Chapter 4

Chapter 4: The Greywood

I had never been fast. Wolfless girls aren't.

But I had spent my whole life gathering herbs in the woods around Silvercrest, and I knew one thing that Garrick Marrow, for all his size and rank, did not. Three paces to my left, hidden under a fall of dead bracken, there was a gully. It dropped six feet onto wet stones, and in spring it ran with meltwater all the way down to the Greyrun.

I threw myself into it.

His knife sliced the air where my throat had been. I heard it whistle. Then I hit the stones hard on my hip and shoulder, and the breath went out of me in a grunt, and I rolled through a foot of freezing water, came up gasping, and ran.

Behind me Garrick swore and crashed down into the gully after me. Then I heard the sound I had been dreading since he drew the blade.

The crack of bones. The wet rip of cloth.

He was shifting.

A man on two legs I could stay ahead of, for a few minutes, in a gully full of loose rock. A wolf, never. I knew that. I ran anyway. I ran down the streambed with the icy water soaking through my boots and my mother's heavy dress dragging at my legs, because running water carries scent away. She had taught me that when I was eight, the first time I got lost in these woods. If you're ever followed, little bird, find water and stay in it. I had laughed and asked who would ever follow me. She hadn't laughed back.

I thought about her while I ran. I don't know why. Maybe because these were her woods more than mine. She used to bring me here before dawn to pick wild garlic and wood sorrel, and sometimes she would stop in the middle of a clearing and stand very still with her head lifted, as though she was listening to something far away. When I asked her what she heard, she would smile and say, Nothing, little bird. Just the trees.

Once, when I was ten, I woke before her and went looking for her and found her at the very edge of the Greywood, standing with one hand flat against a white boundary stone, crying without making a single sound. When she saw me, she wiped her face and told me she had something in her eye.

I had believed her. I had believed everything she ever told me.

The pendant bounced against my breastbone under my dress, warm as a coal.

Somewhere behind me a wolf howled. It wasn't a hunting howl. It was a call, rising and falling, the one the warriors used in drills to bring the line together. He was summoning the other two.

I left the stream where it bent around a boulder and went uphill, through blackthorn that tore my sleeves and drew long, stinging lines across the backs of my hands. The bag of medicines banged against my hip. I lost the bread somewhere. I didn't care. I could hear them now. Three sets of paws, heavy and fast, spreading out through the trees in a wide fan, the way they spread out when they were driving a deer.

Driving it somewhere.

I understood too late.

The trees ended so suddenly that I nearly ran straight off the edge. I threw myself backward and landed on my seat in the pine needles with my boots hanging over nothing.

A ravine. Forty feet down, maybe more. At the bottom roared the Greyrun River, black and white and furious with snowmelt, smashing itself to foam against the rocks. Nobody swam the Greyrun in spring. Every child in Silvercrest knew that. Every year somebody's cousin or somebody's uncle forgot, and every year the river kept them.

I scrambled to my feet and turned around.

Garrick came out of the trees first. As a wolf he was enormous, tawny-gray, heavy in the shoulder, the scar through his brow a pale, hairless line in his fur. His two warriors flanked him, a little smaller, ears flat, heads low. They didn't rush. They didn't need to. They came at me in a slow half circle, and I backed away until my heels found the edge and loose stones went pattering down into the dark.

"You don't have to do this," I said. My voice was shaking so badly I could barely shape the words. "Garrick. You've known me since the day I was born. My mother set your arm when you broke it at the summer games. She sat up with your wife when Selene was born."

The big wolf's lip peeled slowly back from his teeth. I thought, absurdly, that he was laughing at me.

The warrior on the left, though, hesitated. He was young, rangy, with a dark stripe down his back. I knew him. Ewan Pryce. He'd had a fever of the lungs two winters ago, during the same sickness that took my mother, and she had sat with him three nights running and pulled him through. His ears went back further. He whined, very softly, and looked at Garrick.

Garrick snapped at him. Ewan flinched and looked away.

I drew my mother's knife. It was a small knife, for cutting roots and paring bark. It looked ridiculous in my hand, and all four of us knew it.

Garrick crouched to spring.

And the thing inside my chest woke up.

It didn't growl this time. It roared. It came up through me like fire up a chimney, and for one instant the whole world turned sharp and bright and silver at the edges. I could hear Garrick's heartbeat, fast and greedy. I could hear Ewan's, faster, sick with dread. I could smell the river's cold breath, the sap in the pines, the copper of my own scraped hands. I could see every needle on every tree, every hair in Garrick's ruff, every fleck of foam on the water far below.

My eyes. Something was happening to my eyes.

Then it was gone, as fast as it had come, and I was just a girl in a wet dress with a root knife at the edge of a cliff, and Garrick was in the air.

He never reached me.

Something black slammed into him from the side so hard that I heard his ribs crack like green branches. The two of them went tumbling across the clearing in a storm of needles and dirt, and when they stopped rolling, Garrick was on his back with his legs thrashing, and a wolf I had never seen before was standing on his chest.

It was the biggest wolf I had ever seen. Bigger than Garrick by half. Black from nose to tail, black as the inside of a well, with a heavy ruff like a lion's mane and eyes the color of coals blown hot. There was a long scar down the left side of its throat, a pale seam through the black.

It wasn't a Silvercrest wolf. Silvercrest wolves ran gray and brown and tawny. Only one pack on the mountain ran black.

Ashborn.

The black wolf lowered its head until its teeth were an inch from Garrick's throat, and it made a sound I felt in the soles of my feet, in my teeth, in the roots of my hair. It wasn't a growl. It was an order. Every hair on my arms stood up.

Garrick whined. The Beta of Silvercrest, who had broken men's jaws for looking at him wrong, whined like a pup.

The other two didn't wait to see what happened next. They turned tail and bolted into the trees. Ewan went last, and as he went he looked back at me over his shoulder, just once.

The black wolf held Garrick down a long moment more. Then it stepped off him. Garrick scrambled up, limping badly, his side caved in, and fled after his men without a backward glance.

The black wolf didn't chase him.

It turned, and looked at me.

I should have been terrified. I was terrified. Every story I had ever heard about the Ashborn came back to me at once, in my mother's voice and Pip's gran's voice and the voices of the children in the square: they burn their enemies; they eat their hearts; they come at night and leave no tracks.

But underneath the fear was something worse. Because the moment its eyes met mine, the wind shifted, and I smelled it.

Woodsmoke. Iron. Snow.

The same thing that had happened on the ridge. A hand closing around my heart. A thread pulled tight.

No. No, that wasn't possible. You only got one. One mate, one bond, for life. Everybody knew that. My mother's books said so. The elders said so. It was the first law of the moon.

The torn place in my chest, the place where Cassian had ripped himself out of me, pulsed once, hard, as if in answer.

The black wolf took a step toward me.

I took a step back.

There was nothing under my heel.

The edge crumbled. I felt it go, felt my stomach drop, felt my arms wheel uselessly at the air and the root knife fly out of my fingers. The last thing I saw was the black wolf lunging for me, huge jaws open, and the last thing I heard before the Greyrun closed over my head was a man's voice, shouting a single word.

"No!"