Chapter 31: Hiding Elias

I got to the clearing an hour later by the long way round, through the trees and up the ridge and down the far side where the ground was rocky and the snow did not settle.

The fire was out. The stones were in their circle around the standing stone and Maeve and Clara Renn were behind the stone with the blankets and the basket. Silas was sitting on a root with his bandaged arm in his lap and his face gray. June was at the edge of the clearing with the rifle.

Elias was not there.

“Where is he?” I said.

“He went back for you,” June said. “He went back down the ridge twenty minutes ago and I could not stop him.”

I turned around and went back to the edge of the clearing, and he came out of the trees before I got there, and he stopped when he saw me.

“You are all right,” he said.

“I am all right. He took the scarf and he let me go.” I put my hand on his arm. “But he is going to search the co-op. He said it in the field. He is going to search the co-op and the pack house and the barn and every place in this territory he thinks a rogue might hide, and if he does not find you in the co-op he is going to come up the ridge and search Maeve's cottage.”

“Then we move,” Elias said.

“We cannot move. Clara Renn is seventy-nine and Silas has an arm that will not hold a rifle and there is a foot of snow on the ground.” I looked at him. “We need somewhere in the territory that Dale has already searched. Somewhere he will not go back to.”

Maeve came around the standing stone with her shawl around her shoulders.

“The cellar,” she said.

I turned.

“My cellar,” Maeve said. “Under the cottage. It has a stone floor and a stone wall and a door that locks from the inside and a vent that comes out under the porch. Dale searched it in July when he was looking for the rogue and he found nothing because there is nothing in it but potatoes and a shelf of preserves. He will not search it again.”

“He might.”

“He might. But he searched it in July and he searched it again in August and both times he found nothing, and a man who has found nothing twice does not look a third time.” Maeve pulled her shawl tighter. “It is not the clearing but it is warm and it has a door and it is close to the co-op and the road.”

I looked at Elias.

“It is the best we have,” he said.

We went down the ridge at dusk with the snow coming down and the wind at our backs. Maeve went first with the lantern and Clara Renn held onto her arm, and June and Silas came behind with the basket and the box, and Elias and I came last and swept our tracks with a branch the way the old border-wardens used to.

Maeve's cottage was cold and dark when we got there. She lit the stove and put the kettle on and then she went to the back of the kitchen and lifted the rug and pulled up the trapdoor and went down the steps with the lantern.

The cellar was bigger than I remembered. It had a stone floor and a stone wall and a low ceiling, and there was a shelf along one side with jars of preserves and a bin of potatoes and a wooden bench against the far wall. There was a vent in the corner that came out under the porch and there was a door at the top of the steps that shut and locked.

“It is not much,” Maeve said. “But it is dry and it is warm if we keep the stove going above.”

Elias went down the steps and stood in the middle of the cellar and looked around.

“It is a room with a door that closes,” he said.

Maeve looked at him for a moment.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

We put Silas on the bench with a blanket and a pillow and his arm propped up on a sack of potatoes. Clara Renn took the chair at the top of the steps with her mother's box on her knees and said she would keep the first watch. June went up to the kitchen to make tea, and Maeve went with her, and I stood at the bottom of the steps with Elias.

“You should sleep,” I said.

“So should you.”

“I will sleep when I know Dale has gone home.”

He took my hand and pulled me down onto the bottom step and I sat beside him with my shoulder against his.

“I have been thinking,” he said.

“That is dangerous.”

“I have been thinking about the scarf.”

“What about it?”

“The piece I found in the grass,” Elias said. “It had wolf blood on it, and it had a knot in it, the way a scarf gets when a man has been pulled by it. But the blood on it was not Dale's.”

“You said that.”

“I have been thinking about whose it could be.” He was quiet for a moment. “There was no one else in that field last night but Dale and the hunters and Silas. Silas is not a wolf. Mr. Hask is not a wolf. Mrs. Bell is not a wolf.”

“Then it was Dale's blood, and you were wrong.”

