Chapter 3

Hazel's POV

Blaine did not come to bed that night. That was not news.

His side of the mattress was made up so tightly you could have bounced a coin off it, and it had been that way, more or less, for three years. When the pack needed him he slept in the study. When the pack didn't need him, he found something it did. I had stopped taking it personally sometime in the second year. Then I had started again, in secret, which is a more expensive way to do it.

There had been one exception.

It was three months ago, the last week of summer. A rogue raid on the eastern ridge had taken six of our warriors, and Dax, Blaine's oldest friend and his beta, was one of them. They buried them at dusk under a sky the color of a bruise. I stood at the back with the other wives. Blaine didn't cry. He shook hands. He said the words. He thanked people for coming.

Near midnight I heard him in the corridor, and when I opened the door he was on the floor with his back against the wall, still in his funeral black, rain dripping from his hair. He looked up at me like a boy who had lost his way home.

"I keep counting them," he said. "I keep getting six."

I sat down on the floor beside him. That was all I did. I didn't say anything wise. After a while he took my hand and held on as if it were a rope, and after a longer while he turned his face into my neck and I felt the bond in my chest pull tight and sing, the way it had the very first day. What came after was not planned, and it was not elegant. It was two people trying to stay alive in the same room.

At dawn the bed was cold. At breakfast he called me Hazel, the way you'd say a title, and passed the salt.

We had never spoken of it.

Now I lay in that same bed, looking at the ceiling, and listened to the pack house wake up around me. Water in the pipes. Boots on the stairs. A door somewhere, closing hard. My hand had found its way to my stomach, and I let it stay.

I hadn't taken my evening tonic the night before. I hadn't decided not to. Mrs. Hale had simply been slow bringing it up, and I had been slower asking, and the little blue glass cup had gone unpoured. Whatever that meant, it didn't feel like the end of the world. It felt like the first time in years that I'd woken up and been the only person in my own body.

The knock was too bright to be Mrs. Hale's.

"Haz? Are you awake?"

Eloise came in without waiting, carrying a tray in both hands the way you'd carry a bird's nest. On it were a plate of toast, a cup, and a small bottle of blue glass with a cork in its neck. Sunlight caught the bottle and threw a wet blue coin onto the wall.

"Marin made a fresh batch," she said, setting the tray across my knees. "I brought it up myself. You missed last night's, didn't you? I told her you would. Oh, look at you. You're so pale."

"I'm all right."

"You are not." She sat on the edge of the bed, and the smell of jasmine came with her. She poured a thumb's depth of tonic into the cup, and mint rose up around it, cool and sweet, and beneath the mint there it was, that green bitterness at the very back of the throat. I had smelled it every morning for three years and never once thought about it. That was the astonishing part. You can breathe a thing for a thousand mornings and never learn its name.

"Drink," Eloise said. "For me. We only have eleven nights, and you need to be at your strongest."

"It's hot. I'll let it cool."

"I'll wait."

She folded her hands in her lap and smiled at me. She had beautiful manners. She was the only person I've ever known who could wait for you like a threat and make it look like a kindness.

I lifted the cup to my mouth. I held it there. I could feel my pulse in my ears. Under the blanket my other hand pressed flat against two small hearts I couldn't hear, and I thought, very clearly, I will not do this. And then I thought: And if I don't, what do I say?

The door opened. Mrs. Hale came in sideways with a laundry basket on one hip and the air of a woman on urgent business.

"Miss Eloise. Elder Wynn's been asking for you in the hall this half hour. Something about the orphans' feast list. She's in a temper."

"Now?" Eloise's smile didn't move, but her fingers tightened in her lap.

"Now, she said. Since she's ninety and won't be told."

For a moment I thought Eloise would refuse. Then she stood, smoothed her skirt, and bent to kiss my forehead. "Every drop, Haz. Promise me."

"I promise."

The door shut behind her. Her footsteps faded down the corridor. I set the cup on the tray with a hand that had begun to shake, and looked at Mrs. Hale.

