Chapter 6: What Maeve Knows

Dale walked me back to the road with the coil of silver wire over his shoulder, and he talked the whole way about the hunters and the weather and how good the wheat was going to be this year, and I answered him in the right places and did not look at the fence.

At the road he said, "You should sleep. You have a long walk tomorrow."

"I will sleep when the line is walked," I said.

He smiled and put the wire in the back of his truck and drove off with his headlights sweeping the wheat, and I stood in the road and watched until the taillights were gone. Then I went the other way, up the hill toward the healer's cottage, because I was not going home and I was not going to sleep.

Maeve's cottage sits at the top of the ridge where the trees start, with a tin roof and a porch that leans and a chimney that smokes all year round. She has lived there since before I was born. She is the pack healer, and she has silver hair she cuts herself with sewing scissors, and dark eyes that see everything, and a mouth that has never once softened a thing it did not want to soften. Half the pack is a little afraid of her. The other half is a lot afraid of her. I have been in both halves at different times.

I knocked at the door and she opened it before my hand came off the wood.

"You took your time," she said.

She was in her nightgown with a shawl over it and her feet in men's socks, and she turned around and went back into the kitchen without waiting for me. I followed her. The kitchen was warm and smelled like dried herbs and the bread she bakes in the little oven in the wall, and there were jars on every shelf with things in them that I did not want to think about.

"Sit," she said, and pushed a mug of something at me. "Drink that. You look like a woman who has been standing in a field with her mouth open."

I sat down at the table. I drank. It was bitter and tasted of pine and something sweet under it, and it went down into my stomach and warmed me all the way through.

"You know," I said.

Maeve sat down across from me and wrapped her hands around her own mug. "I have known since July."

"Since July?"

"Since the night I walked out to the well and found a wolf sitting at the edge of my trees with his nose up and his eyes on this house." She took a drink. "He did not come close. He sat there until the sun came up and then he went back into the north field, and the next night he was there again, and the night after that. I have been putting out meat for him for two months."

I set the mug down. "You have been feeding him."

"I have been feeding a wolf who could not hunt," Maeve said. "There is a difference, and I do not need you to tell me what it is."

"He is not an animal."

"On the new moon he is," she said. "And on the full moon he is a man with too much in his head. I know what he is, Wren. I am asking you what you are doing standing on his side of the fence at ten o'clock at night."

The room got very quiet. The fire moved in the stove.

"I do not know," I said.

"You do know." Maeve set her mug down hard. "You came up this hill at eleven o'clock at night to sit in my kitchen and drink my tea and tell me you do not know. So I will tell you what I see. I see a woman whose wolf has chosen a cursed man, and I see that woman about to make the worst mistake of her life, and I want you to hear me say it plainly before you do."

"Cursed," I said. "You keep using that word. Everyone keeps using that word. What curse, Maeve? What are you talking about?"

She got up and went to the shelf by the window and took down a tin box that had once held tea and now held paper. She brought it back to the table and set it down between us and did not open it.

"Before this pack was this pack," she said, "there was another pack on this land. The founders came here in the spring of 1891 with three wagons and eleven wolves and a claim deed they had bought from a man in Walla Walla who had never set foot in this county. They found a pack already living here. There was an Alpha and a Luna and a circle of boundary stones in a field, and the stones were the heart of the territory. You could feel them from a mile off. The old people say a wolf who stood in that circle could hear the moon."

I had heard of the boundary stones. Everyone had. Nobody had ever found them.

"The founders wanted the land," Maeve said. "They wanted the wheat and the water and the stones. The old pack would not sell, and the Council in those days did not care what happened on the far side of the mountains. So the founders did a thing. They took the Luna of the old pack out of her own house in the middle of the night and they held her in the mill, and they sent word to her mate that if he gave up his claim they would give her back."

"What happened?"

"She died in the mill," Maeve said. "The story is she drowned. I do not know if that is true. Her mate went to the Council with his grief and the Council ruled the land belonged to the founders, because the founders had the deed and the other pack did not. And the old Alpha did one last thing before he left this country. He put a curse on the founders and their bloodline."

The fire popped.

"That is a story," I said. "Old people tell stories."

