Chapter 2 My Mate, the Arsonist

I did not turn my back on her again.

The lamp came first. That is the law of this rock, and I have kept it since I was nineteen years old and my father's boots were still warm. I cleared the clogged feed with a wire from my pocket, wiped the soot off the glass, and stood there until the flame burned clean and yellow and the beam swung out over the water the way it was meant to. Ingrid watched me the whole time from the corner where I had told her to stand, and she did not move, and she did not say a word.

Then I took her by the arm and walked her down a hundred and twelve steps to the keeper's room at the base of the tower, the small stone cell where my father used to sleep when the weather was too foul to row home. There was a cot in it, a chair, a table with a candle stub, and a door with a good iron lock.

"You are leaving me here," she said.

"I am leaving you here."

"With the rogues on the rock. On the other side of that door."

"You said they brought you," I said. "So they can come and fetch you."

Her jaw tightened. "Alpha. If I stay in this room, I am no use to anyone. You need to know what they are doing out there."

"I need to know what you are doing in here," I said, and shut the door, and turned the key.

She did not shout. I stood there for a while with my hand flat on the wood, waiting for the shouting, and it never came. That was worse, somehow. A woman who screams is a woman I understand. This one just went quiet.

I went back up the stairs and out onto the gallery and stood in the wind with my hands on the rail, and I looked down at the black water where my boat had been. The planks were gone now. The foam had spread out and faded. Somewhere out there, past the skerries, a pair of oars was floating away from me, and I had no way off this rock until the tide turned and the pack came looking.

My wolf had not settled. He was pacing inside my chest, and every few minutes he would stop and turn toward the tower and press, hard, like a dog against a door.

Go down. Go down to her.

She tried to put out the lamp.

She is warm.

She is ours.

I told him to shut up. He did not.

I have heard what the bond does to wolves. Every wolf has heard the stories. My father told me about a pair in the south who found each other at a market and could not be more than ten paces apart for a month, and how the male went half mad when she was called away to her aunt's. I used to think those were stories for children, the way the old ones dress up the plain business of finding a wife. I do not think that anymore.

She is not a wife. She is a woman who came to my island with a match. And she is ours.

I slept badly, sitting up against the wall of the lamp room with my back to the glass and my coat over my knees. I dreamed of her braid, which is a stupid thing to dream about. I woke three times in the night, and each time the sound that had woken me was my own wolf howling inside my skull, a long low cry that never reached my throat. The fourth time, near morning, I gave up.

I went down the stairs at first light with a cup of water and half a loaf of the hard bread from my own cupboard, because whatever she had come to do, I was not going to starve her.

The key turned. The door swung open.

The keeper's room was empty.

The cot was made. The chair was pushed back under the table, neat as you like. The candle stub was burned down to nothing. And the little window at the back of the room, the one that looked out onto the sea rock, was open, the iron latch bent back with something narrow and strong. There was a scratch on the sill where the tool had caught.

I stood in the doorway with the bread in my hand, and my wolf did not howl. He went very still, and very cold, and I felt him point himself at the open window like a nose to the wind.

I crossed the room in three strides and looked out. The rock fell away below in slabs of wet stone. She could have broken her neck. She could have drowned. She had done neither.

She was down on the flat shelf of stone at the water's edge, forty feet below and a hundred yards along the shore, sitting with her knees drawn up and her braid over her shoulder, looking out at the sea. Her coat was soaked and her boots were beside her and her canvas bag was in her lap. Her boat, if she had ever had one, was in pieces against the rocks, stove in and scattered, and the oars had washed up in the kelp.

I climbed down the outside stair. She did not turn around, though she must have heard me.

"You opened a locked window with a fish knife," I said.

"I am not a fish," she said.

"You are a liar."

"I have not lied to you yet." She turned her head then, and the morning light caught her amber eyes and made them look almost gold, and there was a purple bruise coming up along her forearm where she had caught it on the sill. "I left things out. There is a difference. I told you they brought me. I told you I came to put out the light. I did not tell you I did not want to."

I sat down on the stone beside her because there was nowhere else to sit and because my wolf was pushing me toward her so hard that my ribs hurt.

"You cannot leave," I said. "There is no boat but mine, and mine is gone. The tide is out. The nearest island is six miles of cold water. So the two of us are stuck on this rock until my pack comes out to check on their Alpha, and I would rather they did not find a Council seal in a stranger's bag."

She flinched. Just a small one. I would have missed it if I had not been watching her.

"I told you not to be clever," she said.

"I have never once managed it."

We sat there. The tide was sucking out over the rocks, and the gulls were fighting over something in the weed, and the light in the east was turning pink.

"Will you tell me the truth?" I said. "One true thing, before my Beta rows out here and decides it for you."

Ingrid was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "I have been on this rock four days, Alpha. I have been living in the old boat shed on the north shore, and I have been watching your lamp every night. Last night was the first night I had the courage to climb those stairs. And I want you to understand that when I stood in that lamp room with a match in my hand, I was not sure I could do it."

"You should have stayed unsure."

"Perhaps." She looked at me. "But the men who brought me are not rogues. They are worse than rogues. And when they find out I am still here, they will not come to fetch me. They will come to burn the whole rock, and you and your sixty wolves will be the ones who pay for my courage."

I was still turning that over when the wind changed and brought me a scent off the water. My wolf lifted his head and growled.

Three boats were coming round the northern headland. Not pack boats. Not fishing boats. Long grey boats with men in them, and a flag I did not know, and in the prow of the first one a tall old man stood with a white glove on his hand.