Chapter 2

Hazel's POV

I came back to myself in pieces. The smell first: antiseptic and crushed grass and canvas warmed by a lantern. Then a voice, low and unhurried, speaking to someone who wasn't me.

"Harper, I need the portable doppler and a warm blanket. And if anyone asks, this tent is closed for a private consultation."

"Closed for how long?"

"Until I say."

"Yes, Doctor."

I opened my eyes to canvas and lamplight. I was on a narrow cot with my shoes off and my feet propped on a folded coat, and a man was crouched beside me with two fingers against my wrist, watching the second hand of his watch with the concentration of somebody defusing something.

"Ah," he said, without looking up. "There she is. Don't sit up."

"What happened?"

"You fainted. I caught most of you."

"Most?"

"Your elbow made the acquaintance of a tent pole. I apologize on the tent's behalf."

A laugh came out of me, cracked and startled, and it hurt somewhere near my ribs, and I stopped. He glanced up then, and I got my first proper look at him.

He was tall even folded down on his heels, with dark hair cropped close in tight curls and skin the deep brown of good tea with honey somewhere underneath it. A lean, strong build. A sharp jaw, softened by the fact that he seemed to be trying not to smile. And his eyes. They were hazel, the kind that read green in one light and gold in another and never seem to be deciding. They were tired eyes, and very steady.

A white coat, a wolf's head stitched over the pocket, WOLFCARE GENERAL HOSPITAL in blue thread beneath it. A badge clipped to the lapel: R. WHYTE, M.D.

Whyte.

The name went through me like a word from a language I had spoken as a child and forgotten I knew. I reached for it, and it slid away.

"Are you in pain?" he asked.

"Some. Lower down. It's better than it was."

"Any bleeding?"

I checked, with a shame I hadn't expected, and shook my head. His shoulders eased a fraction, and I understood that he'd been holding them up.

"Good. Is there someone I should send for? Your husband, perhaps? The Prince is here, I think, at the hall..."

"No."

It came out sharper than I intended. He paused with his pen over the chart, and I watched him decide not to ask.

"Then no one," he said mildly. "Name?"

"Hazel. Hazel Marshall."

He wrote it, and stopped, and said it back to me like something he was turning over in his palm. "Hazel."

"What?"

"Nothing. I was expecting..." His gaze rested on my face, and he gave a short, surprised huff of a laugh. "Your eyes are blue."

"My grandmother's were hazel. I was named for them and got my father's instead."

"Somebody up there has a sense of humor." He tapped his own chest with the pen. "Roland Whyte. Mine are hazel, and nobody named me for anything."

Something in me loosened a notch. It was the first time all evening that anyone had spoken to me like I was a person.

"How far along are you?"

I stared at him.

"Your hand hasn't left your stomach since you came through the flap," he said gently. "And you're not the first woman I've caught before she hit the ground. Also..." He tilted his head. "I can hear it. Wolf hearing. The machine is mostly for the paperwork."

Every word I had rehearsed for Blaine evaporated. What came out was, "Three months. Just about. I haven't told anyone."

"Then I'll be very careful to be no one." He drew a small black device from his bag, warmed the gel between his palms, and looked at me. "May I?"

I nodded.

The tent narrowed to the cold touch on my skin and a crackle of static, and then, out of the crackle, a sound rose. A quick, bright galloping, so fast and eager it seemed impossible that it belonged to anything inside me.

I stopped breathing.

Roland moved the wand a little and listened, and his mouth changed. "Well, now," he said. He shifted the wand an inch to the left.

Another sound. Not the same rhythm. Lower, a shade slower, a stubborn little drum keeping its own time beside the first.

"That's the first one," Roland said quietly. "And that's the second."

"The second what?"

"Heartbeat." His eyes came up, and they were smiling in a way that reached all the way through. "Two of them, Mrs. Marshall. Two distinct, very determined heartbeats. You're carrying twins."

I laughed. I don't know why it was that. It just came out of me, wet and helpless, and then it turned into something else, and I had both hands over my face and my shoulders were shaking. Somebody put a folded cloth against my knuckles, real cotton, washed soft and smelling of soap, and I took it. He said nothing at all. He sat back on the stool and looked at the wall of the tent, giving me the privacy of a man who had done this many times, and the lantern hissed, and outside the feast went on without me, all drums and laughter.

