Chapter 2: Silver in My Blood

I left Marcus's study with his words still warm in the air and went straight down to the boats, because work was the only thing I knew how to do with a fear in my chest.

The Gamma's men had the nets out on the shingle, and Bram was mending a tear in one of them with his fingers going too fast and his tongue between his teeth. He looked up when I came down the slip. "Elias. Marcus says you're to watch the schoolteacher."

"Marcus says a lot of things."

"He says she's dangerous." Bram said it the way he said everything, hopefully, as if danger were a thing you could be introduced to. His hazel eyes were bright. "He says she shifted on the island, right where the old ones are buried. That's not right, is it? A first shift on the island. My father always said the island was for the old Alphas."

I took the net from him and found the tear and began to work it closed. The cord was rough on my fingers. My fingers had always been quick. "Your father said a lot of things too, Bram."

"But is it true?"

"It's true she shifted there. I heard it."

"Then it means something."

I did not answer that. I had a stone in my chest where the answer should have been, and the stone was heavy, and I did not want to hand it to a boy of twenty three who still thought his Alpha could do no wrong. I worked the net and let him talk about the catch and the tide and a girl in the village called Ivy who asked too many questions, and when the net was mended I went up to the pack house and made myself busy in the storeroom, counting barrels. Counting barrels is good work for a man who does not want to think. There were forty one barrels of salt herring and six of oil and a crate of something Thomas had brought up from the harbour in the night that I decided not to open.

Around noon my arm began to burn.

It started at the cut on my forearm and went up to my shoulder and sat there like a hot coal wrapped in cloth. I pushed my sleeve up in the storeroom with the door shut and looked at it. The cut was a thin dark line, the edges gone grey, and the grey had spread out from the line in little threads that reached down toward my wrist. It smelled of the metal taste in my mouth. I took a clean rag from the shelf and a jar of Agnes's salve, the one she makes with beeswax and marigold, and I bound it up myself and pulled the sleeve down, and then I sat on a barrel and looked at the closed door and listened to the pack going about its day on the other side of it.

Every one of them would smell it. That was the trouble. A wolf's nose is a delicate thing, and silver is a loud smell, the way a bell is a loud sound. It would be under the salve and the wool and my own skin, and anyone who stood close enough and breathed deep would find it. Nina the healer would find it in a second. Nina found everything in a second, it was her curse and her gift, and she had been finding me for years.

I had not spoken to Nina alone since the winter before last, when she had come to my door in the rain and told me, in her clinical gentle way, that she could not be my mate and that I should not ask her again. She had not given me a reason. She had given me a list of things that were not the reason, in the way she did, and then she had gone back to her cottage and I had stood in the rain and had it out with my wolf, who had wanted to run after her and had not understood why I would not let him. Now my wolf was gone and the memory of that night sat in my chest like a swallowed stone, and I found that I could look at it without the old clawing at my ribs. Silver takes more than your shift. It takes the edge off everything.

I went to Nina's cottage that afternoon because I was a fool, or because some part of me still wanted her to tell me what to do.

She was at her table with her dark brown hair pinned up and a mortar of dried leaves in front of her, and her grey eyes came up to mine and stayed there a moment too long. She has a soft face with a small straight nose and long dark lashes, and she has always looked at people as if they were a problem she had been asked to solve, and she looked at me that way now.

"Your arm," she said.

"Nothing."

"Elias."

I sat down across from her. "It's nothing you can fix."

She got up and came round the table and took my arm without asking and pushed the sleeve back. She unwound the rag I had tied and looked at the grey threads under my skin and her face did not change. That was how I knew it was bad, because Nina's face never changed when it was bad. She pressed two fingers to the cut and I felt the heat of her touch, and then she took her fingers away and wiped them on her apron.

"Silver," she said. "In the blood. And your wolf?"

I did not answer.

"Say it."

"He's gone."

She sat down. She did not reach for me. That was not what she did. She folded her hands on the table and looked at the mortar and said, "How long has it been in you?"

"Since last night. I don't know when it went in."

"Who put it in?"

"I don't know."

"Who would want to?"

"Any man with a grudge against a Beta."

She looked at me then, and her grey eyes were flat and steady, and she said, "That's not the whole of it."

It was her way of talking. She said that to me the first time we met, when I came to her with a gash from a boar and told her it was nothing. That's not the whole of it, she had said then, and she had been right then too. I got up and pulled my sleeve down.

"Keep it quiet," I said. "If Marcus hears I can't shift, he'll have to make a thing of it, and I don't want to be made a thing of today."

"Marcus already knows."

I stopped at the door.

