Chapter 2: Herbs on My Skin

The shed behind the smokehouse smelled of cured meat and old ash. I got him onto the bench where the men rested between smoking shifts and pulled the door shut, and in the dark his breathing was the loudest thing on the mountain.

"I will bring water before the pack wakes," I said. "Do not open the door for anyone. Not even if they use my voice."

"That happens often?"

"More than you would think." I checked the bandage and felt no fresh wetness. "Sleep. You heal faster asleep."

"Elif." His hand found my sleeve in the dark and held it. "The boot print. You saw something on the path."

I had seen it. I had walked the last half mile with the print of a shod boot burned into my mind, pointed toward the cairn, and I had told myself it belonged to a peddler from the coast. Peddlers did not walk the north ridge at midnight.

"It could be nothing." I pulled my sleeve free. "Sleep, Cemal."

He slept. I stood outside the door with my forehead against the cold boards and listened to my own heart, which had not slowed since the cairn.

The herb shed sat between the smokehouse and the kitchens. I let myself in and lit the lamp and stood looking at the bundles on the wall. Wolfsbane is a beautiful plant. Pale flowers, soft leaves, a smell like pepper and something sweet under it. The old healers used it for pain, in small doses, and they warned you about the heart. Nobody in the pack knew how much I used.

I measured the dried leaves into the mortar. Twice my usual. His scent was on my skin and my clothes, woodsmoke and rain and the warm animal thing underneath, and I had a whole day of walking among wolves ahead of me.

The tea was bitter enough to make my eyes water. I drank it standing at the window and watched the east go grey, and while it went down my throat I felt my wolf recede, quietly, like a hand slipping out of mine. That was the worst part. Not the taste. The leaving.

Then I washed. Wolfsbane oil on my wrists and behind my ears, the way a hunter masks his smell before a stalk. I scrubbed his scent off my hands with sand and cold water until the skin was raw.

The sky was pale blue when Maren found me at the kitchen door.

She had her honey-blonde hair pinned back and her sleeves rolled, and she was carrying the flat basket she used for the morning rounds. Grey eyes, steady as ever. Maren had been my friend since we were girls running the lower paths, and in five years she had never once made me feel like a broken thing.

"You look like a woman who has not slept," she said.

"I was on the north ridge. I stayed out too late."

"On the ridge." She set the basket down and took my hand and turned it over, and her thumb found the scratch along my palm before I could close my fingers. "And what did the ridge do to you?"

I had not even noticed it. A small cut, probably from the cairn stones. "A branch. It was dark."

She looked at me for a long moment. "Your pulse is wrong. Your skin smells of pepper. You have been drinking more than usual."

"The winter has been hard."

"The winter is four months away." She let go of my hand. "I am not going to report you to the elders. You know I would never. But I am going to ask you once. Is there something on this mountain I should know about?"

The honest answer was yes. A rogue with a silver burn and a mate claim was sleeping in the smokehouse shed, and my wolf had woken for him. The words were right there behind my teeth.

"No," I said. "There is nothing."

She picked up her basket. "Then eat something. You are the colour of old milk."

I watched her walk toward the healer's wing, and the guilt sat in my stomach like a swallowed stone.

The pack house woke around me. Wolves came down for bread and tea and the young ones argued about whose turn it was to walk the eastern line. I sat at the long table with a bowl of porridge I did not eat and listened for any mention of a stranger on the border, and heard none. Barış did not come down. That troubled me more than anything. Barış was always the first at the table.

I went to the shed at midday with water and bread and a fresh bandage, and Cemal was awake and sitting up and picking at the seam of the bench with a splinter.

"You look worse than I do," he said.

"Thank you."

"I mean it kindly. Sit down before you fall down." He moved over, and the bench was narrow enough that our shoulders touched. "Your hands are still shaking."

"They do that."

"Since when?"

"Since last night." I unwound the old bandage. The silver burn had gone from pale shine to a dull grey, and the flesh around it was closing. "You heal well. Better than a rogue should."

"Good blood, bad luck." He watched me work. "The tea you drink. It was on your breath last night, and again now. How much of it do you take?"

"Enough."

"Enough for what?"

I tied off the bandage and did not answer. He did not push. He took the bread and ate it slowly, and after a while he said, "They say a Luna's wolf is the strongest in the pack. The one the Alpha leans on. If yours is quiet, the whole line leans on nothing."

"Who says that?"

"Old wolves. In taverns. On the road." He broke the bread in half and gave me the larger piece. "I have heard a hundred stories about Kırkkaya in the last six weeks. They all end with the Alpha dying and the line breaking and the mountain going to whoever has the teeth to take it."

"Then you have heard too many stories."

"Maybe." He chewed and swallowed. "But I came here anyway. Make of that what you like."

There it was again. The soft insistence, the way he turned every road back to the same place. I sat beside him in the dim shed with my hands in my lap and felt my wolf lift her head and turn toward him, and I hated how easy it was.

That evening I went to the storeroom and measured out the herbs again, more than the morning, more than I had ever taken. My hands moved without asking me. I sealed the jar and put it behind the salt barrels where no one looked, and when I turned around Maren was standing in the doorway.

She did not say anything at first. She looked at the jar in my hands and then at my face, and her grey eyes went somewhere I had never seen them go.

"How much of that are you drinking?" she asked.

"Maren."

"How much, Elif."

I put the jar down. "Enough to keep my scent off the pack. That is all it is."

"That is not all it is. You have been drinking it for years and I have watched your hands shake and your sleep go bad and I said nothing because you are the Luna and you did not ask me for help." Her voice was low and even, and it frightened me more than shouting. "But there is a strange scent on this mountain tonight. It came up from the north ridge on the wind, and it is not a Kırkkaya wolf, and I want to know what you have brought into this house."

I stood there in the lamplight with wolfsbane on my fingers and the lie ready on my tongue, and before I could say a word, someone screamed from the kitchen yard.

We ran. Half the pack was already in the yard, crowding around the well, and the young wolves were pointing at the ground. In the packed earth by the well stood a single boot print, fresh and sharp, the same size as the one on the ridge, and beside it a smear of dark blood.

Barış stood at the edge of the crowd with his auburn hair tied back and a lantern in his hand, and he lifted his head and looked straight at me across the well.

"Someone is on the mountain," he said, loud enough for the whole pack to hear. "A rogue. And I think our Luna knows more about it than she has told us."