Three Years Gone

Selene Marrow had given just as much time to getting ready for this moment as she had to any other part of the odd, life she had been leading since the fire.

She had carried out her practice in the cellar under Moira's cottage as the death-witch was reconstructing her room by room, over a period of eleven months of suffering which made the actual act seem almost merciful when compared with it, a slow and intolerable procedure that Moira described with the kind of clinical detachment characteristic of someone who had carried out the operation many times before, as if she were reweaving a body from a soul which refused to release its old shape. On the long journey south, she had practised with Ivy, going over the same sentences until they no longer tasted like ash. That morning she had practised by herself in a room that she had rented two hours from the border, looking at a face in a mirror that she had borrowed, seeing another person's cheekbones, another person's mouth, and silver eyes where previously her own had been a plain brown colour that Kaelan used to say reminded him of the river in autumn.

My name is Selene Marrow, I am the emissary of Alpha Toren Halloway. I have no history in this place; I have never smelled woodsmoke and imagined my own skin catching fire, and I have never heard the name Kaelan Voss and then felt my ribs close around my heart as if a fist had closed around a struck match.

She was becoming better at believing in herself. Maybe that was the only real gift the fire had bestowed upon her, together with the eyes and the extra half-inch of height and the borrowed, dormant magic beneath her skin, the particulars of which Moira had never completely explained.

The first night, Moira said, when Wren woke up screaming in a stranger's body in a cellar which smelled of dried herbs and of older, stranger things too. You didn't owe me anything, little wolf. The pack had treated you fairly in accordance with their own laws and the dead rarely have the chance to renegotiate a sentence, but I'm giving you one all the same since it amuses me and as there's some use in a wolf who has already died and has nothing left to lose. When I want the debt to be paid, I'll let you know what it will cost. Until then, just live. Though Wren or Ivy asked her many times over the following three years, she never said anything more than that; it was this intentional vagueness that gradually made Wren come to fear a fear about fire which she no longer felt.

Ivy came about four months after Wren and was pulled from the river, half-drowned, by the same slow, experienced magic; she also had a debt which she had never completely explained, although Wren, from the things that were said during the most painful nights of reconstruction, when silence could not be maintained due to the pain, believed it concerned a pack far to the west and a betrayal that had not ended in fire but had instead come to an end in a final way. Initially they had had to come up with the concept of sisterhood since they were two created women with no past and every reason to need one. After eleven months it had started to seem, on some nights, almost as if it were the real thing.

The northern sentry post appeared smaller than she had remembered, or perhaps that was just the way it seemed because she was now taller—having been rebuilt by half an inch above her previous height, one of a hundred little changes she was still coming across, just as you come to notice a scar that you'd forgotten about when the light is wrong. Two wolves in half-shift were standing at the gate, relaxed yet alert in the particular manner of a pack that has been strictly drilled by a leader who no longer trusts peaceful borders. She immediately recognised one of them, Fenn, who used to sneak the pups dried apples during the winter exercises and who had once carried an injured hunting dog all the way along the eastern trail rather than leave it to die alone. He showed her only the appropriate caution befitting a stranger—there was no widening of his eyes and no sudden intake of breath.

Very well, that was precisely the aim. It still hurt more than she had allowed herself to expect, being a steady, constant pain beneath her ribs which she would not name.

She is the emissary of Alpha Toren Halloway," said the woman, the name flowing out smoothly after three years of practice, "and is here under the flag of parley in order to talk about the northern trade corridor with Alpha Voss. He expects a Halloway envoy to arrive within the week. I have come early."

Fenn looked at her for a moment longer and was clearly disturbed by the pale colour of her eyes. "Halloway never usually sends women off alone. Not so far south. Not without an escort."

She said that Halloway never had any women who needed such a thing, adding just a touch of sharpness to the statement, and then observed as he considered the flat, carefree posture of her shoulders, knowing that she was a young woman standing by herself at the edge of a group which, within living memory, had burned its own Luna in front of the whole territory. Whatever decision he made, he reached the same conclusion as men like Fenn always did: it was not worth the trouble to argue with her.

Stay where you are," he said, and sent a boy who was no older than seventeen sprinting up the drive, the boy running with the loose-limbed urgency of someone who had been given an order well above his rank.

Fenn stayed at the gate rather than going back to his post and looked at her with slow, open curiosity. "You have a strange look about you," he remarked in a kind way. "The majority of Halloway wolves who pass through here seem as if they'd prefer to be somewhere else. You on the other hand look as though you already know where everything is."

Selene maintained a carefully neutral expression, even though a tightness suddenly arose in her chest at the fact that he had come so close without realizing it. "I looked at the maps before I left; Alpha Toren never sends anyone who hasn't carried out their study."

