Chapter 3: The Forty-One Coins

I owned forty-one coins.

I knew because I had counted them four separate times on the floor of the loft above the wash-house. I got forty-one, forty-one, forty, and forty-one. The fourth count was the one I trusted; by then, my hands had finally stopped shaking enough to be honest.

Everything else I owned went into a leather satchel in about the time it takes to boil a pot of tea: two shifts, a heavy winter cloak with the hem let down twice, my mother’s horn comb with three teeth missing, a hunting knife, flint, half a loaf of stale rye, and the small clay jar of Beatrice’s burn salve that wasn’t technically mine but came with me regardless.

Eighteen years of being nobody’s daughter in that place, and my entire life fit on my back with room left over. There was a lesson in that, though I wasn’t in the mood to learn it.

Rosamund arrived at the second hour after noon.

She climbed the creaking loft ladder herself, which caught me completely off guard. She stood beneath the low timber beam with her head bent, having shed her fox-collared cloak somewhere in favour of plain wool. Up close, she looked younger than she had on the dais—twenty-six, perhaps. That made her two years older than me but about four hundred years more practised at being watched.

“I’ve brought you money,” she said, her voice even.

“I’ve got money,” I replied without looking up from my satchel.

“You’ve got what a wash-house girl has got.” She set a heavy leather purse down on the wooden boards between us with a soft thud. “Take it or throw it in the river. It’s all the same to me once it’s out of my hands.”

I didn’t touch it, though neither of us bothered to pretend I wouldn’t take it eventually.

“You knew,” I said, meeting her gaze. “Last night, when he was saying the words, you already knew he was going to.”

“I’ve known since the barley harvest.”

“That was before the bond even came in,” I pressed.

“Yes,” Rosamund said simply.

The loft was draughty, and the heat rising through the floorboards from the wash-house fires below carried the smell of lye. I sat there as a cold lump formed in my throat, heavy as ice.

“Say the rest of it.”

“Your Alpha and my father settled the Thornwake and Silverfang alliance back in August. Two hundred spears, the eastern trade road, and a marriage.” She delivered the details flatly, without a trace of relish. “It is the second time I have been written into somebody’s treaty. The first one was worth rather more, and it fell through. 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 waiting 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 down at me, and something flickered across her features that I would have called pity—if pity weren’t the one thing I would have thrown her down the ladder for. “You want me to be your enemy, Elinor. I can see it. It would be tidier for you.”

“It would.”

“I’m not going to play that role,” she said, her posture rigid. “I’m going to marry a man who is in love with someone else, and I’m going to be very good at it. You’re going to walk out of that gate tomorrow, and in ten years, one of us will envy the other—though I don’t yet know which.” She turned toward the ladder, then paused, her hand resting on the wooden rail. “He hasn’t slept. He was out in the stable at four this morning with his forehead pressed against his horse. I thought you should know. I’ve decided I’m allowed to be small about exactly one thing today, and that’s it.”

Then she disappeared down the rungs. I was left sitting alone with forty-one coins, a purse of gold I hadn’t opened, and a feeling in my chest like a swallowed stone.

Matilda intercepted me near the main gate an hour before dark.

She was the pack archivist—sixty-odd years old, spectacles hanging from a leather cord, her cuffs permanently dusted grey with parchment powder. She had spoken perhaps forty words to me in my entire life, and thirty of them had been about returning an overdue ledger.

She reached out, snagged my sleeve, and hauled me sideways into the shadow of the gatepost with a grip like a farrier’s.

“You’re going east,” she said, her voice hushed and hurried. “Don’t. Go north over Cairn’s Pass into the high ground, and don’t take the Hollow Road, whatever the weather does.”

“The Hollow Road is two days shorter.”

“I’m well aware.” She shoved a piece of paper into my hand, folded small and pressed tight. “Don’t read that here. Don’t read it anywhere somebody can see your face while you’re reading it.”

I looked down at the scrap. It was a torn page from an old registry, the top edge feathered where it had been ripped out.

“Matilda, what is this?”

“It’s the entry from the year of your mother’s death, pulled from the pack record. It is the only surviving copy because I made it before the original was corrected.” Her mouth twisted bitterly around the last word. “She’s entered under a different name from the one carved on her grave marker.”

The chill seeping from the stone wall went straight through my wool cloak. “What name?”

“Vaudrey.” Matilda’s fingers tightened around my wrist, squeezing directly over the linen bandage and the mark beneath it. “Alis Vaudrey. And there’s a line copied beneath it from a book that isn’t in my archive anymore—a line I have thought about every single day for eighteen years.”

“Tell me.”

“Vaudrey bonds are not given,” Matilda whispered, leaning closer. “They are opened.”

Down in the courtyard, men began shouting. A horse at a hard gallop burst through the lower gate, sending half the household scattering out of its path.

“That’s the third messenger since noon,” Matilda noted, her eyes darting toward the commotion. “The Lycan King is on the road. Three days out, perhaps two if the weather holds over the high passes.” She abruptly released my arm. “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—”

Every torch along the stone wall went out at once.

They didn’t gutter. They didn’t blow out in the wind. They simply went dark along the entire gate line, snuffed simultaneously as though an invisible hand had closed over every flame at once. Darkness slammed down so completely that I heard Matilda’s breath catch beside me, yet I couldn’t see her face six inches away.

Then, from the pitch-black beyond the gate, a voice spoke in my mother’s unmistakable cadence.

“Elinor.”