CHAPTER THREE: NINETEEN WEEKS EARLIER

Nineteen weeks before he put his teeth in me, I sat in the back of my father's car and watched four hundred people bury me.

It rained the whole time. It always rains in the Lowmarch.

I counted the mourners because I had to do something with my hands. Four hundred and six. I had lived in that house for twenty-two years and I could not have named forty of them.

My father spoke for eleven minutes.

He said I had been a quiet child. He said I had been gentle with the dogs. He said the Goddess takes the soft ones early because she cannot stand to watch the world get at them.

A woman near the back made a sound like something tearing.

She believed him. She stood in the rain for a girl she had never once spoken to, and she meant all of it.

Cassia cried harder than anyone.

That was the part I had not prepared for. I was ready for the arranged and photographable grief she had been practising since she was nine. Instead she stood at our father's elbow with her hair coming down and her mouth ruined, and she sobbed, and it was real, and it was for me.

She just was not going to do anything about it.

There was a stone. Grey, waist-high, cut that morning by a man who had worked through the night for the extra money and had not asked who he was cutting it for.

My name was on it.

Twenty-two years, and that was the first time anybody had put my name into anything that would last.

Nobody looked at the car. Four hundred and six people, and not one of them turned their head, and it was not because they were being discreet. There was simply nothing in that car worth looking at.

xxx

The night before, my sister had ruined our family in under a minute.

We were in my father's study. I was not invited. I was carrying the tray, which is a different kind of invitation and the only one I have ever had.

Cassia stood on the rug in her travelling coat with her hands pushed into the pockets, and my father asked whether her trunks were loaded, and she said no.

He asked again, the way he asks things twice.

She said, "I am not going north."

My stepmother did not look up from her book.

I set the tray down. I have very good instincts about when to become furniture.

Cassia told him about the boy. Not a wolf. A human, from the town by the mill, and she said his name out loud in that room, which is the bravest thing she has ever done and the last brave thing she did for a long while afterward.

Then she told him the rest of it, with one hand flat on her stomach.

My father went very still.

Alpha Marek Thorne had asked for a Duvarr daughter, and my father had spent four months telling every pack between here and the mountains that his would be delivered at the winter turn.

And here she was, standing on his rug, pregnant by a human, and not going.

He did the arithmetic out loud. That is the part I remember. He stood there and worked through it the way a man reads a ledger. What it costs to break an alliance. What it costs to be the pack that broke it. How long the Lowmarch lasts alone.

How long he lasts.

He got to the end and started again from the beginning, and the numbers came out the same both times.

Then he turned around and looked at me.

I will not pretend otherwise. For about a second and a half, before I understood, something in me came up off the floor. My father looked directly at me and my whole body went to meet it like a dog at a door.

That is the thing I would take back, if I were allowed to take one thing back.

xxx

He hit me twice that night. Once for asking a question, and once for bleeding on Cassia's dress.

"Hold still," he said.

He had my sister in a basket. That is the only way I know how to say it.

Her hairbrush. A collar she had worn three days running. A nightdress, and something out of her pillow.

Six months of her, saved up and carried down from her room by my stepmother, who had gone to fetch it before anybody said the plan out loud.

He worked her into my throat with his thumbs. Behind my ears. The insides of my wrists.

He was gentle about it, which I had not expected and did not know what to do with, and he took his time, and he did not once look at my face while he did it.

That is the closest my father has come to touching me since I was four years old.

Then he brought out the medicine.

For eighteen years I rubbed that oil into my own skin. Every week. With my own hands.

And every single time, I thanked him for it.

It is for my blood.

That is what he told me the first time, when I was small enough to believe that a father crouching down to your height meant something good was coming.

There is a thinness in your blood, Thea. Your mother had it. It is why you are not like the others, and why you do not turn. Keep up with the oil and you will live a long life like anybody else.

He said it kindly. He has always said it kindly. It is the only subject on which he has ever been kind to me.

So I did it. Sunday nights, in front of the mirror, for so long that I could no longer remember the first time.

Pulse points, throat, wrists, the back of the neck.

It goes on grey and warm and smells of nothing at all, which I used to think was strange for a medicine, and then stopped thinking about, the way you stop hearing a clock.

He put it on heavier that night than he ever had. Twice over, and a third pass at the nape.

