Five Years

Five years is long enough to become someone else.

Greywater knew Maren Frost now, the way a town knows its own.

She was the healer two streets back from the harbour. The one you went to when the doctor's prices frightened you, or when the trouble was the kind you did not want written down in a doctor's book.

She set bones. She brought down fevers. She sat with the dying. She had brought more than thirty babies into the world.

There was not a street in the lower town where a door would not open to her if she knocked.

She had a proper place now. A whole floor above the chandler's shop, with a stove that drew well and shelves of jars in careful rows and a heavy oak table where she ground her herbs.

She was respected. She was, in the quiet way of a woman who keeps her own counsel, a little feared.

She was, though she would never have said it out loud, content.

And she had Wren.

The child was five now, and she was a holy terror, which is to say she was exactly what Maren had hoped she would be.

Quick. Clever. Entirely without fear. With her mother's dark hair and those storm-grey eyes that made the women of Greywater murmur about old blood without ever knowing how right they were.

She could outrun children twice her age. She could climb anything that stood still long enough.

She had once, at the age of four, talked the fearsome harbourmaster out of a confiscated fishing net by asking him, with perfect seriousness, whether he had always been so tall or whether it had happened to him recently.

The net came back. The harbourmaster still asked after her.

The wolf in her had not yet woken, and would not for years. Their kind did not shift until the body was near grown.

But it was there. Maren could feel it the way she felt weather coming. A low, patient thing under her daughter's laughter.

On the nights of the full moon she saw it surface in the child's grey eyes. A brightness. A pull toward the dark trees beyond the town.

On those nights Maren held her a little closer and told her stories until she slept.

And tried not to think about the day, still far off but no longer beyond imagining, when she would have to explain to her daughter what she was, and where she came from, and why they could never go north.

Because the Hollow was still there.

Maren did not let herself dwell on it. But she did not let herself forget it either, because forgetting was how the careful got caught.

She kept an ear to the low channels along which news of the packs travelled even into human country. And so she knew things.

She knew Dorian Vale was still Alpha of the Hollow.

She knew the great alliance he had broken her for had curdled within two years into something closer to a cold war.

She knew the Crestline girl had never become his Luna after all. That there had been a falling out, the details of which never reached so far south.

She knew the Hollow under Dorian had grown harder and colder and more alone with each passing year.

And she knew he had no heir.

That last fact was the one she turned over most often.

An Alpha with no heir was an Alpha with a problem. And a problem of that size did not stay quiet forever.

She had told herself, five years ago, that the danger was that he might want her child. She had never let herself follow the thought to its end.

Which was this: an Alpha grows more desperate for an heir the longer he goes without one, not less. The man who had been merely careless of his bloodline at twenty-eight might be hungry for it at thirty-three.

She did not follow the thought to its end now, either. She had become expert at stopping just short of the things that would frighten her into running before she had to.

She told herself she felt nothing about any of it.

Most days, that was even true.

What she had not heard, what no low channel had carried south, was the one thing that would have made her pack a bag that very night.

She had not heard that Dorian Vale had spent five years looking for her.

Quietly. Without stopping. With the steady, grinding focus of a man who has done a thing he cannot undo and discovered, too late, exactly what it cost him.

But that morning she knew none of it. And so the morning began like any other.

Wren woke her at an offensive hour by climbing directly onto her chest and announcing that she was hungry, that the fire was out, and that there was a man in the square looking at their building. In that order, and without pausing for breath.

Maren came fully awake at the third item. "A man," she said, keeping her voice light. "What sort of man."

"A looking sort." Wren considered. "A north sort."

The cold that went through Maren had nothing to do with the dead fire. "What do you mean, a north sort."

But Wren was five, and the question of the man had already been pushed aside by the far more pressing question of breakfast. She was halfway to the larder before Maren had finished asking.

Maren crossed to the window, keeping back from the glass, and looked down into the square.

There was no one there. A fishwife setting up her stall. A boy with a handcart. The ordinary waking of an ordinary street.

Whatever Wren had seen, if she had seen anything at all, was gone.

Maren stood at the window a long while anyway, her heart beating harder than the sight of nothing should have warranted.

Then she told herself she was being foolish. A child's chatter was not an omen. She had built five years of safety on not jumping at shadows.

She lit the fire. She made the breakfast. She sent Wren off to the chandler's wife with a kiss on her dark head.

That night, tucking the child in, she asked as lightly as she could what the man in the square had looked like.

Wren, already half asleep, said only that he had looked sad. And that he had been very still, the way the heron on the harbour wall went still before it struck.

Then she slept.

Maren sat on the edge of the small bed for a long time. Because of all the things her daughter might have said, very still was the one that frightened her most.

She knew a man who went still like that. She had loved him once.

She told herself it was nothing. She was not at all sure she believed it.