Chapter 4

Roland's POV

I had been sitting in the hospital parking lot for forty minutes, in a car that wasn't running, holding a coffee that had stopped being hot, when I finally admitted that I wasn't going to get any work done until I'd thought it through.

It was ten past six on Thursday morning. The sky over WolfCare General was the color of dishwater. Somewhere inside, the night shift was handing over to the day, and I was out here like a teenager, replaying a woman's voice saying I know it.

Three notes up. One down.

I hadn't hummed that tune in years. I hadn't meant to hum it in that tent, either. It had simply come out of me, the way a hand goes to a pocket where a key used to be, and then a stranger with blue eyes had gone white and told me she knew it, and sixteen years had dropped off me like a coat.

My mother was the healer for the eastern reach of Night Howler territory. We lived in a low stone house by the river, close enough that the pack sent for her at all hours and far enough that nobody had to invite us to supper. She kept a garden of things that heal and things that kill, and she taught me to tell them apart by smell before I could read. She sang while she worked. Three notes up, one down.

There was a girl who came to our garden gate.

Small, solemn, hair the color of wet sand, blue eyes far too large for her face, a red wool scarf she wore in all weathers. She never said why she came. She'd stand there with her hands tucked into the scarf and watch my mother tie up bundles of herbs, and my mother would pass a sprig of mint through the bars without a word, and the child would hold it to her nose like a secret and go away. Somebody's daughter. Somebody important, I gathered, because a very bored guard always trailed her at a distance.

The night the house burned, I was sixteen.

I don't remember waking. I remember the heat, which was a solid thing, like a wall of hands. My mother pushed me through the back window and told me to run to the river and not stop. She said it the way she said everything, quietly and with certainty, as though she were reading me a recipe. She didn't come out after me. I stood in the reeds with the sky going orange behind me and heard the roof go.

The river was high that night, swollen with spring melt, fast and black. And out in the middle of it, spinning, a flash of red.

I have never known how she got there. A child who'd seen the fire from the bank and run toward it, I think, the way children do, and slipped. I went in after her. I caught her by the coat and dragged us both into the shallows, and she was shaking so hard her teeth clacked, and I did the only thing I knew how to do. I held her against my chest and hummed my mother's song until she stopped.

"Don't tell," she whispered, in a small, hoarse voice. "I'm not supposed to be here."

Then torches came down the bank, and men shouting, and I ran. I was sixteen years old and I had just listened to my mother burn. I ran until I stopped being a boy.

I never learned who set that fire. For a long time I told myself I no longer needed to know. I trained as a healer because it was the only thing of hers I had left. I moved from hospital to hospital and never went home, because there was no home, and six weeks ago I took a post at WolfCare General because it was the nearest good hospital to the Night Howler border and I had run out of ways to pretend I wasn't looking.

And then a woman named Hazel Marshall had opened her eyes in a field tent, and they were the same eyes.

Not the same. She was twenty-five, married, with grief drawn around her mouth. But I knew them the way you know a word you've read a hundred times and never heard said aloud.

I finished the cold coffee and went in to work.

"You've been staring at that door for an hour," Harper said.

"It's been twenty minutes."

"It's been an hour in spirit." She perched on the corner of my desk with her arms crossed, a tall, freckled woman with a fringe she cut herself and a laugh you could hear through two doors. Technically she was a charge nurse. Unofficially she was the reason WolfCare General didn't fall in on itself. She had followed me out of the field station on Tuesday night with a blanket and the unspoken understanding that whatever had happened in that tent was ours to keep.

"Who is she?"

"A patient."

"Doctor Whyte." She said it the way you say the name of a child who has drawn on the wall. "I've been a nurse for eleven years. I know what a patient looks like. You don't hum at patients."

I put my head in my hands. "Please don't."

"I'm not doing anything. I'm sitting here being supportive." She paused. "Is she the one from Shadowpelt? The Prince's wife?"

"She's carrying two very unlucky babies," I said, "and I'm going to need you to be very good at your job today."

Harper's face changed. She unfolded her arms. "Twins?"

"And I need a lab that doesn't ask questions."

"I love a lab that doesn't ask questions."

At ten o'clock exactly, Hazel walked into the obstetrics wing.

She'd dressed for anonymity: gray cardigan, dark trousers, hair in a plain knot. It didn't work. Nothing could have made her plain. It was in the way she carried herself, chin up and careful, like a woman crossing a floor she knows is rotten. She had a canvas tote clutched to her chest. Behind her, a heavyset woman in a housekeeper's gray dress took a chair in the corridor, folded her hands over her purse, and glared at the opposite wall in a way that said she would take on the entire hospital.