"Mm." Though not entirely convinced, he accepted it, just as border sentries generally allow most people to pass without spending the entire shift checking each traveller's face to see if they resembled someone who had died. "Yes, the Alphas have changed a lot in the last few years, if it's actually been that long since Halloway saw him. He doesn't laugh much any more. Used to." He stopped himself there, the quiet of a man realising halfway through a sentence that certain aspects of the pack's history weren't intended for outsiders. "Before some things occurred. You'll find out for yourself soon enough."

She carefully and accurately kept the phrase among all the other things she had stored away, saying nothing.

She stayed at the gate, with the reins loosely held in her hands, and took in the air of the land which she had once known as Luna's. It had the same smell. That was the worst thing. Even after three years, with a new body, a new name, and a debt owed to a death-witch whose conditions she still didn't understand, the air above Ashcombe had not at all changed: it was still pine, river-stone, and ever so faintly, continuously, woodsmoke drifting down from the pack house chimneys. Every part of the wolf who was still under Moira's magic longed in a simple, animal way that made her angry with her own body to consider this place as home. She recalled the creek where she and Rhys used to catch minnows, the hollow oak that Iris had shown her in that first summer, and the exact angle of the afternoon light across the training yard which meant that it was almost time for the evening meal. All of those things were still there, unchanged in the fact that it had watched her burn.

Never a home, she told herself; there was only a cage which you were permitted to decorate. And now you can't have the desire to get it back, can't have the desire for any of it, can't have the desire for him—that's the price. That has always been the price.

The boy came back within an hour, jogging and out of breath, with the same look that a young Beta would have if he'd been given an order above his pay grade and was making an effort not to show his anxiety. "Alpha Voss will meet you at the pack house," he said, pausing as though he were quoting exactly what had been said and taking care to get the words right, "he says that any Halloway wolf who is willing to turn up a week early and on his own is either very confident or very stupid, and he wants to find out which before the rest of the delegation arrive."

There was an unpleasant effect in Wren's chest; it was just like him—dry and watchful—and it was the kind of comment that used to make her laugh, though after two years of being involved in pack politics she had learned which of his moods it was safe to laugh at in public and which were only safe to laugh at behind closed doors.

Say to your Alpha that I am rarely either of the two.

Before he remembered who he was, the boy grinned, lowered his head and guided her horse through the gate.

The border markers behind her, ancient stones inscribed with the Ashcombe crest, had at some point in the last three years been replaced by ones bearing the Voss crest, a minor alteration which no one had considered worth mentioning, and now vanished among the trees. In front lay the pack house, together with the man who had signed the order to burn her, and the version of herself which it had taken three years and intolerable suffering to create, so that when she at last stood before him once more, he would look straight at her and see nothing at all.

Nothing that had ever happened in all her experience had prepared her for the actual cost of it.

The journey went by in fragments past the creek where she had waded barefoot with Rhys the summer before the bond changed everything she was allowed to be; past the fallen oak at which she and Iris used to sit down and have long, meandering conversations about what pack law might be rather than about what it actually was, Iris always maintaining that the old rite existed because it was fast, not because it was right, and that one day someone would have to put that right; and past the exact curve in the road at which, two years and one lifetime earlier, Kaelan had told her, in a low and disbelieving tone, that the bond had chosen her out of all the wolves in the territory, and neither of them knew whether to be happy or terrified.

She went by the old training ground at which she had first held a blade when she was eleven, back then being stubborn and hopeless, and at that point the third instructor had given up on her out of pure frustration. She passed the shrine at the crossroads where the pack had left offerings for the wolves who had died from winter sickness. There was a small jolt at the fresh bunch of dried flowers tied there, out of season, proof that someone was still looking after it and still remembering a person. She thought, about a place she didn't pay much attention to, that perhaps someone had once left flowers for her or that the way she had died had made her name so shameful that it could not be mourned aloud.

No, she told herself firmly, just as Ivy had taught her to interrupt a spiral before it picked up speed. Your purpose here is not to grieve but to collect.

When the pack house finally appeared, it was larger and had new wings on the east side, with torches set along a drive that had originally been dirt but had since been properly gravelled, and every sign showed that the pack had been rebuilt and strengthened under three years of guilty but disciplined leadership. Selene Marrow took all the fragments of Wren Ashcombe and put them back into the small, cold, careful spot where she kept them, then assumed the pleasant but unreadable expression of a stranger who was only there for business and no more.

A steward whom she did not know bowed and told her that she could see Alpha Voss. It was a small mercy, meaning one less person would have to survive.

She dismounted, handed off the reins, and climbed the steps of the house she had once run, toward the man she had once loved and spent three years learning to hate with a precision that felt, some nights, like the only clean thing left in her and thought, with the particular calm of someone stepping off a cliff they've already decided to jump from:

Shall we see whether you know what you've turned me into?