Chapter 3: The Forty-One Coins

I owned forty-one coins.

I know because I counted them four times on the floor of the loft above the washhouse, and got forty-one, forty-one, forty, and forty-one, and the fourth count was the one I trusted because, by then, my hands had stopped shaking enough to be honest.

Everything else went into a satchel in about the time it takes to boil a pot. Two shifts, a winter cloak with the hem let down twice, my mother's comb with three teeth gone, a knife, flint, half a loaf, and the small clay jar of Beatrice's burn salve that wasn't mine and came with me regardless.

Eighteen years in a place and it fits on your back with room left over. There's a lesson in that. I wasn't in the mood for it.

Rosamund came at the second hour after noon.

She climbed the loft ladder herself, which surprised me, and stood with her head bent under the low beam, and she'd left the fox-collared cloak somewhere and come in plain wool. Up close, she was younger than she'd looked on the stone. Twenty-two, maybe. Two years older than me and about four hundred years more practised at being watched.

"I've brought you money," she said.

"I've got money."

"You've got what a wash-house girl has got." She set a purse down on the boards between us. "Take it or throw it in the river. It's the same to me once it's out of my hand."

I didn't touch it. Neither of us pretended I wouldn't take it eventually.

"You knew," I said. "Last night. When he was saying it, you already knew he was going to."

"I've known since the barley harvest."

"That's before the bond came in."

"Yes," Rosamund said.

The loft was cold, and the light came up through the boards from the wash-house fires below, and I sat there with a lump of ice going down my throat.

"Say the rest."

"Your Alpha and my father settled Thornwake and Silverfang in August. Two hundred spears, the eastern road, and a marriage." She said flatly, no relish in it. "It is the second time I have been written into somebody's treaty. The first one was worth rather more, and it fell through, and I have never once been told why. Then in September, the moon handed Evander a wash-house girl, and for nine weeks I sat in Thornwake and waited to find out whether a man I'd never met would choose the moon or the road."

"And he chose the road."

"He chose his father." She looked at me and something crossed her face that I'd have called pity if pity weren't the one thing I'd have thrown her down the ladder for. "You want me to be your enemy. I can see it. It'd be tidier for you."

"It would."

"I'm not going to do it," she said. "I'm going to marry a man who's in love with someone else, and I'm going to be very good at it, and you're going to walk out of that gate tomorrow, and in ten years one of us will envy the other and I don't yet know which." She went to the ladder and stopped. "He hasn't slept. He was in the stable at four this morning with his forehead against a horse. I thought you should know, and I've decided I'm allowed to be small about exactly one thing today, and that's it."

Then she was gone, and I sat with forty-one coins and a purse I hadn't opened and a feeling in my chest like a swallowed stone.

Matilda found me at the gate an hour before dark.

She's the archivist, sixty-odd, spectacles on a cord, permanently dusted grey at the cuffs. She has spoken perhaps forty words to me in my life and thirty of them were about returning a book.

She caught my sleeve and pulled me sideways into the lee of the gatepost with a grip like a farrier.

"You're going east," she said. "Don't. Go north, over Cairn's Pass, onto the high ground, and don't take the Hollow Road whatever the weather does."

"The Hollow Road is two days shorter."

"I'm aware." She pushed something into my hand. Paper folded small and folded often. "Don't read that here. Don't read it anywhere where anybody can see your face while you're reading it."

I looked down. It was a page out of a ledger, the top edge feathered where it had been torn.

"Matilda, what is this?"

"It's the year of your mother's death, out of the pack record, and it is the only surviving copy because I made it before the original was corrected." Her mouth twisted on the word corrected. "She's entered under a different name than the one on her grave marker."

The cold coming off the stone went straight through my cloak. "What name?"

"Vaudrey." Matilda's fingers tightened on my wrist, over the bandage, over the mark. "Alis Vaudrey. And there's a line copied under it out of a book that isn't in my archive anymore, and I have thought about that line every day for eighteen years."

"Tell me."

"Vaudrey bonds are not given. They are opened."

Down in the yard, men were shouting. A rider had come in through the lower gate at a gallop, and half the household was running.

"That's the third messenger since noon," Matilda said. "The Lycan King is on the road. Three days out, perhaps two if the weather holds off the passes." She let go of me. "Edmund is not exiling you because your bond wouldn't cut, child. He's exiling you because Aldren of Blackthorn is coming, and Edmund does not want the King to find a Vaudrey standing in his yard."

"Why would the King care about—" I stopped my words.

Every torch on the wall went out at once. Not guttered. Not blown. Out, all along the gate line, snuffed as though a hand had closed over each one in turn, and the dark came down so complete that I heard Matilda's breath catch beside me and couldn't see her face six inches away.

Out of the black on the other side of the gate, in my mother's voice, something said, "Elinor."