Chapter 3 The Crate I Shouldn't Have Opened

Cal knocked again, and I heard the door handle turn.

Roan moved before I did. He crossed the boathouse in two strides, got behind the shelf of paint tins, and pulled the canvas tarp off the old dinghy and over himself in one motion. It was quiet and quick and it told me he had done this many times.

I got to the door and opened it a crack.

Cal stood on the boards with the harbor behind him and a tin pail in his hand, and the morning light made a warm gold of his skin. He was smiling the way he always smiled, easy and patient, as if he had all day and all night to wait for me.

"You are up early," I said.

"I have been up since two." He held out the pail. "Hester sent this down for your father. She said he would not take it from her hand."

The pail was warm through the handle. Oatmeal, by the smell of it. I took it and set it on the bench behind me and did not invite him in.

Cal looked past me into the boathouse. "You were down here all night."

"I was."

"Your father asked for you twice."

That went into me like a hook. "Is he worse?"

"He is the same as he was last night." Cal's eyes came back to me. "Nell, there is something on the bar this morning. A schooner went onto the rocks sometime before midnight. The patrol found her at first light and there is no crew aboard her and no name on her bow."

My hand was still on the door. "A rogue."

"Most likely." He said the word the way the pack said it, flat and finished, like a nail already hammered down. "I am taking a boat out at nine to look her over. I want you with me."

"Why me?"

"Because you are the tide reader, and I want to know how a ship came onto a bar that you charted as deep water." He said it kindly. That was Cal. He could put a question through a man's ribs and make it sound like a favor. "If someone in this harbor is moving the channel, I would rather learn it from you than from the Council."

I nodded and said I would come, and he went back up the hill with his hands in his pockets, and I closed the door and leaned against it.

Roan came out from under the tarp.

"You are going to look at my ship," he said.

"I am going to look at a wreck." I took the pail off the bench and put it into his hands. "Eat that. Do not light the stove again, and do not open the door for anyone. I will be back before noon."

He looked down at the oatmeal and then at me. "The crate in the surf," he said. "If you go aboard her, you will find it. It is lashed to the second mast and it is marked with the same seal as the tin."

"I know what it is marked with."

"That is not what I am telling you." He set the pail down. "I am telling you that there were eleven crates on that ship when I left Blackwater, and six of them carried medicine and five of them carried wolfsbane, and I do not know which one is lashed to that mast. If the patrol opens the wrong one in front of Cal, I will be hanging by the afternoon and so will you."

The Bay of Fundy was flat as a coin by nine o'clock, and the fog had gone out to sea. Cal rowed and I sat in the bow with my hand on the gunwale and watched the water for the color that means a wreck is under it. The bar showed green and broken past the second buoy, and the schooner lay in it with her masts down and her hull half eaten by the rocks, and her stern sitting up out of the surf.

Two patrol boats were already there. I saw the pack's green stripe on their bows and the wolves standing along the rails.

The crate was where Roan said it would be. It had broken free of the mast sometime in the night and washed up into the rocks below the schooner's stern, and it was riding the surf like a barrel, turning over and over in the white water.

"There," I said, and pointed. "That is not hers. That is a rogue crate that came off in the wreck."

Cal turned his head. "How do you know it is not hers?"

I did not have an answer that was not a lie, so I said the first true thing I could think of, which was that the schooner was a Blackwater boat and Blackwater crates are not built with that lid.

Cal looked at me for a moment too long.

"Bring it in," he said to the patrol.

Two wolves went over the side and swam the crate back to the boat, and they hauled it over the gunwale and set it down at my feet. It was the size of a tea chest, and it was bound with iron, and the lid was nailed down hard. On the side, stamped deep into the wood, was a mark I had seen a hundred times in the dockmaster's office.

Cal saw it at the same moment I did. His face did not change. That was the thing about Cal. Nothing ever changed his face.

"That is the pack mark," he said.

"It is."

"Nell." He crouched beside the crate and put his hand flat on the lid. "Why would a rogue ship be carrying a Tidal crate?"

"I do not know."

He looked up at me, and his eyes were the green of the harbor on a clear day, and they were as steady as a held breath. "Open it."

I had a hammer in my hand before I had decided to take it. I put the claw under the lid and worked the nails up one by one, and the wood gave with a splintering sound that went through the boat, and then the lid came free and I lifted it off and the smell came out.

I had smelled it once before, in Hester's cabinet, when I was thirteen and my father had brought me up the hill to watch her grind herbs for the pack. Wet iron. Something green and bitter underneath, like a leaf left to rot in a jar.

Wolfsbane.

The crate was full to the top with it. Roots and leaves and powdery grey seed heads packed into paper twists, forty or fifty of them, tied with string. The boat went quiet enough that I could hear the surf on the rocks.

Cal reached in and picked up one of the twists. He held it up and turned it in the light, and then he looked at me.

"This is a hanging matter," he said. His voice was very calm. "A rogue brings wolfsbane into a pack harbor under our own mark, and the Council will come down on this pack like a wall. Your father is too sick to answer for it. That leaves me."

"I know what it leaves."

"Do you." He put the twist back into the crate and closed his hand around the edge of the lid. "Then tell me, Nell, since you were the one who read the tide wrong last night and the one who went out onto the bar alone, and the one who has been down in that boathouse all night with the door shut."

I did not say anything.

He stood up and looked down at me with the sun on his brown hair and that patient smile not quite gone from his mouth. "If you know who the rogue is, you need to say it now. This is the last hour where the pack gets to decide what to do with him before the Council does."

I looked down at the wolfsbane in the crate. There was a paper twist near the top with a string tied around it in a knot I knew, because my mother had tied knots that way, and the paper had a date written on it in pencil, and the date was three years ago, in the winter my father first began to cough.