What the Old Wolves Remember

It took eleven days.

For eleven days the rest of the Halloway delegation filled the pack house with strangers, which made it easier for Selene to go through the rooms she had used to run around in without anyone giving her a second look. There were eleven days' worth of trade talks during the day and another activity after dinner, something that neither of them ever named aloud. Kaelan always found excuses to walk down the same corridor that she was walking down. The excuses were always sensible, even though he knew, beneath the sense of reason, that they weren't true.

He told himself that it was due to his diligence. Since an Alpha stays near any thing that might endanger his pack and as this woman had no scent record and her eyes didn't match anyone already known, she had to be regarded as a threat until she was proven not to be. That was the form of the lie which he constructed for himself every morning, and it remained intact until the evenings, when it began to fall apart at the edges, just as lies do when a person is tired and all alone with them.

Cassius inquired as to Selene Marrow and received no response. There was no entry for her in any of the Halloway registers, no scent match anywhere that his contacts were able to search, and indeed no prior history until three years ago, when a woman going by that name had apparently first shown up in a small town located two hundred miles to the east, buying supplies, asking no questions, and attracting no attention. He hadn't told Kaelan about all this yet. The reason for this, he told himself, was that he wanted to be certain, though on some nights he doubted that the waiting was mainly about certainty and thought it was more a matter of fear regarding what might come next.

Selene, on the other hand, made use of the eleven days to get used to the house's new layout. She kept a record of which servants had been employed since the fire and which had remained, noted which corridors Kaelan avoided and which ones he walked as if he didn't think about them, and remembered the specific time every evening when the kitchens became quiet and the guard change near the west wing became less frequent. Habits acquired long ago; although she had once run the household, some part of her body had evidently never stopped maintaining the records.

She saw Rhys two more times that week, each time from a distance and always succeeding in looking away before he could look back. Once, briefly, she saw Delphine in a doorway and noticed the other woman's eyes following her down the corridor with a kind of attention that was by no means casual. And every evening, once the final remarks of the trade talk had finished and the household had settled down for sleep, she would find herself in the garden, telling herself it was for the fresh air, for the quiet, or for some other reason rather than the truth, which was that a part of her still kept hoping that Kaelan might happen to be walking there as well.

On the eleventh night, that was he.

It was nothing new for Kaelan to have difficulty sleeping, so he took his usual walk around the grounds as he had done on most nights since the fire—following the same route, passing by the kennels, going along the low wall next to the training yard, and in the end passing by the west wing gardens, even if he acknowledged that final point to himself.

She was there—this time not by the window but in the garden, walking around barefoot on the cold stone with a robe draped over her nightclothes, facing away from the house and turning her face towards the tree line where the pyre had once been. She was humming, a sequence of three notes that meandered and looped back on themselves and never quite ended, and Kaelan knew what it was before he could identify it; he had heard it only once before, through secondhand information from a Beta called Corin who had told it to Cassius's record about what the Luna had been doing the moment the guards came for her.

" A tuneless little song," Corin had said, sitting there stiff and pale at the table, although he had tried to keep his voice steady it still shook. I don't think she realised that she was doing it. I don't know what it was. I don't think it was anything at all.

Never, during the three years that had passed, had Kaelan considered asking what the song actually sounded like. It had never been written down, no one had supposed that he would want to know, and he had never in all his grief thought to ask—which at the moment seemed like a further small failure on top of the main one.

He knew it now, and he would have known it anywhere—whether in sleep or in death—since it flowed through him just as the fire had, quickly and greedily, attaching itself to everything dry it came across.

He must have produced some noise, like a boot hitting gravel, so that she halted and turned, and for a moment before either of them could hide their expression, they just stared at each other over the grass which had been killed by the frost. A man who had just heard a dead woman's private song issued from a stranger's lips. A woman who, too late, realised precisely which part of three years' practice had just failed her.

"Emissary," his voice didn't seem right to him, "couldn't you sleep?"

"Neither could you," she remarked, though she recovered more quickly than he did and still managed to show a half-second's hesitation as she looked elsewhere, clearly calculating something she didn't like the result of.

