Chapter 8: Grain in His Hair

The headlights swept across the mill door and I dropped flat behind the grain chute, and Elias was gone before I had my knees under me. There was the sound of boots on the floor above, quick and light, and then nothing.

The truck came down the mill road slow and stopped outside. I heard the engine idle and a door open and boots on gravel, and then a voice, Mrs. Bell's, flat and unhurried.

"Light's not on in there. Nothing moving."

"Check the door anyway," Mr. Hask said.

I pressed myself into the gap between the chute and the wall and put my hand over my mouth and breathed through my nose. My wolf had gone quiet, the way a wolf goes quiet in a hedge when the dogs come past. The mill floor was cold under my knees and the dust in it was old and fine.

The boots came up to the door and stopped. A flashlight came on and moved across the floor, slow, left to right, and then up over the beams and across the loft floor.

"That ladder's new," Mrs. Bell said.

"It's an old ladder," said Mr. Hask. "It's been here since before the war. The rail is worn."

"The rail's worn on the outside. That's feet. Something's been climbing it."

The flashlight went out. I heard the two of them standing in the doorway, and I could hear the truck idling, and I could hear my own heart going too loud.

"We'll come back in the daylight," Mr. Hask said. "There's no point stumbling around in the dark. We'll bring the wire and we'll do it proper."

They went away. The doors of the truck opened and shut, and the engine came up, and the headlights swung off the wall and down the road, and the sound of them faded out toward the north fence.

I stayed where I was for a long time. Then I sat up, and my knees cracked, and I said, "You can come out now."

Elias came down the ladder. He had a length of iron pipe in his hand and he put it down against the wall and sat down on the floor with his back against the grain chute and his legs out in front of him.

"That was close," he said.

"You were in the loft."

"I was on the roof. There is a hole by the chimney."

"You were on the roof with a piece of pipe."

"I was on the roof," Elias said. "The pipe was for later."

I sat there in the dark and looked at him. Then I started to laugh. I did not mean to. It came up out of my chest and I put my hand over my mouth and it did not stop, and Elias looked at me with his head tilted and then he began to laugh too, quietly, both of us sitting on the floor of a ruined mill with hunters on our line and a list in my pocket with his description on it.

"I brought food," I said when I could talk. "It is in my jacket. It is going to be squashed."

It was squashed. There was bread and a jar of Maeve's cold chicken and an apple that had gone soft on one side, and I put it all on the lid of a grain bin between us and we ate with our fingers in the dark.

"I have been eating rabbit," Elias said, with his mouth full. "For four months. Rabbit, and whatever the healer leaves at the edge of her trees, and once a bag of oats that fell off a truck."

"Maeve said she has been feeding you."

"Maeve talks too much."

"Maeve talks exactly as much as she wants to," I said, "and no one has ever made her do otherwise."

He smiled at that. It was the first real smile I had seen on him, and it changed his whole face. It made him look less like a man who had been lying in a field for four months and more like a man who had once been easy in his own skin.

"Tell me about Owen," I said.

The smile went away. He set down the bread and wiped his hands on his knees.

"You want all of it?"

"I want the part you have been keeping back," I said. "You told me you were there. You told me he said Dale's name. You told me you tried to hold the wound shut. There is something between those things, and you have not told me what it is, and I am sitting on the floor of a mill eating cold chicken with the man who was holding my brother when he died, and I am asking you nicely."

He was quiet for a while. The wind came through the broken door and moved the dust on the floor.

"I was not in the field by accident," he said.

"Go on."

"The new moon comes every month, and every month it takes me somewhere. I do not get to choose where. It is as if the wolf in me has an errand, and the errand is always the same, and when I wake up I am somewhere in this county with no clothes and no memory of how I got there. For four months it has been the north field by the mill. But before that, it was not."

"Where was it before that?"

"Wherever the curse wanted me," Elias said. "In April it was the west line. In May it was the Henderson place, twice. In June it was the corral at the north line, and I know, because I woke up in the dirt beside it with the wire cut and a dead calf forty feet away and no memory of doing it. That is why I stopped sleeping. That is why I stopped letting myself be found. Because I could not tell you what I did on the new moon and I could not tell you it was not me."

I put down the apple.

"You cut the corral wire," I said.

"I do not know. I woke up next to it. The wolf had blood on it and I had blood on my hands, and the calf was dead, and the cuts were clean and deep and there was nothing eaten." He looked at me. "Four long cuts. Like a blade. I have been going over it for months, and I cannot make it fit. A wolf does not cut. A wolf tears. But every time the new moon comes I wake up in a field where something has been cut, and the pack finds the body and calls it a rogue, and I am the rogue."