“I am not wrong about a scent,” Elias said. “I have been wrong about a lot of things in my life but I have never been wrong about a scent.” He turned his head. “The blood on that scarf was wolf blood and it was not Dale's. Which means there was a wolf in that field last night that neither of us knows about, and whoever it was got close enough to Dale to grab his scarf and pull, and got cut for it.”

I sat with that for a moment.

“There was a third set of tracks,” I said. “June counted them. One came from the road and went into the trees and did not come back.”

“I know.”

“You think the third man was a wolf.”

“I think the third man was a wolf who was not in wolf form,” Elias said, “and who was in that field for a reason, and who went into the trees bleeding after Dale cut him.”

The cellar was quiet. Upstairs the kettle began to whistle and June's boots went across the kitchen floor.

“Who in this territory would be in that field at night?” I said. “Everyone in the pack was at home. Everyone in the pack is afraid of Dale and afraid of the Council and afraid of the rogue.” I stopped. “Except one.”

“Who?”

“The person who has been watching the field since 1932,” I said. “Clara Renn.”

Elias looked at me.

“She is seventy-nine years old,” he said.

“She is seventy-nine years old and she is not soft. She dug up the boundary stone in the dark by herself and carried it to her house and nobody saw her. She walked the mill road with a basket of stones and nobody stopped her. And she has been alone in that house for eleven years with a mother who told her to watch the field and wait for the wolf.” I stood up. “I am going to ask her.”

I went up the steps and out into the kitchen. Clara Renn was still in the chair at the top of the cellar steps with her box on her knees and her shawl around her shoulders. She looked up when I came.

“Mrs. Renn,” I said. “Where were you last night?”

She looked at me for a long moment. Her old face was calm.

“I was in the field,” she said.

Maeve put down the teapot.

“I was in the field,” Clara Renn said again. “I have been watching that field for sixty years and I have never once seen a thing happen in it that I did not want to see, and last night I saw the lanterns and I saw the wire going up and I went down the mill road to see what the Beta was doing.” She looked at me. “He had a man on the ground by the wall and he had a rifle on him, and I went through the gap in the wall and I got my hand on his coat and I pulled him back, and the Beta turned around and I got a piece of his scarf in my hand before I let go and ran.”

“You pulled Silas out of the field,” I said.

“I pulled him out of the field.” She folded her hands on the box. “I am seventy-nine years old and I have never been much of a fighter, but I have been waiting for a chance to do something since I was a girl, and I was not going to let the Beta shoot a man in a field in the snow.”

I sat down on the chair across from her.

“You could have been killed,” I said.

“I could have been killed sixty years ago,” Clara Renn said. “I have been dead since my mother died and I am only now finding out what it is like to be alive.”

The door of the cottage opened.

We all turned. June was at the window and she had gone white.

“Wren,” she said. “There is a light on the road. It is the pack truck and it is coming up the hill.”

Maeve moved first. She went to the trapdoor and pulled it open and pushed Silas down the steps and Clara Renn after him and then she turned to me.

“Elias,” I said. “Cellar. Now.”

He went down the steps. I pulled the trapdoor shut and put the rug over it and Maeve put the kettle back on the stove and sat down at the kitchen table with her hands folded.

The pack truck came up the ridge road and stopped outside.

There was a knock at the door. Three raps, sharp.

Maeve got up and opened it.

Dale was on the step with his hat in his hand and snow on his shoulders. Behind him Mr. Hask was standing by the truck with a lantern.

“Healer,” Dale said. “I am sorry to trouble you at this hour. I am looking for a man.”

“There is no man here,” Maeve said.

“I would like to see for myself.” He stepped inside without waiting to be asked. He looked at me and then at June and then at the kitchen. “I have been to the co-op. I have been through every room and every cupboard and the back room and the loading dock.” He put his hand in his coat and took something out. “And I found this in the co-op office, in the drawer of the desk.”

He held it up. It was a knife with a handle of dark wood and a blade that was short and curved, and there was a mark on the handle that I knew.

It was Owen's knife.

“That is my brother's,” I said.

“It is your brother's,” Dale said. “It was in the co-op office in a drawer that had been forced open. And I want to know how it got there, and I want to know who put it there.” He looked at me. “Because the last time I saw this knife, Wren, it was in your brother's hand, on the night he died.”