Chapter 3

Chapter 3: The Judgment

They locked me in the old cold store under the stone hall, where the pack kept ice in the summer and prisoners in the winter. It had a stone floor, a heavy oak door with a grille, and no window. I sat on an upturned crate in my blood-stiff dress and waited for the sun to come up and for someone to decide what to do with me.

I was not afraid yet. That came later. Right then I was only tired, a bone-deep, swaying tiredness, and confused, and somewhere underneath both of those, so far down I could barely feel it, angry.

Someone had stolen my mother's recipe. Someone had made it, with care, in the right proportions, and poured it into the guards' cups on the one night of the year when every eye in the pack would be on the ridge. Someone had let rogues into Silvercrest. Two wolves were dead. And they had made sure the trail led back to the herb room.

To me.

I kept trying to think who. I kept coming back to the same small, horrible list: the people who knew about the old script, the people who had ever been in that room, the people who would gain from seeing me gone. The list was very short. It had Selene's name at the top of it, and I didn't have a single scrap of proof.

Some time before dawn, I heard footsteps on the stairs. They stopped outside the door. Through the grille I saw a pair of green eyes.

"Go away, Cassian."

"Listen to me." His voice was rough, as though he'd been shouting. "Whatever they decide up there, don't fight it. Don't argue. Don't say anything about the moon pool, or what you heard, or what you felt. Just take whatever sentence they give you and go."

I stood up. My legs ached. "What did I hear?"

He was silent.

"Something growled," I said. "Inside me. When I accepted. You heard it too. I saw your face."

"You didn't hear anything."

"Cassian."

"You didn't hear anything." He pressed his forehead against the bars, and in the thin light from the stairwell he looked wrecked. "Please, Wren. I'm asking you. For the cedar tree. For every time your mother let me sleep by your fire. Don't fight them. If you fight them, they'll look closer, and if they look closer they'll find out, and then nobody will be able to protect you."

"Protect me?" I almost laughed. "You rejected me in front of the whole pack."

"I know."

"Was that protecting me?"

He didn't answer. He stayed at the bars for a long moment, breathing. Then he said, so quietly I barely heard it, "Yes."

And he was gone.

They brought me up at sunrise.

The stone hall was full. The same faces from the ridge, gray with exhaustion, smelling of smoke and blood. Some of them wore bandages I had wrapped. A warrior I had stitched up four hours earlier stood against the wall and wouldn't meet my eyes. Tobin Hale wasn't there. He was still asleep in the herb room, I supposed, with his thigh packed in yarrow.

Alpha Roderick sat in the high chair. Cassian stood at his right hand, washed now, in a clean shirt, his face like stone. Garrick and Selene stood at his left. Selene had changed out of the white fur into something dark and plain and sorrowful, and she was holding her father's arm as though she might faint.

"Wren Halloway," the Alpha said. His voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. "Four guards were drugged with a draught that only you can make, on the night rogues came through our gate. Two of our warriors are dead. Harl Bennick and Jory Ashe. Their mothers are in this hall. Explain yourself."

I looked for the mothers. I found them, two women standing together near the front, holding hands, staring at me with a grief so raw I had to look away.

"Someone stole it," I said. "I keep a supply in the herb room. The door has no lock. It never has. Anyone could have taken a bottle."

"Anyone could have," Roderick agreed. "But who would know which bottle?"

"My mother labeled them."

"In her own hand. Very small. In the old script." He tilted his head. "I've seen it. I can't read it. Can you, Garrick?"

"No, Alpha."

"Selene?"

"No, Alpha," Selene murmured.

"Can anyone in this hall read the old healer's script?" He waited. Nobody spoke. "Then tell me, Wren. Who in Silvercrest could have walked into that room in the dark and picked the right bottle out of two hundred?"

My mouth went dry. He was right, and the worst part was that I had never once thought about it. My mother had taught me the old script the way her own mother had taught her. She said healers kept it so their medicines couldn't be stolen and misused. I had thought it was a quaint old custom. Standing in the middle of the stone hall, with two hundred people deciding whether I was a murderer, I understood for the first time that it had been a lock, and that I was the only one who had the key.

"I didn't do this," I said. My voice cracked and I hated it. "I spent all night saving your wolves. Ask anyone who was carried in. Ask Pip. He was with me from the moment the horns blew."

Pip stepped out of the crowd before anyone could stop him. He was shaking from head to foot. "She was. Alpha, she was. I never left her side. Not once. She saved Tobin Hale's life. I watched her do it."

"The kitchen boy," Selene said softly, to no one in particular. "Who follows her around like a puppy."

A few people laughed. Pip went red to the ears and stepped back.

