Chapter 2 A Stranger in the Muster

The pack house smelled of woodsmoke, wet wool and stew, and every wolf in it turned to look at me when Rhys pushed open the door.

There were perhaps thirty of them in the long hall, seated at trestle tables or standing by the hearth, and the noise dropped away table by table as they caught my scent. I kept my chin level and my hands out of my pockets and counted the exits. The main door behind me. A side door near the kitchen with a muslin curtain across it. Two windows too high to be useful.

"This is Nessa," Rhys said. "She says she is a tracker looking for muster work. She will stay until I know whether that is true."

A woman at the hearth put down her ladle. She was old, white-haired and straight-backed, with a face like a dried apple and eyes that went over me the way a farmer's wife goes over a chicken before buying it.

"Rogue blood," she said.

"Yes," Rhys said.

The warriors shifted at their benches. One of them, a broad-shouldered man with copper hair and an easy grin that did not reach his eyes, leaned back and folded his arms. "An Alpha brings a rogue into the hall and tells us she is a tracker. Is she going to sleep in the hall too, or have you a room in mind?"

"Ivo," Rhys said, in a tone that could have frozen the stew. "She will have the small room at the end of the east passage. Put a guard on her door if it comforts you."

"Your own door is at the end of the east passage," Ivo said.

The hall went very quiet.

Rhys turned his head and looked at Ivo for a long moment, and I watched the copper-haired warrior decide how far he wanted to push. He dropped his eyes first.

"East passage," Rhys said. "Now, Nessa, you will eat, and then you will tell me what you know about deer."

I was hungry enough that the stew nearly made me forget why I was there. I sat on the bench at the far end of the table with my pack between my boots and ate while the hall filled back up with talk. Nobody spoke to me. A young woman with a scar through one eyebrow brought me bread without being asked and did not stay to be thanked.

The door at the far end of the hall opened and a man came in with snow melting in his champagne blond hair. He was neatly combed and clean-booted, and he crossed the hall with the walk of someone who had never once had to argue for a seat. Light blue eyes, long dark lashes, a jaw that looked carved for a statue. He stopped at the table where Rhys sat and bent to speak into his ear.

Rhys listened. Then he said, loudly enough for me to hear, "No. She stays."

The blond man straightened, and his gaze found me across the hall, and he smiled. It was a smooth, pleasant smile that made the stew sit cold in my stomach.

"Doran," he said, coming over and sitting down across from me without asking. "Gamma of Kielder, since we are introducing strangers at dinner. Rhys tells me you are a tracker."

"I am."

"From where?"

"Here and there. My family moves with the season."

"Rogues," Doran said. "Yes, I caught that." He picked up my bread and broke a piece off it and ate it. "Do you know what a Gamma does in a pack, Nessa from here and there?"

"Keeps the warriors in line. Holds the border when the Alpha is elsewhere."

"Also he asks the questions the Alpha is too polite to ask." Doran leaned back. "The autumn muster brings six packs to our border. Six Alphas, all of them with an opinion on Kielder and its water. If a tracker with rogue scent in her hair walks among them and learns things she should not, who do you think the Council will blame? The rogue, or the Alpha who let her in?"

"Neither," I said. "The Council will blame the Gamma who did not search her pack."

Doran's smile changed at one corner. He took another piece of my bread.

"He is testing you," the young woman with the scar said later, in the passage outside the kitchen. Her name was Bette and she carried a pail of peelings in each hand. "Doran tests everyone. Do not let him see you sweat and he will leave you be."

"You are not afraid of him."

"I am afraid of him every day," Bette said, and went through the kitchen door with her pails.

The small room at the end of the east passage had a bed, a stool, a washbasin with a chip out of the rim, and a window that looked out on the ridge and the dark pines. I set my pack on the stool and stood at the window and listened. Below, in the yard, wolves were talking, and one voice rose above the rest and was not angry.

Rhys was out there with them. I could pick his voice out of thirty. My wolf pressed against my ribs, wanting to go down, wanting to stand near him, and I put both hands flat on the cold glass and told her no.

The door opened behind me.

Rhys came in without knocking, shut the door and stood against it with his arms folded. The room was small enough that the mate scent filled it in three breaths.

"You said my mother used to say my name that way," I said. "At the ridge. What did you mean by it?"

He studied me. "I meant it as a test. You answered it before you thought."

"I do not know your mother."

"You know her name, though. You flinched when I said it." Rhys pushed off the door and walked to the window, and I had to step aside to give him room, and there was nowhere in that little room to step aside to. "Her name was Alys. She came to Kielder twenty-four years ago with a child at her breast and left the child in the snow at our gate, and my father raised it as his own. The child died at three years old. We buried her under the rowan tree."

"I am sorry."

"Are you." He looked at me with those blue-grey eyes and did not blink. "The muster starts in two days. Until then you are my guest and you will stay where I can see you. At the muster you will stand at my table and answer every question the Alphas put to you. If your answers hold, you may leave Kielder with your skin and a wage. If they do not hold, you will answer to me first and the Council second, and I will not save you from either."

My heart was going fast, but my voice was steady. "That is a generous offer for a rogue."

"It is not generous," Rhys said. "It is the only way I can keep you close without breaking my own law." He said it flatly, as if he were reading a number off a ledger, and then he looked away from me, at the window, at the pines. "My wolf does not want you to leave this forest. I do not trust my wolf where you are concerned."

"I do not trust mine either," I said.

That made him turn back. We stood there in the dark little room with the washbasin between us and the mate scent thick as smoke, and I heard his breathing change, and I knew that he heard mine.

Then someone knocked hard on the door, three times, and a man's voice called through it, "Alpha. There is a rogue at the gate. He is asking for the woman."

Rhys was out of the room before I could move. I followed him down the passage and out into the yard with my heart in my throat, and there, at the iron gate under the lantern, with his hood back and his grey eyes bright in the cold, stood a man I had known all my life.

Mara had sent our best scout after me. And he was not alone.