I sat with that for a minute. The mill creaked above us.

"And June," I said. "Last June. The night Owen died. Where did the wolf take you?"

"To the field behind the mill road," Elias said. "To the same field it takes me now. And when I got there, there was a light in the trees and a truck on the road, and Owen was on the ground with a wound in his chest, and there was a man standing over him."

I stopped breathing.

"You never told me there was a man."

"I told you there was a wolf that killed him. I did not tell you there was a man standing there after." Elias looked at the floor. "The man had a lantern. He was wearing a coat with the collar up, and his back was to me, and I could not see his face. Owen was still alive. He was saying the name over and over, and the man with the lantern was telling him to be quiet. Then the man heard me in the wheat and he turned around, and I saw his face for half a second before he ran for the truck."

"What did he look like?"

"Sandy hair," Elias said. "That is all I got. Sandy hair and a green scarf and a coat with the collar up, and a lantern in his left hand and the truck door opening, and then he was gone."

I sat very still. My brother's chest, I thought. The coroner said the wound was from an animal. The casket was closed. The coat with the collar up and the green scarf, and Dale standing at the back of the church with his hand on my shoulder.

"Why did you not tell me this," I said. My voice came out very quiet.

"Because you were already looking at me like I was the thing that killed him," Elias said. "And because I did not know if I could trust you, and because if I told you and you told the pack, I would be dead in a field before the week was out, and the man with the lantern would still be walking around this county with his coat on." He looked up at me. "And because I was not sure of my own eyes. The new moon is not kind to the memory. I have had to go over it a hundred times to be sure of the coat and the lantern, and I am still not sure of the scarf. It might have been green. It might have been the light."

"Dale has a green scarf," I said. "He wore it at the harvest dance last year and June said it made him look like a Christmas card."

Elias did not say anything.

I got up. My legs were stiff from the cold floor and I had to put my hand on the grain bin to steady myself, and then I walked to the door and stood in it and looked out at the dark road and the wheat.

"If it was Dale," I said, "then he did not kill my brother because he was a wolf. He killed him with a blade and stood over him with a lantern and told him to be quiet."

"It looks that way."

"And then the pack called it a rogue, and the Council agreed, and everyone in this county believes a wild wolf did it, and the wild wolf was you, and you have been living in a mill for four months because you could not prove otherwise."

"That is about the size of it," Elias said.

I turned around. He was still sitting on the floor with the apple in his hand and the coat open at his chest, and he was watching me with an expression I could not read.

"Give me the stone," I said.

He looked at me for a moment. Then he reached into the coat and brought out the handkerchief and put it in my hand. The stone was warm through the cloth, warm the way a thing is warm when it has been held for a long time.

"When the moon comes," I said, "I want to see it. I want to be in that field when you change, and I want to see where the wolf goes, and I want to see what it does. If the wolf is being made to do things in this county, I am going to find out what and who is making it."

Elias stood up. He was close to me now, and the smell of him was all around me, and his face in the dark doorway was very still.

"You do not know what you are asking," he said.

"I know exactly what I am asking."

"The new moon is in nine days," he said. "And if you are standing in that field when it comes, you will see something that will make you wish you had never come to this mill."

"That is my problem," I said. "Not yours."

He looked at me for a long time. Then he reached out and took the handkerchief out of my hand to wrap the stone, and his fingers brushed mine.

The heat came up through my hand and up my arm and into my chest, and my wolf went down and made that low sound. Elias's hand closed over mine and he did not let go, and his eyes in the dark went wide. He made a noise in his throat that was not a word.

"Let go," I said.

"I cannot," he said. His voice had gone rough. "Wren. I cannot."

I lifted my chin. "Then do not."

The wind came in through the broken door and moved his hair, and there were still grains of wheat caught in it from the field where he had been lying, and I reached up with my free hand and took one out between my fingers and held it up where he could see it.

"You have grain in your hair," I said. "You have had grain in your hair every time I have seen you, and I am starting to think it grows there."

He did not laugh. He looked at the grain between my fingers and then at my face, and his hand tightened on mine, and then he stepped back and let go all at once, and the cold came back into my skin so fast I nearly fell.

"Nine days," he said. "If you are still sure in nine days, come to the east field by the stone wall. I will be there."

"And if I am not sure?"

"Then do not come," Elias said, "and I will be glad of it, because you will live longer."

He turned and went up the ladder into the dark of the loft, and I stood in the doorway with my hand still warm, and behind me in the north the hunters' truck started up again and moved along the fence line.