Chapter 2: Outside Pack Law

They gave me until first light, which in Ironmoor, this late in autumn, isn't long.

I walked back to the east cottages alone. Nobody offered to come with me and I didn't want anyone to. The bonfire noise thinned out behind me until all I could hear was gravel under my shoes, and somewhere along the path I noticed I was holding my scarred wrist in my other hand, as if it belonged to somebody else.

My stepmother had got home before me.

My things were already on the step. Not packed, just put there. My spare dress, my boots, my mother's hairbrush with half its bristles gone. The tin where I kept my kitchen wages sat on top, and when I picked it up it was light.

"There was eleven silver in here," I said.

Hesta didn't come out. She spoke through the gap in the door. "Rent. For the years you ate at my table."

I thought about pushing that door open. I thought about it quite seriously. But my arms still felt heavy and slow, the way they had since the clearing, and I wasn't sure I could have lifted my hand to the latch, never mind done anything once I was inside.

So I put the brush and the dress in a flour sack and sat on the step to pull my boots on, and that was the end of eleven years.

***

Old Wenna's hut was at the bottom of the lane, where the healers had always lived because of the stream. Her lamp was still lit. She opened the door before I'd finished knocking, like she'd been sitting up for me.

"I heard," she said.

"I can't stay. I only wanted to..." I didn't know what I wanted. To say goodbye to someone who'd say it back, maybe.

Wenna took my chin in her dry fingers and turned my face to the lamp. She looked into my eyes for a long time. Then she leaned in and smelled my breath, which nobody had ever done to me in my life, and her mouth went thin.

"What did you drink tonight?"

"Tea. Cassia made it."

She didn't answer that. She went to her shelves and came back with a twist of paper and a small stoppered bottle.

"Salt, for the water out there. And this is for your stomach. Two drops in the morning, no more." She pressed both into my palm and closed my fingers over them. "And Seraphina. Don't drink anything that comes out of that house again. Ever. Do you understand me?"

"Why?"

"Go," she said, and shut the door.

***

Two warriors were waiting at the north gate. I'd half expected Kael's cousins, who would have enjoyed it. Instead it was Rowan, the Beta, and a young one called Tam who wouldn't look at me.

Rowan did look at me. That was almost worse.

"Boundary's two miles," he said. "We walk you to the stones. After that you're outside pack law."

Outside pack law meant anyone could do anything to me, and nobody in Ironmoor would be obliged to care. He didn't need to explain it. Every child in the pack learns that before they learn to shift.

The frost had come down while we were in the clearing, and the grass crunched under us. Tam carried the torch and kept it well away from me, as if rejection might be catching.

Halfway up the ridge, Rowan slowed until he was walking beside me.

"For what it's worth," he said, very low, "he didn't eat today. Didn't sleep last night either. Something's been..." He stopped and glanced back at Tam. "Forget it."

"Something's been what?"

"Forget it, Seraphina."

The boundary stones stood on the crest, taller than a man and grey with lichen. Past them the land fell away into black pine forest, and past that was country I didn't have names for.

Rowan took off his coat and held it out.

"I can't take that."

"You can. It's cold, and I've got another."

I took it. It was still warm and it smelled of woodsmoke, and I had to look at the ground for a moment.

Then I stepped between the stones.

It's a strange thing, crossing out of your pack. You don't feel it in your body. You feel it somewhere behind your eyes, like a door closing in another room of the house. When I turned round, the two of them were already heading back down the slope, and the torch was getting smaller.

Up above the gate, where the old watchtower stands, a shape showed black against the last of the red moon. A man, or a wolf sitting very still. Watching.

I told myself it was nobody, and I walked into the trees.

It took about twenty minutes for the forest to go quiet around me. The kind of quiet where every small animal has decided, all at once, to stop moving. Every wolf knows what that means.

I reached inward for my wolf, the way you'd reach for someone's hand in the dark.

She wasn't hurt, and she wasn't sleeping. She was gone, like a room somebody had cleared out while I was away.

Something moved between the trunks to my left. Something else, to my right. Then I saw the eyes, low to the ground and yellow, and I'd counted four pairs before I made myself stop.

Rogues.

And for the first time in my life, I had no wolf to answer them with.