"He came by this morning," Nina said. "Before the sun was up. He asked me how a wolf might be poisoned without a wolf noticing, and what the silver would do to a Beta who had too much of it in his blood." She picked up the pestle and turned it over in her fingers. "I told him a wolf would notice. I told him it would have to be put in by someone the wolf trusted, or in his food, or in his cup. He listened to me very politely and then he thanked me and went away."

The door felt cold under my hand. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you are going to ask me to keep it quiet," she said, "and I am not going to lie to you and say I will keep it from him. I will keep it from the pack. Marcus hears what Marcus asks me for."

I stood there with the handle under my palm and the stone in my chest turning over. "Is there a cure?"

"I don't know. I've never heard of a wolf taking silver and living to tell it. There are stories of it in the old books. They all end the same way."

"Which way is that?"

She did not answer. She set the pestle down in the mortar and said, very quietly, "Go and see the schoolteacher. Marcus will ask you today whether you've done it, and you'd better be able to tell him yes."

The schoolhouse stands at the bottom of the village green, a low white building with a slate roof and a bell in a wooden frame at the gable, and there is a stone wall round the yard that the children sit on in fine weather. There is a smell to the place. Chalk, and wet wool, and the ash from the stove, and something underneath it all that belongs to no one. I stood at the gate with my hand on the latch and told myself that this was work, that Marcus had given me an order and I was a soldier who followed orders, and I stepped into the yard and the door opened and Clara came out with a pail of water in her hand.

Her hair was down today, champagne blonde and soft over her shoulders, and her eyes when she saw me were blue green and wide and her full lips parted, and her strong jaw went tight. She was not a small woman. She was tall and she carried herself like she expected to be argued with. She wore a grey dress and her sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, and her forearms were pale and clean, and there was a little burn on the back of her wrist from a pot.

She stopped. She did not say good afternoon. She looked at me the way a person looks at a dog they are not sure about, and she said, "You're the Beta."

"I'm Elias."

"I know who you are." She set the pail down. Water slopped over the rim and made a dark mark on the step. "What do you want?"

And then I caught her scent.

It came off her like the smell of the shore after rain, wool and chalk and that clean rain on stone, the same smell that had been on my coat in the kelp store, and it went into me and found the rope that had been tied to my ribs that morning and pulled it tight. My hands went cold and then hot. I could not look away from her face. My body did not care at all that my wolf was gone. My body knew what it wanted and it did not need a wolf to tell it.

But there was nothing behind it. I stood in the yard and waited for the mate bond to open like a door, the way I had heard it described all my life, the warm flood of knowing, the sense of a place found. There was nothing. There was a rope and a pull and a terrible ache in a place where the wolf used to be, and that was all. I could feel the bond reaching for me through a wall I could not see and could not get past, and it was like hearing a voice on the other side of the water.

"You look ill," Clara said. Her voice was careful. "Are you ill?"

"No."

"You're the color of a fish."

"That's a kind thing to say to a stranger."

"I wasn't being kind." She picked up the pail again. "I'll be honest with you, since you've walked into my yard without an invitation. I know what you are. I know what all of you are, up at that house on the hill. I came back here to bury my grandfather and I have seen things since that I cannot explain, and I am not going to stand here in the wet and be polite about it. Whatever Marcus wants from me, he can ask me himself."

The name landed between us. She had said his name like a thing she had been turning over. I felt the rope go slack and then tight again.

"How do you know my Alpha's name?"

Her chin came up. "Everyone knows the man who runs the boats and the kilns and the magistrate. My father worked for him once. My father left. I came back."

"Why?"

"Because I have questions," Clara said, "and this is the only place that has answers."

She turned and went into the schoolhouse and shut the door. Through the wall I heard her set the pail down and say something to a child inside, and a girl's voice answered her, bright and curious, and then the stove door scraped. I stood in the yard with the rain beginning to fall and my arm burning under my sleeve and a bond I could not feel pulling at a place where nothing lived anymore.

I went to the gate. I had my hand on the latch when the pain in my arm turned to a hot bright line and I looked down and saw a thread of grey light running up under the skin of my wrist, moving under it like a fish under ice, and it went up past my elbow and into my shoulder and stopped.

The whole arm went numb. And in the numb place, for one heartbeat, something moved.

It was small and far away and it was not my wolf. It was something old and hot and it did not know my name. Then it was gone, and the rain came down harder on the green, and I stood at the gate of the schoolhouse with my good hand on the latch and my bad arm hanging useless at my side, and I heard Clara's voice through the door again, saying to the child, "Ivy, fetch me the long spoon, the one on the hook."

The name Ivy went through me like a spark. I knew that child. Everyone knew that child. And on the other side of the door, in the warm chalky dark of the schoolroom, Clara was teaching her letters, and neither of them knew yet what was coming up the hill from the sea.