I was humming something," he said, and for a moment disliked himself for having said it, since he had told himself that he wasn't ready to tackle that kind of thing yet.

"Was I?" She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, a normal action, and he watched her as she decided in real time how far a lie to tell. "I don't know where it came from; sometimes tunes just get stuck somewhere and come out when you're not paying attention."

That was a good tune, he said, and that was true even though it was not really what he had in mind.

Alright, I'll go on your word about it," she almost smiled, "for I don't think I could sing it back to you if you asked me to."

He never asked her to. He reasoned that it was necessary for him to be certain first, and that was true, although it only accounted for half the truth; the other half was worse. Should he ask and she say no, or give a response that was similar but not exactly right, or just stare at him in a way that showed she had no idea what he was talking about, he would then have to once again believe that she was gone. And part of him would prefer to stay in that impossible hope for a little longer than face a particular kind of grief.

They stayed there for a moment longer, with neither of them speaking, as the cold rose from the stone beneath her bare feet. He then wished her good night and returned towards the house with his hands pushed deep into his pockets so that she wouldn't see them shaking.

The following morning James saw Cassius looking through Iris's old letters for the third time that week, the papers lying out on the reading table in neat piles which alone Cassius knew the order of.

Kaelan said at once, "I heard her hum something last night. In the garden it was the same tune that Corin described—the one his mother's Luna used to hum when they came for her."

Cassius turned the colour of old ash and sat down heavily on the edge of the reading table, as if it had been his legs that had asked him to.

"You're certain."

I am sure that I heard it, but I am not sure what it means.

"When she was worried about something and didn't want anyone to know it, my mother used to hum that tune," Cassius said slowly, "and over the years I heard her do it hundreds of times, always thinking that no one was around, always sticking to those same three notes which went nowhere. I had always thought that Wren must have picked it up from her, just as puppies pick up their elders' habits without being aware of it. I never mentioned to either of them that I had noticed it. It wasn't any concern of mine to point it out."

It doesn't prove anything,' Kaelan said, since somebody in the room had to say it, had to keep the door open a bit longer against whatever was waiting on the other side. 'Anyone might be able to hum a tune. It could just be a coincidence. People pick up melodies from all sorts of places.'

"Kaelan," Cassius said, looking up, and there was no trace of his usual caution any longer, no more of those careful, weather-like expressions that Kaelan had come to know after three years of observing him as he decided how much truth a person could bear in a single sitting. "I've been looking for eleven days and found nothing about Selene Marrow, because there's nothing to find—no birth record anywhere in Halloway's territory, no scent history anywhere that his people would recognise. A woman who appeared fully formed in a border town two hundred miles from here exactly three years and some months ago, with no past at all behind her." He rubbed a hand over his face, a gesture typical of an old man, worn and tired in a way that Kaelan had rarely allowed himself to see. "I had that confirmed four days ago and I didn't tell you because I didn't know how to tell you, and because there was a cowardly part of me that didn't want to be the one to tell you." His voice broke, even though it had never broken before. "That isn't a rival pack's envoy singing your mother's private tune under a garden window at midnight. That is Wren."

They both kept quiet for a moment. The vault was cold and had the smell typical of old paper—dust and dried ink and a slight odour similar to the inside of a very old book.

"Say it again," Kaelan said in a low voice.

"Wren," Cassius said this clearly this time, putting no emphasis at all on it, and in some way that made it more unpleasant than if he had shouted it. "I believe that she's been Wren since the moment she crossed the border; I think that some part of me has known ever since the first night, when I felt her cross and when something in this house awoke that hadn't moved for three years. I have spent eleven days being a coward about it because I didn't know what you'd do once you had it."

Kaelan settled himself down on the floor without having made up his mind to do so; his legs had lost the ability to support the rest of him and so the cold stone touched him and he allowed it.

