Chapter 3 The Alpha's First Question

The scout at the gate was called Erik, and he had a long face and a chipped front tooth and he had taught me to set a snare when I was nine.

"Nessa," he said, as if we had met by accident in a market. "Mara sent me to see that you got in all right."

"You can see that I did." I stood in the lantern light with Rhys at my shoulder and the warriors of Kielder spread along the wall behind me, and I kept my voice easy. "Go back and tell her I am working. She knows the terms."

Erik looked past me at Rhys and did not lower his eyes fast enough. "The Alpha knows what you are?"

"The Alpha knows what I smell like," Rhys said. "Which is more than you will know if you do not take your hand off my gate."

Erik took his hand off the gate. He looked at me once more, and there was a question in it, and I shook my head a quarter of an inch. He went back into the dark, and the warriors on the wall watched him until the pines swallowed him.

Rhys did not say a word to me in the yard. He walked back into the pack house and I followed because there was nothing else to do, and he went into a room off the main hall that I had not seen, a study with a cold hearth and a table piled with papers and a lamp that smoked.

"Sit," he said.

I sat. He took the chair across from me and turned the lamp up and looked at me across the table for a while without speaking. The mate scent in that closed room was worse than in the passage. It sat on my tongue.

"Erik of the rogues," Rhys said at last. "He knows you well enough to come to my gate for you. So you are not a lone tracker. You belong to a family, and the family has business with Kielder. What business?"

"Deer," I said.

He did not laugh. "You are going to sit in that chair and lie to me until the muster, and then you will lie to six Alphas, and one of them will be better at reading you than I am, and then I will have to hang a rogue at my own gate to keep the peace. That is what happens if you keep saying deer."

"Then perhaps you should let me go now and save us both the trouble."

"No," Rhys said, and the word came out before he could stop it. He heard it himself. His fingers tightened on the edge of the table. "No. My wolf will not let you go, and I have learned to listen to him even when I do not like what he says. So we will do this the hard way. I will ask, and you will answer, and every time you lie I will know, because I can smell a lie on you now. That is what the bond does. It has made you a very poor liar to me."

I had not known that. My stomach dropped, and I made myself shrug. "Then ask."

"Where were you born?"

"North of here. A camp in the Cheviots. My mother died when I was small."

"Her name."

"Does it matter? She is dead."

"It matters to me."

I looked at the lamp. "Alys."

The name sat in the room like a stone dropped into still water. Rhys did not move. His face stayed exactly as it was, and his voice when it came was quiet. "You are lying."

"I am not."

"You are." He leaned forward. "Your heart went faster. I heard it. Say the name again."

I said it again, and my heart went faster again, and I hated him for hearing it. "I do not know what you want from me. I gave you the name I was given."

"You were given a name by a rogue woman who took you in. That is not the same thing as your mother's name, and you know it." Rhys pushed his chair back and walked to the window with his hands behind his back. "Alys came to Kielder with a child. She left the child at the gate and went north and nobody saw her again. My father would not speak of her, and Elspeth will not, and now a rogue tracker with her voice walks into my forest and claims to be hunting deer."

"I am not her child."

"I did not say you were. I said you have her voice." He turned around. "Where did you learn to track?"

"From the woman who raised me."

"Her name."

"Mara." The truth came out before I could dress it up, and I saw him notice.

"Mara." He tasted the name. "The rogue who trades in pack secrets. I have heard of her. The Council has a paper on her somewhere, and if Aldric finds it, your visit here becomes a great deal more complicated."

"Then do not tell Aldric."

Rhys crossed the room and stopped in front of my chair, and I had to look up at him. The lamplight came in from the side and made his pale hair shine like frost on a roof. I could see the pulse in his throat and the small scar on his knuckle where a wolf had bitten him, and I could smell him, birch and river water, and my wolf rose in me and pressed her whole weight against my ribs.

"You are afraid," he said. "Not of me. Of something behind me. What is behind me, Nessa?"

"Nothing."

"You are lying again." His voice had gone low. "Your heart is going like a hare's. I can hear it, and I can smell it on you, and I am standing close enough to hear it because I cannot make myself stand further away. Do you understand what that means?"

I stood up. There was no room to stand up in, but I did it anyway, and my shoulder brushed his chest and neither of us stepped back. The lamp smoked between us. I could feel the heat off him through his shirt, and my hands had gone cold and my face had gone hot, and I heard him take a breath that was not a steady one.

"It means the bond is doing what bonds do," I said. "It does not mean I am going to tell you my business."

"It means I am going to keep you alive long enough to find out what your business is." His eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up. "And it means that if you lie to me again tonight I will know it, and I will not be as patient about it as I have been."

I should have stepped away. I had a hundred good reasons to step away, and Mara's voice in my head telling me what happened to trackers who got tangled with Alphas, and instead I stayed where I was and let him look at me.

Then the door opened and Doran came in without knocking, and his light blue eyes went from Rhys to me and back again, and his smooth face did something ugly at the corners.

"Forgive me," he said. "I did not mean to interrupt the interrogation. The healer wants the rogue at the spring at first light. She says the water has something to say to her."

Rhys stepped back from me, and the cold came in where he had been.

"Elspeth said that?" he asked.

"Those were her words." Doran smiled at me. "The water has something to say to the rogue. I would very much like to hear it."