"I was going to tell him tonight," I said, when I could. "My husband. I bought him a tiny wooden wolf."

"And?"

"And he's sitting at a table right now being offered my sister in my place."

Roland was quiet a moment. "That is the worst thing I've heard this week," he said. "And I work in emergency."

It surprised another laugh out of me, ragged but real.

"For what it's worth," he went on, "what you felt tonight wasn't a miscarriage. It's stretching, and dehydration, and a woman who's been standing on her nerves for hours. Bodies keep receipts. Yours is telling you it's carrying more than it should."

He took my wrist again to check the pulse, and this time I felt him pause. His head dipped closer. The frown that formed was small and professional, and gone as fast as it came.

"What have you had to drink today?"

"Water. Tea this morning."

"What kind of tea?"

"A tonic. My sister brings it every morning. For my nerves." I hesitated, then said the rest, because it sounded so ordinary out loud. "And to help my wolf wake."

"Every morning."

"For three years."

He had gone very still. "Do you know what's in it?"

"The pack healer mixes it. Mint, mostly. Something sweet."

"There's a note beneath the mint," he said, in the level voice doctors use when they don't want you to hear what they're thinking. "On your breath, in your skin. Bitter. Green. It may be nothing." He let go of my wrist. "Bring me a bottle. Thursday, ten in the morning, the obstetrics wing at WolfCare. Ask for me by name, and I'll put you down as a routine first visit. And Mrs. Marshall, until I've had a look at it, skip the tonic. Plain water is better than a mystery."

"You think it's..."

"I think I'm the new doctor and I like to be a nuisance," he said lightly, and clicked his pen. But he didn't quite meet my eyes.

He began to write in my chart, and under his breath, absently, the way people do when they think no one is listening, he hummed.

Three notes climbing. One falling. Like a person going up a stair in the dark and coming down again.

Every hair on my arms rose.

I knew that tune. I did not know how. It was in my body before it was in my head, older than any words I had, and behind it came a wash of cold and firelight and the sound of moving water, gone before I could catch hold of it.

"What is that?" I whispered.

"Hm?" He looked up. Saw my face. The pen stopped. "Sorry. Bad habit. It's an old lullaby. My mother used to sing it."

"I know it."

Nothing moved in the tent, not the lantern flame, not the man.

"Do you," he said, very softly.

"I don't know how."

For a long moment he looked at me, and I couldn't read his face at all. Then he stood, and rolled his shoulders, and was a doctor again. "Rest another twenty minutes. Harper will bring you water. Then you should go back before anyone starts counting how long you've been gone."

"Thank you," I said. "For all of it."

"It's just my job."

"It isn't," I said. "But thank you."

Outside, the night had turned colder. I stood at the tent flap with the blanket around my shoulders, letting the wind wash my face, aware of two small hearts I couldn't hear anymore. I had a secret now. Two of them, doubled.

"There you are!"

Eloise came out of the dark at a light run, her white skirt gathered in one hand, cheeks flushed. She caught me by both wrists. "I've been looking everywhere. Blaine was so worried."

Blaine hadn't been worried. Blaine had been at a table. But my throat closed around the correction, and I let it.

"I felt faint," I said. "I only needed air."

"In the medic tent?" Her eyes moved past my shoulder to the lit canvas, where the shadow of a tall man crossed the wall. "Oh, Haz. Why didn't you come and find me? I'm your sister."

"It was nothing."

"Who was the doctor?" Casual. Curious. She squeezed my wrists. Her hands were very cold. "Someone new?"

"I didn't ask his name."

"How lovely, that somebody was here." She smiled. It was the sweetest smile in Shadowpelt. "You'd tell me if something were wrong, wouldn't you? You'd always tell me."

"Of course," I said.

"Good." She linked her arm through mine, warm and affectionate, and turned me toward the lights. "Come on noww. They're about to maketoast."

It wasn't until we'd walked back into the glow that I understood what I had done. I had lied to my sister in the space of one breath, and it hadn't felt like lying. It had felt like closing a door.