Then he set nineteen small jars on the table in front of me.

Grey glass, sealed with wax, the kind of thing you would store honey in. He lined them up with the flat of his hand until the row was straight, and I watched his hands do it, because his hands are the only part of my father, I have ever been able to read.

They were steady.

"One a week," he said. "Sunday. Not late. Not early."

Nineteen.

I counted them twice, which took no time at all, and then I did the second sum, the one that mattered.

Nineteen weeks.

"And after," he said, "you will be Cassia Duvarr, and you will be Luna of Ashvale, and you will not come back here. There is a stone in the yard with your name on it. Do you understand what that means?"

I said that I did.

I did not. Not the whole of it. Not then.

xxx

Here is how a pack is arranged, in case you have been lucky.

The Alpha, and beside him the Luna. Then the Beta, who holds the house. Then the Gamma, who holds the ground.

Then the warriors, who are counted. Then everybody with a trade, who are counted at feasts.

Then the omegas, who are not counted at all, but who are fed, and named, and buried under their own names.

I lived twenty-two years below an omega.

There is no rank for what my father made me.

xxx

Ashvale is black.

That was the first thing.

The Lowmarch is wet and green and over-farmed and it smells of turned earth all year. I came up over the last rise expecting more of the same.

Instead, there was old volcanic ground going out grey-black to the hills, with a compound sitting on it like a fist on a table.

Four hundred wolves came out to see the bride.

I want you to understand what a room like that is. Every one of them could smell every other one. Who had eaten, who had run, who was frightened, who was lying. That is not a metaphor in a pack. It is the weather.

And I walked into the middle of it giving off nothing at all.

A woman in grey met me at the gate and told me the river road floods in spring and things from the south arrive late.

Behind her a man said, "So do brides."

I looked at his hands first. Scarred across the knuckles, and very still, and holding nothing.

Then I looked up.

xxx

Custom says the Alpha scents his bride at the gate, in front of the pack, so that everybody who has come out in the cold can go home knowing it was done properly.

He did not ask. Custom does not require him to.

But he waited. Half a second, with his hand not yet on me, and I understood that I was expected to move first.

So I turned my head and gave him my throat.

His hand came under my jaw. He was warm, and that is the thing nobody tells you about a man like that. They warn you about the size and the quiet. Nobody mentions that standing that close to him was the first time I had been warm since the study.

His mouth did not touch me. It came near enough that I felt him breathe against the skin under my ear, and my whole body went somewhere I had not sent it.

I did not breathe out.

I found something to look at in the arch above the gate and worked along it, one stone at a time, because I had to put my body somewhere.

I got to nine before he moved.

Here is the part nobody who has a scent will ever understand.

He was working. I could feel him working. A man with his face in a woman's throat in front of his own pack is not supposed to have to try, and he was going back over the same three inches of skin the way you pat down a coat for keys that are not in it.

Four seconds. Maybe five.

Long enough for the yard to see him find something, and long enough for me to feel the exact moment he did not.

He came off my throat and he did not step back, and his face did not move at all.

But I read hands, and his had come off my jaw one finger at a time.

"You have travelled since dark," he said.

"Yes."

"Do you know what I asked your father for?"

I said, "A daughter."

"A daughter." He turned the word over as though he were checking it against something written down somewhere. "Yes."

Then he went into his own house, and left me standing in the yard with four hundred people who had just watched their Alpha find nothing.

xxx

There was an old woman sitting to one side of the gate, out of the wind, in a chair somebody had carried out for her.

Everybody else in that yard was looking at my face, to see whether I was pretty enough, or at my hands, to see whether I had ever worked.

She was looking at my eyes.

She did it for a long time, and she did not smile, and when I looked back she did not pretend she had been doing anything else.

Then she got up and went in, and she did not speak to me that night, or for a long time afterward.

xxx

They gave me a room with a fire already lit, and somebody had put flowers in it, and I stood in the doorway a while because I could not work out who they were for.

I got into the bed with my sister on my throat and waited for my hands to start shaking.

They did not.

What came instead was a thing I did not have a word for then, and have never much enjoyed having a word for since.

A man had looked at me for four seconds.

Nobody had ever done that before.

And I lay in the dark in a house that would kill me for it, and understood that I was going to have to be extremely careful, because I had already started wanting him to do it again.