"Three years," he said, turning his hands over as if he might spot something written on them which he had not noticed before. "I allowed myself to grieve her because it's easier to grieve something you'll never see again than it is to realize that you might have to look it in the face and account for yourself. I have built up a whole life on the idea that a dead woman was dead, Cassius. And in fact she's been alive all along, and it's my fault that she had to become somebody else in order to remain that way."

Cassius asked what he would do, and this time there was no calculation in the question, merely an old man putting to his nephew a straightforward query.

Kaelan took some time before answering. He sat there on the vault floor for a long while staring into space. It wasn't until he did speak that his voice had moved to a place that Cassius had never before heard it go—beyond guilt and beyond grief, taking on a sharp edge, and for the first time in three years sounding less like a man carrying out a sentence and more like a man who had just been given, against all reasonable expectations, a second trial which he intended to win.

He said that he doesn't have the right to go in there and tell her who she is. He doesn't get to take Selene Marrow away from her before she's ready to give her up, not after all that it must have cost her to build up. He doesn't have the right to ask for anything from a woman who has been allowed to be burned, not the truth, not forgiveness, not even her attention if she doesn't want to give it. But he's had enough of standing outside and calling that discipline. He's had enough of letting three years of guilt turn me into a coward who does nothing and calls it respect. He's going to work his way into a room that she chooses to let him stand in, whatever the length of time it takes, and he's going to do so without asking her for anything in return, because he doesn't think he has the right to ask for anything yet. Perhaps he never will.

"She will never forgive you," said Cassius gently. "You realise that. No matter what you do from now on or how far you go, she is entirely within her rights in never telling you during the rest of her life whether or not you have earned it."

"I know," Kaelan said. "I'm still going to do it."

Cassius looked at him for a long moment, a sort of relief showing in the old eyes—that being the kind of relief a man experiences when he has just seen someone else agree to take on a responsibility which he had been afraid no one would ever be willing to accept.

"I'll assist you," he said at last. "In a quiet way, though I can do that. It's the least I can owe her and a great deal more than I've already given her."

You might as well begin, Kaelan said, by letting me know what you already suspect regarding the trial. You've been looking through my mother's letters for three years, not eleven days, so I don't believe your interest started because of a strange envoy having pale eyes.

Cassius remained silent for a long time, and a certain expression settled upon his face, the kind of stillness that comes from a man deciding how much of his old fear he is willing to bring across the table.

"Three days before she died," he said at last, "she came to see me in a state of worry. She wouldn't say what it was that she had discovered, only that she wanted to compare something in the vault records with something else—an old accounting that she remembered from many years earlier—and that if she were correct, it would matter more than any of the other things that were happening in the pack at that time. She never got the opportunity to tell me what it was. Two days after that she died, and although it has now been three years, I have never once allowed myself to finish thinking about what she might have found."

"You think it's connected."

It would be rather remarkable if it weren't a coincidence. Luna, who is in a disturbed state, is asking questions regarding old accounts. Then comes a murder two days later. The trial proceeded faster than any capital case I have handled in the sixty years I've been doing this, the evidence being put together so neatly that it almost didn't need to be looked at. And now a woman with no previous record is walking back through our gates humming the private tune of your mother. Cassius shook his head slowly. "I am too old to accept so many coincidences happening one after another."

Kaelan stayed like that for a while, the cold from the vault floor creeping up through him. "So go and find what she found, whatever it was; if anybody has built a case against Wren in order to cover up whatever my mother knew, I want to know who it is and I want to know it before this situation develops any further."

Cassius said that he would have a look; he added that it would be a careful one, since the person who did it had three years in which to hide their tracks and would therefore be on the watch for exactly the sort of investigation this was.

"Then be careful."

I intend to be so," said Cassius, rising as he usually did but more slowly this time, in the way that old people rise, and stopping just short of the vault door. "Anyway, Kaelan, I'm pleased that you didn't ask me to lie to you tonight; I don't believe I could have done it a second time."

Kaelan nodded, and once his uncle had left, he remained all by himself on the vault floor, listening as the old house settled above him, with a name staying in his chest which he was no longer permitted to speak out loud but would never be able to stop hearing.