Chapter 29: Blood on the Snow

We went down to the wall before the sun was properly up, and the snow came down through the trees all the way and lay in the stubble of the east field in a thin white skin that showed every mark on the ground.

The field was a mess.

Silver wire ran across it in lines, strung between stakes that had been driven into the hard ground, and the wire was not the thin stuff Dale had put on the fence. It was braided, heavier, the kind that hunters use when they want a wolf to hit it and stay hit. There were four runs of it, and they crossed each other, and the whole east end of the field was a net.

“He has been busy,” Elias said.

“He has had help,” I said. “It would take one man a week to string this.”

The blood was on the wall.

It started at the gap where the stones had fallen down and it ran along the top of the wall for maybe twenty feet, dark and frozen and thin, and then it dropped down on the far side and went into the trees in spots and smears.

June was standing at the gap with her arms folded and her face white.

“I did not go past the wall,” she said. “I saw the blood and I came straight back.”

“Good.”

“Wren, whose blood is it?”

I crouched down and put my hand near the stain on the stones without touching it. There was not much of it. Whoever it was had not bled long, and had not bled fast. A cut, maybe. A scrape along the arm or the hand.

There were boot prints in the snow on the far side of the wall. I counted them the way I count things. Two sets going out, one set coming back, and then a third set that was smaller and lighter and came from the direction of the mill road and went into the trees and did not come back.

“Three people,” I said. “Two went out and one came back. And one came from the road and went into the trees.”

“Hunters,” Elias said.

“Hunters and Dale.”

“And the one who came from the road?”

“I do not know.”

I went along the wall to the gap and looked through it. The silver wire ran into the trees on the far side, and there was a place where a stake had been pulled out of the ground and the wire had gone slack. There was a scrap of green wool on it.

I picked it off the wire. It was the size of two fingers, torn at the edge, and the stain on it was brown and dry.

“The scarf,” I said. “It is Dale’s scarf. I have seen him wear it a hundred times. Green wool, the same color, the same weave.” I turned it over. “But this is not a tear from wire. Look at the edge. It is cut.”

Elias came and looked. He took the scrap from me and held it up to the gray light and turned it over.

“It is cut,” he said. “Something sharp went through it.”

“A knife.”

“A knife or a blade on a wire.”

I put it in my pocket. “We need to find the rest of it. If Dale was in this field last night and something happened to him, the scarf will be in the field or in the trees, and the rest of the scarf will tell us more than this corner does.”

We spread out along the wall. Maeve stayed with Clara Renn at the edge of the trees and June went along the wall to the north and I went south with Elias, and the snow kept coming down and covered our own tracks almost as fast as we made them.

I found the second piece in the grass on the far side of the wall.

It was longer, the length of my forearm, and it had been torn from the first piece and it had a knot in it, the kind of knot a scarf gets when a man has been pulled by it. The stain on it was bigger and darker.

I stood in the grass with it in my hands and my wolf pushed at my chest and would not sit still.

“It is blood,” Elias said. He came and crouched beside me and put his nose close to the wool and breathed in. “It is wolf blood.”

“Dale is a wolf.”

“Dale is a wolf, but this is not Dale’s blood.” He looked up at me. “I have smelled Dale. He was in the barn on the night I was chained and I have smelled him a dozen times since. This is not him.”

I held the scarf up and looked at it. The stain was dark and there was a little patch of it that had gone stiff and shiny, and under it there was a faint smell that I could not name.

“Whose is it?” I said.

“I do not know.” Elias stood up. “But whoever it was, they were hurt in this field last night and they went into the trees, and there is a piece of a Beta’s scarf with their blood on it.”

We went into the trees. The snow was thicker under the branches and the trail of blood spots went in about forty yards and then stopped at the foot of an old pine. There were marks in the snow at the base of the tree. Someone had sat down there. Someone had sat down with their back against the trunk and stayed for a while, long enough for the snow to start to cover the marks, and then got up and gone on.

“They are still moving,” Elias said. “They are not dead and they are not lying in a ditch. They are walking.”

We followed the marks. They went north through the trees and came out on the old mill road about a quarter mile from the mill, and there the snow had been swept by the wind and the trail was gone.

I stood in the road. The mill was ahead of us, dark and quiet against the gray sky, with its broken door and its rusted roof.

“They went to the mill,” I said.

We went to the mill.

The door was open the way it had always been and the floor inside was swept clean of snow by the wind. There was no blood on the floor. There was no sign of anyone at all.

“They did not come in here,” Elias said. He was standing at the door and his head was up and his nose was working. “There is no blood in this building. They went past it.”

“Past it where?”

“The miller’s house.”

I turned and looked down the road. The white house at the end of the road was barely visible through the snow.

We went down the road. The gate was open and the garden was a mess of dead stalks and the shed door was banging in the wind, and there was a light in the kitchen window.

I knocked on the door. Nobody came. I knocked again and then I tried the handle and it was not locked.

“Clara,” I called. “It is Wren. I am coming in.”

I went in.

The kitchen was warm. The stove was lit and there was a kettle on it and a chair pulled out from the table and a cup of tea gone cold on the table with a saucer over it. There was a coat on the back of the chair and a hat on the table and a pair of boots by the stove.

And there was a man sitting in the chair by the window with a blanket around his shoulders and a bandage on his left arm.

He looked up when we came in. His face was pale and his black hair was plastered to his forehead and his gray eyes were tired.

“Silas,” I said.

“Warden,” he said. “I have been trying to get to you for three days. The snow came in and the car went off the road and I have been walking since Tuesday night.” He held up his bandaged arm. “And then last night I walked into a field full of wire and a man with a lantern and a rifle, and I did not get out of the way in time.”