She didn't say a word. She reached into her apron pocket and took out an empty jam jar, scrubbed clean, lid screwed on. She unscrewed the lid. She held it out.

"I don't know what you're doing," she said quietly. "And I've decided I don't want to. But if a girl needs a jar, she ought to have one."

I looked at her. I don't think I have ever been so grateful for anything.

"Thank you," I said.

"Hm." She tipped the cup into the jar herself, lidded it, and slid it under my pillow with the quick, sure hands of a woman who had hidden a great many things in her life. Then she took the little blue bottle from the tray and put it in my nightstand drawer. "Miss Eloise will be back to see the cup empty. I'll rinse it and say it went down very well."

"Mrs. Hale."

"Yes, child."

"Why?"

She paused with the basket on her hip. Her face, which was ordinarily as readable as a shut door, did something complicated for a moment.

"I've watched everyone who's walked through this house for thirty years," she said. "I know when a person is being tended to and when she's being managed." She sniffed. "That's all. Now eat your toast."

I ate the toast.

I found Blaine in the study a little before ten. The door stood open. He was bent over a map of the northern border, pinned flat with four coffee cups and his father's old dagger, still in last night's clothes, the shadows under his eyes gone almost violet.

I stopped in the doorway with the cedar wolf in my fist.

I had rehearsed it on the stairs. Blaine, I need to tell you something. Then: Blaine, we're going to have a baby. Then, because it was true: Blaine, two of them, and I'm frightened, and I'd like you to be frightened with me.

"If this is about last night," he said, not looking up, "I don't want to do it here."

"It isn't about last night."

"Then it can wait. The northern patrol didn't check in at dawn." He drew a line with his thumb across the map, up a ridge, into a valley of ink folds. "My father is out there."

Everything I'd meant to say stood up in my throat and sat back down.

"Is Alpha Harris all right?"

"I don't know."

"He's the toughest man I've ever met."

"He's sixty-one." Blaine's voice cracked on the number and he stopped, jaw working. When he spoke again it was quieter. "He's sixty-one years old, Hazel, and I talked him into going."

I crossed the room before I'd decided to. I didn't touch him. I only stood at his elbow, close enough that our sleeves brushed, and looked at the map with him, at the small ink lines of a forest that swallowed people.

His whole body went rigid.

"Don't," he said.

"Don't what?"

"Be kind to me." He still wouldn't look at me. His knuckles were pale on the edge of the table. "I can't afford it right now."

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough for the sentence to unfold. Not I don't want it. Not I don't need it. I can't afford it. As though kindness were a debt he couldn't cover and refused to owe.

"All right," I said.

I walked out. In the corridor I opened my hand and looked at the cedar wolf. It had left a small pink print in my palm. I closed my fingers over it again and put it back in my pocket, where it belonged, for now.

The kitchen garden was empty at that hour, brown and gold with the end of the season, the beans finished, the squash vines going papery. I sat on the low wall beside the herb beds with the jam jar wrapped in my shawl and my back against the sun-warmed stone. I didn't cry. I was almost proud of that.

What I did instead was think about the tonic, and the way Eloise had watched the cup.

It didn't mean anything. Eloise watched everyone. It was her gift. She noticed when the pups were hungry and the elders were tired and a widow had stopped setting a second place at her table. She had noticed me, too, for three years. Noticed, and brought me tea.

I laid my palm flat against my stomach and let my head rest against the wall.

And something answered.

Not the babies. It was too soon for that, and too different. It came from deeper, from the room at the center of me that had been shut all my life, the silent one, the one with the stopped clocks, and it was so faint at first that I thought I had imagined it. A shifting. The sound a sleeper makes in a dark house when she turns over and doesn't quite wake.

Then, low and slow, a breath.

Not mine.

I went perfectly still. The wind moved through the dead bean vines. Somewhere in the pack house a door banged, and a bell rang for the noon meal, and in the quiet room inside me, for the first time in my life, something drew air, and held it, and let it go.