"Mrs. Marshall," I began.

"Hazel," she said. "Please. Mrs. Marshall sounds like somebody with a husband in the room."

"Hazel, then."

"I brought you a nuisance." She drew a jam jar out of the tote and set it on my desk, then a small blue glass bottle beside it. Something like humor flickered at the corner of her mouth. "In case you preferred the original."

"I'm honored."

"Are you always this pleased about jam jars?"

"Only the ones with contents."

She almost laughed. She looked better than she had on Tuesday. There was color in her face and the pinched look had gone from around her eyes. But her hands moved when she wasn't watching them, and she didn't quite sit in the chair. She perched.

"Two nights ago," she said, low, "I woke up and there was something breathing in me. Not the babies. Something else."

I went very still. "Since you stopped the tonic."

"Yes."

"That's what I was afraid of," I said quietly, "and what I was hoping for." I tapped the bottle. "Let me see what's in this. Then I'll explain. First..." I stood and switched on the ultrasound. "We should look at them properly. So far you've only heard them. I'd like you to see."

She stared at the machine. Then she lay back on the exam table.

There is a particular silence people fall into the first time they see the ones they carry. I've heard it hundreds of times, and it still stops me. Two small shapes floated on the screen, gray and grainy, curled toward each other like a pair of commas. One of them moved. Just a flutter. A wave.

"Oh," Hazel breathed.

"That's the first one. Show-off. And that's number two, who is clearly not going to be outdone."

"They look like they're holding hands."

"That's probably the umbilical cord," I said. "But I've never seen a more convincing hand-hold."

She put out her fingertips and touched the screen, the lightest touch, as if the image might dissolve. Her face was wide open, and I looked away for a moment because it felt like something I hadn't paid for.

"Can they hear me?"

"Not yet. Soon."

"What should I say to them?"

"Anything you like. They'll learn your voice before they learn your face."

She nodded slowly. The tears ran sideways into her hair and she didn't wipe them away. "I'm going to say a great many things," she said, "and most of them will be an apology."

"For what?"

"For the house they're going to be born into."

I didn't answer that. I couldn't. I handed her the printed image and let her hold it, and then I took the jar and the bottle down to the basement lab.

It took ninety minutes.

Harper ran the centrifuge and kept up a commentary that had nothing to do with anything, which is the kindest thing a person can do for a man who is watching a machine. The first result came up at eleven-twenty. I read it and read it again, and I asked Harper to check the calibration, and she did, and it was right.

Monkshood. Wolfsbane. In a dose so small you could have served it to a horse. A wolf who took it once would be groggy. A wolf who took it every morning for three years would be a different creature altogether: dulled, sedated, her instincts asleep in a cell.

The second compound came up. Silverroot, ground fine, to weaken a wolf's tie to the moon. That was ugly enough.

The third one made my hands go cold.

"What is it?" Harper said. "What's graveroot?"

"A binder." My voice sounded strange to me. "It doesn't poison anything by itself. It holds the other two in the blood so they can't wash out. It makes them stay."

"Is it common?"

"It's almost unheard of. It needs river clay and deep shade and someone who knows how to cure the root. In three territories, one family ever cultivated it."

"Whose?"

"Mine."

Harper stared at me.

"My mother's book was the only place that recipe was ever written down," I said. "All three together, in these proportions. She made it once, for a dying man who wanted his wolf to sleep through the end. It's the gentlest thing she ever made. And it's what someone has been feeding a healthy woman every morning for three years." I put my hand flat on the steel counter to keep it still. "The book burned with the house. Or so I was told."

Harper was quiet for a long time. Then she came around the counter and took my arm, hard, just above the elbow. She didn't say anything comforting. She's too good for that.

"What are you going to do?"

"Tell her."

"She's going to hate you."

"Probably."

"Do it anyway?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll be at the desk," Harper said, "pretending I don't know anything, which I am spectacular at."

I climbed the stairs with the printed results folded in my hand and Hazel's chart under my arm. Whoever had made this had known my mother's recipe. Whoever had made it had been feeding it, spoonful by spoonful, to a girl who had once stood at my mother's gate and been given mint.

I thought of a river. I thought of a small, cold hand.

She was sitting on the exam table when I came in, the ultrasound picture in her lap, her housekeeper hovering in the doorway. I asked the older woman as politely as I could to give us a moment, and she looked at Hazel, and Hazel nodded, and the door clicked shut.

I pulled the stool round and sat, so that my eyes were level with hers.

"Hazel," I said. "I need you to stay very calm, and I need you to hear the whole sentence before you react."

Her fingers tightened on the picture.

"Somebody has been drugging you," I said. "And I think they've been doing it for years."