Chapter 54: The Scent of Silver

We got in the truck and I drove.

The track behind the miller's house was not a road. It was two ruts with grass in the middle and branches hanging low over it and a crust of snow on everything, and I put the truck into it in second gear and we went up through the trees with the headlights cutting a yellow hole in the dark. The branches scraped the roof and once a limb came down across the hood and I drove through it and it went under the wheels.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

June sat by the window with her arm in the scarf and her face turned away. Arthur Renn sat in the middle with the record on his knees and his spectacles in his hand. Hannah was in the back with the stones and the blankets. Elias was beside me with his shirt off and Maeve's stitches in his shoulder and his coat over his knees.

I drove for about an hour before I said anything.

“Elias,” I said. “You said there was more of it and it was worse.”

He had been watching the trees go by.

“Your mother came to me in 1968,” he said. “I was twenty-eight years old and I had been on my own for six years and I was working on a fishing boat in Oregon and I had come inland for the winter to look for work. I was in a churchyard in Walla Walla on a Sunday morning and there was a woman sitting on a bench with a green scarf around her neck and she looked at me for a long time and then she said, you are the cursed one.”

“How did she know?”

“She said she could smell it. She said the curse had a smell and she had smelled it once before, on a boy who died in 1948 in a car on the Walla Walla road.” He turned his head. “She told me she was the Luna’s line and she told me what the curse was and she told me that it would come for her son and that when it did she would not be able to stop it. She told me to run east and not come back to this territory. She told me to change my name and never use my father’s name and never let a wolf of this pack see my back.” He put his hand on his shoulder. “And then she said, if you ever meet my daughter, tell her I am sorry.”

I kept my eyes on the track.

“Sorry for what?”

“She did not say. I asked her and she stood up and walked away and I did not see her again.”

“And you have been carrying that for eleven years.”

“I have been carrying it for eleven years.” He looked at me. “And then in July I came to this territory because the curse dragged me here and I found a woman in a field and she had your mother’s chin and your mother’s temper and your mother’s way of standing with her hands in her pockets, and I knew who you were before you ever told me your name.”

I drove around a curve and the trees opened and the river road was there below us, a gray line in the dark with the snow on it and the river beyond it black and moving.

“There is a thing I do not understand,” I said. “If my mother knew about the curse and knew what it would do to Owen, why did she not tell anyone? Why did she not tell Harlan or the Council or the pack?”

Arthur Renn cleared his throat in the middle seat.

“Because she did tell someone,” he said.

I looked at him.

“My grandfather kept a file on your family,” Arthur Renn said. “I have it in the truck. It goes back to 1954. There is a letter in it from your mother to the Council, written in 1968, asking the Council to hear a claim of blood. She wrote it herself. She asked for a hearing in front of the Alphas and she asked for a ruling on the land and she asked for the curse to be lifted from her children.” He put his spectacles on. “The Council wrote back to her and told her that the claim had been considered and denied, and that if she pursued it she would be declared a rogue and driven from the territory with her children. There is a copy of the letter in the file. It is signed by the chief clerk.”

“Kessler,” I said.

“Kessler,” Arthur Renn said.

I drove down the track to the river road and turned south and put my foot down.

“She tried,” I said. “She wrote to the Council and the Council told her to be quiet and she was quiet for the rest of her life.”

“She was quiet and she kept her children out of the pack records,” Arthur Renn said. “That is why there is no record of your birth in the pack book and no record of June’s birth either. She registered you both with the county and not with the pack. She was trying to keep you out of the Council’s file.” He looked at the record on his knees. “She was trying to keep you alive.”

The river road went south along the river and the sky began to gray and the snow turned from white to gray and the river turned from black to silver. We passed a farmhouse with a light in the window and a barn with a tin roof and a dog that ran out and barked at the truck and then fell behind.

June said, “Wren.”

“What?”

“There is a smell in this truck.”

I looked at her.

“What kind of smell?”

“Silver.” She was holding her arm and her face was turned toward the window and she was not looking at me. “It is on my jacket. I have been smelling it since we got in and I did not want to say anything because I did not want to be the one who said it.”

I pulled the truck over onto the shoulder and stopped.

“Give me the jacket,” I said.

She took it off and handed it to me. It was her coat, the brown one with the wooden buttons, and I put it to my face and breathed in.

Silver. It was faint and it was under the wool and the snow and the smell of June, and it was there.

“Where did you get this coat?” I said.

“It is mine.”

“June.”

“It is mine. I have had it since October.”

“Where did you get it?”

She looked at me.

“Dale gave it to me,” she said. “In October. He said it was a coat that had come into the co-op in a box of things from the Sears catalog and that it was the wrong size for anybody in the pack and he thought it would fit me.” She looked at the coat in my hands. “Wren, what is on it?”

I got out of the truck and opened the back and took the coat into the snow and turned it inside out.

There was a lining in it. It was a thin gray lining and it was sewn in at the seams and it had been sewn in by hand, and along the inside of the left sleeve, from the cuff to the elbow, there was a row of small silver rings sewn into the seam.

“Wren,” June said behind me. “Wren, what is it?”

“It is silver,” I said. “It is a tracking coat. There is silver sewn into the lining and silver in the sleeve, and there is a piece of something in the collar that is not wool.” I turned the collar over and there was a small flat disc sewn into the seam, and the disc was warm.

“What is it?” June said again.

“It is a stone,” I said. “It is a piece of the boundary stone sewn into the collar of your coat.” I stood up with the coat in my hands. “Dale gave you a coat with silver in the lining and a piece of the boundary stone in the collar. He has been tracking you for four months.”

June was very pale.

“He told me to follow the patrol,” she said. “The night I got caught. He came to the house and he said there was a patrol going out and he said if I followed it I would see where they were putting the wire.” She put her hand over her mouth. “He told me to go. He told me it was safe.”

I stood in the snow on the river road with the coat in my hands and the truck running and the sky going gray.

“He put you in that field,” I said.