"It is a story with a curse in it," Maeve said, "and the curse has a shape. There is a page in the founders' record, and I have seen it, and it says what the old Alpha said when he stood in that circle on the night of the new moon. He said that the founders would have the land but never the heart of it. He said that every generation one of their wolves would be born with a piece of the old pack in him, and that piece would be a wolf that could not live like a wolf. It would be a wolf that changed on the wrong moon, and was a man when the pack was strong and a beast when the pack was blind, and it would carry the marks of every wolf it failed to save."

I sat very still.

"Maeve."

"The curse moves," she said. "It does not stay in one family. It follows the land. When a wolf is cursed it takes something from the last one who held it, and it takes it in the body. A scar. A burn. A wound it should not have."

"Owen," I said.

Maeve's face did not change. She looked at me for a long moment and then she nodded, once.

"There is no record of it," I said. My voice came out flat. "There is nothing in the pack records about a curse, and I have read the pack records, Maeve, I have read every one of them from 1891 to 1974, because Harlan asked me to sort them when I was twenty and I did it, all of them, and there was nothing."

"Because the founders' record is not in the pack records," Maeve said. "The founders' record went to the Council in 1902, and the Council keeps it, and there is one page that the Council has never let out of its sight. I saw it because I was young once and I was allowed into the archive in Boise with a healer's pass. It says two bloodlines, one claim, no cure. It says the curse can only be broken by a claim made in public at the full moon, in the circle, with the whole pack as witness." She looked at me. "And the Council has never allowed it. Not once in eighty-five years. Because a cursed wolf on a leash is worth more to the Council than a free one."

I pushed my chair back and stood up. The kitchen was small and warm and the walls had jars on them, and I could not breathe properly.

"You are telling me that Owen died of a curse," I said, "and the pack covered it up, and the Council has the paperwork, and now there is another cursed wolf in the north field and he is my mate, and you have known this since July and you have been feeding him like a stray cat."

"I have been keeping him alive," Maeve said. "There is a difference, and you know it. He is not a stray. He is the only witness to what happened to your brother, and he is the only wolf in this county who cannot lie about it, because the curse makes him carry the truth in his body." She stood up too. "But none of that changes what I said. Stay away from him. If the pack finds out that the border-warden is mated to the rogue, they will not cull the rogue. They will cull the border-warden, and the Council will sign the order and Harlan will sign it under them, and your sister will be the one who finds you in the field."

I looked at the tin box on the table.

"What is in there?" I asked.

"Things I have kept," Maeve said. "Things I will show you when you are ready to look at them. Not tonight."

"I am ready now."

"No," she said. "You are not. You are a woman with a mate bond in her chest and no sleep in her body and a hunter out on your line, and if I open that box tonight you will do something brave and stupid and I will lose a wolf I have known since she was born." She put her hand on the lid. "Go home. Sleep. Tomorrow you walk the line with the hunters and you keep your face still. And when you cannot stand it any longer, come back up this hill and I will show you the box."

I went to the door. I stopped with my hand on the latch.

"Who else knows?" I said. "About the curse. About the mill. Who else in this pack knows?"

Maeve did not answer for a while. Then she said, "Harlan knows part of it. He was told when he became Alpha, the way every Alpha is told. He has never told the pack, and he has never told the Council what he knows, and that is the most dangerous thing about him." She paused. "And there is a man in a gray suit who has been in town for four days asking about the mill. I do not know what he knows. I know that I do not like his shoes."

I went out onto the porch.

"Wren," Maeve called after me. "There is one more thing. The page in the Council archive. The one that says two bloodlines, one claim, no cure. There was a second line under it in a different hand, and I only saw it once, and I have never forgotten it."

"What did it say?"

She came to the door. Her silver hair was lit from behind by the kitchen lamp, and her dark eyes were steady on me.

"It said the curse will not end until the Luna comes home." She closed the door.

I stood on the leaning porch with the wind coming up from the north and the trees moving above the roof. Far off along the line I could hear the hunters' truck starting up, and somewhere in the dark a wolf sat in the edge of the trees and did not come close, and I could smell pine and cedar on the wind all the way down the hill.