Chapter 6: The Healer's Warning

Cemal did not argue about Halden. He listened to the scrap of paper read aloud, and he sat with his hands folded and his eyes on the floor while I told him what Deniz had learned at the fork, and when I finished he said, "Then I lied."

"Say it plainly."

"I lied about the town. There is no Halden on the lower coast." He lifted his eyes. "I was told to say it by a wolf who thought it would keep me safe if anyone came asking about my past. He gave me the names the way you give a child a story to tell at a door."

"Who told you?"

"I will not give you his name yet." He said it without heat. "But I will give you the truth of the last eleven years, and it is shorter than the fishing town. I have been on the roads since I was twenty two, and I have not stayed in one place long enough to be remembered. That is why there is no town to find."

"That is a very tidy answer for a wolf who just admitted to a lie."

"It is tidy because it is true. You can test it however you like."

I stood in the shed door with the cold coming through my sleeves and looked at him. My wolf was awake and listening, and she did not smell another lie on him, only the fear that had been there since the first night. But fear can be honest and a story can still be false.

"Three days," I said. "The full moon tests you before the elders, and I will be watching your face when you answer them."

"I would expect nothing less."

Maren found me crossing the yard and took my arm without asking. Her honey-blonde hair was coming loose from its pin and her grey eyes had the flat look they got when she had been up half the night with a fever.

"Come to the healer's wing," she said. "I want to look at you."

"You looked at me two days ago and told me to eat more."

"And you did not eat more, and now you are the colour of a wet sheet. Come."

The healer's wing smelled of camphor and dried yarrow. She sat me on the stool by the window and took my wrist in her fingers and held it, and her thumb found the pulse and stayed there.

"Your heartbeat is wrong," she said.

"You said that yesterday."

"I said it was fast. Today it is wrong in a different way." She let go of my wrist. "How much wolfsbane are you drinking?"

The question came out flat, without warning, and I felt my face go still before I could stop it.

"Enough to keep my scent off the pack."

"That is not a measure. That is a thing you say to keep me from asking again." She folded her arms. "I am going to ask once more, and then I will stop asking and start acting. How much?"

I looked past her at the shelf of jars. "A cup in the morning. A cup before the council meetings. Sometimes a third if there is a reason."

"A third." She said it slowly. "Elif. Do you know what wolfsbane does to the heart in those amounts? It does not only quiet the wolf. It quiets the wolf's healing, and the wolf's healing is what keeps a body standing when the winter is long and the food is short."

"I heal fine."

"You heal slowly. I have watched the cut on your hand take four days to close. A Kırkkaya wolf closes a cut like that overnight." She stepped closer and lowered her voice. "And there is the other thing. The thing neither of us has said out loud since you were nineteen years old."

"Then do not say it."

"I am going to say it." Her grey eyes did not move. "You have been drinking wolfsbane for five years to hide a wolf that never came. I have kept your secret because you are my friend and because I believed the pack would tear you apart if they knew. But this morning the stranger told the yard that a wolf alone in a town is a wolf waiting to be found out. He was talking about himself. I heard it in his voice. And I thought, that is exactly what Elif is doing, and she has been doing it for five years, and it is going to kill her before any rogue does."

"Maren."

"You are the Luna. You cannot spend the rest of your life drinking poison to hide a wolf that is not there."

I stood up. The stool scraped on the flagstones. "And what would you have me do? Stand in the council circle and tell Barış and the elders that the Luna line is broken and their Alpha is forgetting his own daughter's name? Do you know what happens to a pack with no Luna and a dying Alpha? Çamlıca will be at our gate before the snow melts."

"Çamlıca is already at our gate. That is why I am telling you now instead of next year." She picked up a jar from the shelf and set it back down. "There is something else. The stranger's scent does not match his story."

"You have said that before."

"And I will say it again, because I have been turning it over all night." She turned to face me. "I have smelled rogues before. They carry the road on them, mud and smoke and whatever they have eaten. He smells clean. Clean the way a wolf smells when he has been living in a house with a good kitchen and someone washing his clothes. That is not a rogue's scent, Elif. That is a pack scent, and I cannot tell which pack."

I thought of the woodpile and the rehearsed story and the Çamlıca lift in his vowels, and I said nothing.

That evening I measured the herbs as I always did. I poured the water and set the cup on the windowsill to cool and turned to the shelf for the oil.

Behind me, the door opened.

Maren stood in the doorway with her basket on her arm and the last of the daylight behind her. She had come for the yarrow salve she lent out on Fridays. That is what she always came for on Fridays. I had known it as surely as I knew my own name, and I had still left the cup on the sill.

Her eyes went to it and stayed.

"What is that?" she asked.

"Tea."

"You do not drink tea at this hour. You drink it in the morning and before councils." She came into the room and picked up the cup and held it under her nose, and I watched her face change. "Elif. This is wolfsbane. This is a cup of wolfsbane, not a measure, a cup."

"It is the same amount I always take."

"It is a cup of it at an hour you never take it." She set the cup down very carefully, as if it might break. "Why tonight? What has happened tonight that made you need it more than usual?"

I opened my mouth to say the stranger, and behind that lie was a smaller truth I did not want to hand her. My wolf had stirred that morning when Cemal said my name. She had stirred in the shed and again in the yard, and each time the hollow place behind my ribs had turned toward him. The herbs were not for the pack tonight. They were for me.

"Because I am tired," I said. "And because the test is in three days, and I want to sleep."

Maren looked at me for a long time. Then she took the cup and poured it out into the slop jar by the door, and the bitter smell rose up between us.

"Drink your tea plain from now on," she said. "And when you are ready to tell me what is truly happening in this house, I will be in the healer's wing."

She left the door open behind her. I stood in the lamplight with the empty cup in my hand and heard footsteps in the corridor outside, slow and even, coming toward the herb shed.

The door swung wider. Barış stood there with his coat still on and mud to the ankle of his boots, and he looked at the wet slop jar and the empty cup and then at me.

"The western gate was opened tonight," he said. "Not by the wind. Someone went out over the wall and came back an hour ago, and my patrol found the tracks. I want to know who it was, and I think you already do."