto the old stone lip of the mill race. Her shoe slid on the green moss.

She went in.

The water took her like a hand. One second she was there in her red coat. The next she was a smear of red tumbling through the white rush, heading for the place where the race dropped into the main river.

“LILY!” Dana screamed.

I was already running.

Ora, I thought. Ora, now. Please.

Can’t, she gasped, from somewhere far down. Too hot. Can’t change. Noa, I can’t.

So I didn’t change. I jumped in the way I was.

The cold hit like a slap from every side at once. It knocked the breath out of me. The current grabbed my legs and dragged, and for one second I was nothing, a leaf in a drain. Then my hand slammed into one of the old wooden posts that still stood in the race, black and slimy, as thick as a man’s thigh.

I grabbed it. I wrapped my arm around it.

And I sank.

Feet wide. Knees soft. Weight low. Like dough into a pan. I dropped my hips into the water and let every pound of me sit down against that post, and the river roared and pulled and shoved at me, and I did not move.

The red coat came tumbling toward me.

I reached out with my free arm. My fingers caught the hood. The water tried to tear her out of my grip, and the post groaned against my shoulder, and I held. I held, and I pulled, and I got her against my chest, coughing and screaming, her small hands clawing at my neck.

“I’ve got you,” I gasped. “I’ve got you, Lily. I’ve got you.”

“Noa! NOA!” Dana was on the stone lip, flat on her stomach, reaching for me. Yosef was behind her, sobbing. “Give her to me!”

I couldn’t let go of the post. If I let go of the post, we both went.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I braced my feet on the slick stone of the race floor, and I lifted Lily with one arm, up and up through the freezing water, until Dana’s hands closed on her coat and hauled her onto the bank.

Then a wave of white water hit me in the face, and the post slipped out of my grip.

A hand clamped around my wrist.

Dana’s. She had her other arm hooked around the iron ring on the mill wall, and her face was purple with effort, and she was screaming at me through her teeth.

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare, Bread Girl. Kick!”

I kicked. She pulled. I came up over the stone lip on my belly like a seal, and lay there on the cold moss, coughing up half the river.

For a while, nobody said anything.

Lily was wrapped in Dana’s jacket, crying in great hiccupping sobs. The puppy, which had somehow climbed out on its own, was licking her face. Yosef sat beside her with his arms around both of them.

Dana knelt beside me. She was soaked to the shoulders. Her hands were shaking.

“You didn’t shift,” she said.

“I couldn’t.”

“You held that post against the whole river.” She was staring at me as if she had never seen me before. “I’ve seen grown warriors go down in that race. Nobody holds against it. Nobody.”

“I’m hard to move,” I said. My teeth were chattering. “I’m learning.”

Dana looked at her little sister. Then she looked back at me. Her eyes were wet, and she was furious about it.

“Kezia fights fast,” she said. “She comes in low, on the left, every time. I know, because she did it to me. I can show you.”

I turned my head on the moss and looked at her.

“Why would you do that?”

Dana wiped her face with the back of her wrist.

“Because you went in after my sister,” she said. “And I’d have stood on the bank and screamed.”

~

I slept that night like a stone at the bottom of a pond.

I didn’t go to Asher’s rooms. I told myself I was too cold, too tired, too wet. I told myself he deserved one night of sitting alone with his poison and his sorry. I lay in the dark with my damp hair on the pillow and the note with term ten under my head, and I didn’t read it.

The knocking woke me at two.

It wasn’t polite knocking. It was a fist, hammering, hard enough to rattle the door in its frame.

“Noa!” Micah’s voice. “Noa, open up!”

I fell out of bed and wrenched the door open. Micah stood in the hall in his socks, his shirt on inside out, his face gray in the lamplight.

“What is it?”

“It’s Asher. He went down in his study an hour ago. His fever’s through the roof and the wound’s open again. Black. Worse than I’ve ever seen it.”

Cold went through me. Worse than the river.

“Why didn’t you come sooner?”

“He wouldn’t let me. He said you’d made your choice and he’d earned it.” Micah’s jaw clenched. “Then he stopped being able to say anything.”

I was already pushing past him into the hall.

“Noa, wait.”

“What?”

Micah caught my arm. He looked down the dark corridor toward Asher’s door, and his voice went very low.

“You’re not the first one there,” he said. “The guards called the pack physician.”

I stopped.

“Simon Vane is with him now,” said Micah. “And he’s already got his bag open.”