"And there's this," Selene went on. She let go of her father's arm and came forward, holding out a small leather pouch. My pouch. It had hung on a nail inside my door for two years. "My father's men found it near the south gate. In the mud. Right where the rogues came through."

She tipped it open. Dried valerian flowers spilled into her palm. Of course they did. I always kept a little in it.

"I haven't carried that in a week," I said.

"How convenient for you."

"Why would I do it?" I turned to face the room. I made myself look at the two mothers. "What could I possibly gain by letting rogues into the only home I have ever had?"

It was Garrick who answered. "Revenge."

The hall went still.

"She was rejected last night," Garrick said. "Publicly. By the heir. Humiliated in front of every wolf in this pack. And not an hour later, the gate is standing open." He spread his big hands. "I'm not a clever man, Alpha. But I can count."

"The draught was in the cups before the Rite," I said. "The watch changed at sundown. If it was in there by sundown, I would have had to do it before he..." My throat closed. I couldn't say it.

"Before he rejected you?" Selene's eyes were bright and wet. "So you planned it in advance? In case he did? That's worse, Wren. That's so much worse."

I looked at Cassian.

I don't know what I wanted from him. After the cold store, I think I wanted him to finally say something true. He had known me since I was four years old. He had slept on the floor of our cottage when the Luna was too sick to nurse him, and my mother had sat up all night with both of them. He knew I couldn't kill a spider without carrying it outside first.

He looked back at me, and his face was a wall.

"The draught is hers," he said. "The pouch is hers. I have nothing to add."

Something inside my chest growled again. Louder this time. I felt it press against my ribs like a shoulder against a door.

Alpha Roderick rose.

"By the law of Silvercrest," he said, "a wolf who betrays the pack to its enemies is put to death. But you are not a wolf." A ripple went through the hall, and some of them smiled. "So I will be merciful. At first light tomorrow, you will be taken to the southern boundary and released into the Greywood. You will not return. If you are found on Silvercrest land again, you will be killed on sight, by any wolf who finds you."

The Greywood.

A hundred miles of old forest between us and the Ashborn pack, who, according to every story I had been told as a child, burned their enemies alive and ate their hearts. Rogues hunted in the Greywood. Bears hunted in the Greywood. A wolfless woman alone, with no claws, no pack, and no way to call for help, would last a week if she was lucky and three days if she wasn't.

He hadn't spared my life. He had only made it someone else's job.

They gave me one hour in my mother's cottage to gather my things, with a guard outside the door.

I had lived in that cottage my whole life. I had not changed a single thing in it since she died. Her shawl still hung on the hook by the fire. Her reading glasses still sat on the windowsill, folded, as though she had just taken them off. I walked through the two small rooms touching things, and I did not cry, because if I started I knew I wouldn't stop.

I took her root knife from the kitchen. A waterskin. A heel of bread. Her book of recipes, wrapped in oilcloth. A small bag of the medicines I could carry.

Then I went to her bed and knelt and pried up the third floorboard from the wall.

I had found the hiding place when I was eleven and never told her. I had looked inside it once, seen a folded square of cloth, and put the board back with my heart pounding, ashamed of myself. I had never touched it again. Not even after she died. It had felt like reading someone's letters.

Now I unwrapped the cloth.

Inside was a pendant on a fine silver chain. A disk of black stone no bigger than a coin, polished smooth, and carved into its face in thin silver lines was a wolf. A wolf with its head thrown back, howling at a crescent moon.

I had never seen it before. I had never once seen my mother wear it. I didn't know what it meant. But my hands were shaking as I fastened it around my neck and tucked it under my dress, and when the stone touched my skin it was warm, like something alive.

The guard knocked. "Time."

At the door, Pip was waiting. He pressed a wrapped bundle of dried meat into my hands and wouldn't let go of my sleeve.

"I'll find out who did it," he whispered fiercely. "I swear to you I will."

"Don't," I said. "Pip, listen to me. Don't. Whoever did this killed two warriors to get rid of me. They won't think twice about a kitchen boy."

The next morning the sky was barely gray when they marched me to the southern boundary. Garrick led the escort himself, with two of his warriors. Nobody spoke. Our breath steamed. At the white boundary stones, where Silvercrest ended and the Greywood began, the men stopped.

Garrick didn't.

He walked with me five more paces into the trees, until the others couldn't see us. Then he leaned down, close enough that I could smell last night's wine on his breath.

"The Alpha has a message for you," he said softly. "He says he's sorry. He says he wishes it could have gone another way."

I stared at him. "Then why...?"

"And he says to make sure you never reach the river."

He drew his knife.