Chapter 5

Chapter 5: The Enemy Alpha

I woke up warm, and that was how I knew something was wrong.

Nobody in the Greywood should be warm. I should have been dead, or frozen, or tangled in the roots at the bottom of the Greyrun with my lungs full of black water. Instead I was lying on a low bed piled with furs, in a room with rough stone walls and a low ceiling of dark wooden beams, and somewhere to my right a fire was crackling.

I sat up too fast. The room tilted. My shoulder throbbed where I had hit the gully stones, and when I looked down I found it bandaged, neatly and firmly, with a poultice under the linen that smelled of comfrey and arnica and something sharp and green I couldn't place.

It was good work. Better than mine, nearly. That irritated me more than it should have.

"Don't pull at it," said a voice. "You'll undo all of Ines's hard work, and she'll blame me. She always blames me."

He was sitting in a chair by the fire with his boots up on the hearthstone, so still that I hadn't seen him. A man in his late twenties, maybe thirty. Black hair cut short. A jaw like the edge of an axe. A long, pale scar running down the left side of his throat and disappearing under his collar. He was turning a small knife over and over in his fingers.

My mother's root knife.

"Where am I?" My voice came out as a croak.

"Ashborn." He said it the way someone else might say the kitchen. "My home. You've been asleep for two days."

Two days. I pulled the furs up to my chin, which was ridiculous, because I was fully dressed, in a clean linen shirt much too big for me and a pair of soft wool trousers rolled at the ankles. Somebody had undressed me. Somebody had washed the blood off me.

My hand flew to my throat. The pendant was still there, warm against my skin. I let out a breath.

"Who are you?"

He stood. He was tall, taller than Cassian, taller than Garrick, and he moved without making a sound. He crossed the room and set the root knife down on the furs beside my hand, handle first, and stepped back.

"Lucan Draven," he said. "Alpha of the Ashborn."

I had heard that name my whole life. Silvercrest mothers used it to frighten children into bed. Be good, or Lucan Draven will come down the mountain and take you. Lucan Draven, who took the Ashborn throne at nineteen by tearing out his own uncle's throat in front of the whole pack. Lucan Draven, who burned the Rivenmoor border fort to the ground with every warrior inside it. Lucan Draven, who had no mate, no mercy, and no heart.

He didn't look like a monster. He looked tired. There were shadows under his eyes as though he hadn't slept in the two days I had.

"You pulled me out of the river," I said.

"I did."

"Why?"

He leaned back against the wall and folded his arms, and his coal-dark eyes moved over my face slowly, carefully, the way a healer reads a wound.

"I was hoping you'd tell me that," he said. "Three nights ago, a band of rogues crossed my eastern border and killed a family of five in their beds. Two of them were children. I tracked the rogues south for a day and a half. Their trail led me straight through the Greywood to Silvercrest's front gate, which I found very interesting, because rogues don't usually walk in straight lines, and they don't usually know where they're going." His voice didn't change, but something in the room did. "Then I smelled Silvercrest wolves hunting in my forest, and I came to see what they were hunting. And I found the Beta of Silvercrest trying to murder an unarmed girl." He paused. "So. Little wolf. Tell me why Silvercrest wants you dead."

"I'm not a wolf."

Something flickered in his face. "Aren't you?"

"I've never shifted. I'm twenty-one. I'm wolfless." It came out flat. I had said it so many times, in so many ways, that the words had no edges left. "They think I let the rogues in. I didn't. Someone used my mother's sleeping draught to drug the guards at the south gate and made it look like me. They banished me. And then the Alpha sent Garrick after me to make sure I never reached the river."

"Roderick did."

"That's what Garrick said."

He was quiet for a long moment, looking at the fire. Then he said, without turning, "And the heir? Cassian Thorne. Where was he in all this?"

I didn't answer. I didn't need to. Something in my face must have said it for me, because when he looked back at me his eyes had narrowed.

"He rejected you," he said. It wasn't a question.

