Chapter 5: Moonbane

SERAPHINA

I woke up warm, and for a few seconds that frightened me more than the river had.

There was a fire, built properly in a ring of stones, and I was lying beside it wrapped in a blanket that smelled of horse. Someone had taken off my wet dress and put me in a man's wool shirt that came down to my knees. I sat up too fast and the world tipped.

"Easy." A woman sat on the other side of the fire, running a knife along a whetstone. Thirty, maybe. Fair hair cropped close to her skull, a warrior's shoulders. "You've slept since morning. Nobody's going to hurt you."

"Who undressed me?"

"I did. You were blue." She tested the edge with her thumb. "Hakon would've done it, but I thought you'd rather wake up to me."

Hakon. The bearded man from the riverbank. I found him a little way off, brushing down a big bay horse and pretending not to listen. There were four more horses under the trees and two more men I didn't know. None of them wore Ironmoor colours. None of them wore colours I recognised at all.

"Where am I?"

"Twenty miles downriver from where you went in," the woman said. "On the wrong side of it, from your point of view. I'm Ilse."

"You're wolves."

"We are." She put the knife away. "You're not, apparently. Which is what we'd all like to talk about, when you're ready."

I wasn't ready. But my stomach had started to cramp, the low sick pull that had sat under everything since the clearing, and I remembered Wenna's bottle.

It was still in the pocket of my dress, hung on a branch to dry. I got up, wobbled, fetched it. Two drops on my tongue. Bitter green, and under that, very faintly, metal.

Ilse watched me with an expression I couldn't read.

"Healer's tincture?"

"For my stomach."

"Mm." She held out her hand. "May I?"

I hesitated, then gave it to her. She uncorked it, sniffed, and her eyebrows went up.

"Hakon," she said, without raising her voice.

He came over wiping his hands on his trousers, and she passed him the bottle. He smelled it too. The two of them looked at each other the way people do when they've fought side by side for years and can hold a whole argument without a word.

"What?" I said.

"Whoever gave you this knew what she was doing," Hakon said. "That's silverroot. It isn't for stomachs." He handed the bottle back to me carefully. "It's what you give someone who's been fed moonbane."

I didn't know what moonbane was. I knew enough from their faces.

"Poison," I said.

"Of a kind. It won't kill you. It puts your wolf to sleep. Give someone enough of it for long enough..." He shrugged. "And it looks like there was never much of a wolf there to begin with."

The tea. Bitter and too hot. Cassia pushing the cup into my hands and telling me I was white as a sheet.

My wolf wasn't gone. My wolf had been drugged.

I sat down on the log by the fire because my legs had decided it for me.

"Will she come back?" My voice came out thin.

"If you keep taking that, yes." Ilse nodded at the bottle. "Slowly. A week, maybe a month. Depends how much they gave you." She paused. "And for how long."

I thought of all the years I'd been too slow for patrol, too clumsy to shift cleanly, winded carrying laundry.

I thought of every cup anybody in that house had ever handed me. There hadn't been many. There had been some.

I didn't cry. I sat there and felt something settle in my chest, heavy and cold and quite calm, like a stone going down to the bottom of a well.

"There's something else," Hakon said.

He crouched in front of me and held out his hand, palm up, the way you'd offer it to a horse you didn't want to startle. After a second I understood, and gave him my left wrist.

He turned it to the firelight. The old scar was shiny and puckered, pink at the edges, about the size of a coin.

"How did you get this?"

"Kitchen fire. When I was twelve."

"Do you remember it?"

I opened my mouth to say yes, of course, and then I didn't. I remembered the pain. I remembered my mother's face, very white. I remembered her pinning my arm to the table and saying it's all right, it's all right, it was an accident. And I remembered thinking, even at twelve, that nobody had lit the stove that day.

"I don't know," I said slowly.

Ilse came round the fire with a small tin and rubbed something cold and silvery into the scar with her thumb. The three of us watched.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then, under the shiny skin, faint as a watermark