Chapter 9: The First Touch

I walked the north line at first light with the hunters, and I did it with my face still and my hands in my pockets and the warmth still in my right hand from the night before.

Mrs. Bell walked ahead with her rifle and Mr. Hask walked beside me and asked questions. He was a thorough man. He wanted to know where the fence had come down, and when, and who had found it, and what the ground had been like after the rain, and whether the pack had any dogs. I answered all of it. He wrote things in a small notebook with a stub of pencil. Mrs. Bell did not ask me anything. She walked along the wire with her eyes on the ground and every so often she crouched and put her fingers in the dirt and then went on without a word.

At the stone wall, Mr. Hask stopped and looked out over the east field. The wheat there had been cut and the stubble was pale and the wall ran along the bottom of it, low and old and made of field stones piled up without mortar.

"That is the east field," I said. "It is cut. There is nothing out there but stubble."

"The wall is old," Mr. Hask said.

"It was here before the pack," I said. "It is just stones."

He wrote something in his notebook. Mrs. Bell came up and stood next to him and looked out at the field for a while, and then she turned her head and looked at me instead.

"You walk this line often," she said.

"Most nights."

"Have you ever seen a wolf out there?"

"On the new moon," I said. "In April and May. A big one, pale. It ran for the trees when I called out."

That was a lie, and I told it well, and I did not like the way it sat in my mouth.

Mrs. Bell nodded slowly. Then she said, "Thank you, warden," and walked on down the line, and Mr. Hask followed her, and I stood at the stone wall with the wind in my face.

I went home and slept for four hours and then I got up and went in to the co-op, and the day went past me like a truck on the highway. June watched me all afternoon and did not ask. Harold asked me twice whether I was sick. I weighed grain and wrote tickets and answered the phone and thought about nine days.

At five o'clock I went up to Maeve's cottage and knocked on the door and she opened it and looked at me and said, "You have been to the mill."

"How do you know that?"

"Because you smell like him," Maeve said, "and because you have not slept, and because you are standing on my porch with your chin out like a woman who is about to do something she cannot undo." She stepped back and held the door. "Come in and eat something. I made a pie."

The pie was apple and she gave me a piece that took up half the plate and I ate it all. She sat across from me with her own plate and watched me with her dark eyes and waited.

"You said the curse moves," I said. "You said it takes something from the last one who held it and puts it on the next one."

"I did."

"The marks on Elias. The scar and the burn. Those were Owen's."

Maeve set down her fork. "What did he tell you?"

"He told me he was in the field the night my brother died. He told me there was a man standing over Owen with a lantern and a coat with the collar up. He told me he saw the man's face for half a second and the man had sandy hair." I put my hands on the table. "Maeve, he told me Owen said the name Dale before he died."

The kitchen was quiet. The stove ticked.

"You cannot prove it," Maeve said.

"I know I cannot. Not yet."

"You cannot go to Harlan with it."

"I know that too."

"Then what are you going to do?"

I looked down at my plate. "In nine days the new moon comes. Elias says the wolf takes him somewhere every month whether he wants it or not, and that for four months it has been taking him to the north field. I am going to be in that field when it comes. If something is making his wolf do things, I am going to see what."

Maeve got up and went to the window and stood there with her back to me, and her silver hair caught the last of the light.

"There is a word for a wolf who wakes up where he did not go," she said.

"What word?"

"Bound." She turned around. "There is an old thing in this pack. It goes back to the founding. When a wolf is cursed, the wolf is bound to the land and to the moon, and the curse does not let him rest. But a curse is a thing with a shape, and a shape can be seen, and a thing that can be seen can be broken. You are not going to like how it is broken."

"Tell me how."

"Not yet," Maeve said. "You are not ready, and I am not certain, and I have been wrong before." She came back to the table. "You want to be in that field in nine days. Then you need to be able to get out of it alive, and you need to be able to get him out of it alive, and the two of you are not going to do that by standing in the middle of the wheat holding hands. You are going to do it by knowing the ground. So go home, and sleep, and tomorrow after the co-op you come up here, and I will show you what I know about the field and the stone and the way out of it that does not run past Dale's house."