"How could you possibly know that?"

"Because I can smell it on you. A torn bond leaves a wound, and wounds have a scent." He came away from the wall and crouched down beside the bed, so his face was level with mine. Up close, the smell of him hit me again, woodsmoke and iron and new snow, and my heart did something stupid and painful in my chest. "And because there's something I can smell underneath it. Something I've been smelling since the moment I saw you on that cliff." His voice dropped. "I think you smell it too."

I looked away. "That's not possible."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't. Not for a wolfless girl." He said the word wolfless as though it tasted wrong. "A second bond only comes to a wolf whose first mate rejected her. And only if she carries the old blood. Moonborn blood. The kind that turns the moon pools white instead of silver." He watched me flinch. "There hasn't been a Moonborn wolf on this mountain in over a hundred years. Not in any pack. They were hunted out. Every last one."

My hand had gone to my throat again without my meaning it to. His eyes followed it.

"What's that?"

"Nothing."

"Show me."

I don't know why I did. Maybe because he had pulled me out of the Greyrun. Maybe because some part of me was too tired to keep fighting. I drew the pendant out from under the shirt and let it lie in my palm, black stone and silver wolf, howling at its silver moon.

Lucan Draven went absolutely still.

He didn't touch it. He stared at it, and I watched the color leave his face, slowly, until the scar on his throat stood out like a white rope.

"Where did you get that?" he said. His voice was very quiet.

"It was my mother's. I found it hidden under her floor. Why? What is it?"

"Tell me her name."

"Mara. Mara Halloway. She was the Silvercrest healer for twenty years. She died two winters ago, of the fever."

"Did you see her body?"

The question went through me like a blade. "What?"

"Did you see her body, Wren?"

How did he know my name? I hadn't told him my name. I opened my mouth to ask and heard myself say, instead, very small, "No. They sealed the coffin. Fever-dead are sealed and burned the same day. Alpha Roderick's order."

Lucan stood up very slowly. He walked to the fire and stood with his back to me and his hands braced against the stone mantel, and for a long time he said nothing at all. The fire popped. Somewhere outside, a long way off, a wolf howled and another answered.

When he finally turned around, the tired man was gone. He looked the way he must have looked the night he took his throne.

"Your mother's name wasn't Mara Halloway," he said. "And she didn't die two winters ago."

The words didn't make sense. I heard them, and they slid off me like rain off oilcloth. "What are you talking about?"

"That pendant is the seal of the Ashborn healers. There are only three ever made. One is buried with my grandmother. One hangs in our great hall." He took a step toward me. "The third was stolen twenty-two years ago, on the night the woman who wore it vanished from this mountain. The same night Roderick Thorne became Alpha of Silvercrest."

"No," I said. "You're wrong. She came to Silvercrest from the lowland villages, before I was born. She told me so. She told me..."

"Where do you think she learned to make a poultice like the one on your shoulder?" he asked softly. "Who do you think taught her the old script, Wren? Silvercrest healers haven't used it in two hundred years. Ashborn healers still do."

I opened my mouth, and that was when the pain hit.

It started at the base of my spine, a white-hot line, and it shot up my back so fast that I screamed. I fell sideways off the bed onto the stone floor. My fingers curled, and something was happening to my fingers, the nails going dark and thick, the knuckles cracking one by one like ice on a pond. Every bone in my body was on fire. My jaw ached as though someone were pulling it forward with tongs.

Above me, Lucan was shouting. Shouting for Ines. Shouting at someone in the corridor to clear the hall, clear the whole house, get everyone out, now.

The pendant was burning against my chest like a brand.

And inside my head, for the very first time in my life, a voice that was not mine spoke, clearly and calmly, as if it had been waiting twenty-one years to say it.

Finally. Now listen to me, Wren, because there isn't much time, and they will come for you the moment they feel me wake. Everything they told you about your mother was a lie. She's alive. And the man who locked her away is the man you have been calling Alpha all your life.