I went home. June was sitting on the porch with her feet on the rail and a book on her knees, and she looked up when I came up the road.

"You have been up to Maeve's," she said.

"How do you know?"

"You smell like her tea." June closed the book. "I have been thinking."

"That is dangerous."

"I am serious, Wren. I have been thinking about the harvest order. In July, Dale put a note on the co-op board that said the east field goes first, and Harold said it was the wrong order and Dale told him the co-op needed the grain and Harlan had signed off on it. And I asked Harold about it last week, and Harold said no one has ever been told to cut a field before it is ready. He said the last time the east field was cut this early was in 1952, and the co-op lost money." She looked at me. "The east field goes first because of the stone, does it not? You told me about the stone."

I sat down on the porch step. June is nineteen and she is not stupid, and I have never had much luck lying to her.

"It is not only the stone," I said. "The stone is under the east field and the Council wants it. That is why Dale is cutting early and that is why the wardens stay off the north end."

June's eyes went wide. "The Council is the one who is buying the grain land."

"Yes."

"Then the Council is buying the land and Dale is cutting the field and neither of them wants anyone to look at the wall." She sat up straight. "Wren, that is not a rogue problem. That is a land problem."

I looked at my little sister on the porch with her red hair and her freckles and her book on her knees and her chin out the way it goes when she has decided something.

"You cannot say a word about this to anyone," I said.

"I know that. I am not a child."

"I mean it, June. Not to Mrs. Pike, not to Harold, not to anyone in the co-op. If Dale even thinks someone in this town is asking about the east field, he will go to the Council and the Council will come down on this pack and they will not come down gently."

June was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I have not said anything to anyone. But I am going to help you, and you are going to let me."

I opened my mouth to tell her no, and then I thought about the hunters and the silver wire and the list in the drawer with the line about the girl on it, and I shut my mouth again.

"We will talk about it tomorrow," I said. "I need to sleep."

I did not sleep. I lay on my bed with the window open and the smell of the wheat coming in and my hand still warm from the night before, and it did not fade. It was still there when I woke up and it was still there when I went in to work, and it did not feel like heat anymore. It felt like a compass needle. It was pointing north, and it was pointing at the mill, and I could feel it turning when I turned.

The ninth day began with rain.

It rained all morning and into the afternoon and the co-op yard turned to mud and June came in with her boots soaked and her hair plastered to her forehead. The rain stopped around four and the sky cleared and the wind came out of the west and dried the ground, and by the time the sun went down the stubble in the east field was dry as paper.

I told June I was walking the line. She looked at me for a long moment and then she said, "Take the knife," and I did, and I put on the dark jacket and left the house before the moon came up.

The east field was silver with stubble and the stone wall ran along the bottom of it, and I came over the wall where the ground was soft and crouched down in the shadow. The moon was not up yet. I waited.

I heard him before I saw him, and then I saw the pale hair in the dark by the wall, and he was crouched down against the stones with his knees up and his arms wrapped around them, and he was shaking.

"Elias," I said.

"Do not come closer," he said. His voice was wrong. It was low and rough and there was something under it that was not a man's voice.

"It is going to happen soon."

"It is happening now." He lifted his head. His eyes in the dark were amber and they were not entirely his. "You should go. Go now, Wren, please."

I stood up out of the shadow.

"I told you I would be here," I said.

He made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else and pushed himself up against the wall, and his hands on the stones were shaking, and then he reached out toward me, and I reached back, and our fingers touched.

The heat went up my arm like a wire pulled tight. It did not stop at my chest this time. It went through me and out of me and into the ground, and the stubble in the field moved in a circle around us where there was no wind. Elias's hand closed on mine and his eyes went wide, and his mouth opened, and he did not say anything at all. Not one word. He just held my hand and looked at me while the moon came up over the wheat and his skin began to change under my fingers.

Then something in the field behind us said, "Well. That is not what I expected to find out here."

I turned. Silas was standing on the other side of the wall in his gray suit with his leather folder under his arm and his pale eyes bright, and beside him Mrs. Bell was already lifting her rifle.