Chapter 2 Her Silver Chain

I poled for the north shore because the south channel was open water and the east channel was where the howls were thickest. The north shore meant the pine line and the old logging road and a mile of woods I knew better than any wolf in the pack, and it meant I could put the boat between the ice and the rocks and hope the hounds lost the scent in the slush.

Maren rode in the bow with the pry bar in her hands and the chain coiled at her feet like a dead snake. She had put her coat on and pulled the collar up around her ears, and she watched the shore the whole way with her green eyes narrowed against the wind.

"Left of the big pine," she said. "There's a gap in the rocks."

"I know the gap."

"Then take it faster."

The ferry scraped bottom. I jumped out into knee deep water and hauled on the bow line, and the cold went through my boots and up my legs and settled in my bones. Maren jumped out beside me and pushed from the stern, and her boots found the rocks without slipping once, which told me she had done this kind of work before. We dragged the scow into the gap and tied it to a birch and stood there in the dark with our breath coming hard.

The howls had stopped. That was worse than the howls.

"Up the bank," I said. "There's a hunter's blind about two hundred yards in. Old, but it has a roof."

She followed me without a word. The snow was knee deep in the hollows and crusted on the ridges, and every step we took made a noise like breaking glass. My wolf pushed at my senses and I let him, and the woods came in around me, the smell of frozen moss and old woodsmoke, the scratch of a hare moving under a root somewhere to our left, the wet iron smell of the lake behind us.

And her. Cedar and clean skin and apples, close behind me, and my wolf would not stop turning toward it.

The blind was a lean to of poles and pine boughs built against a boulder, and the snow had drifted over the front of it so that it looked like a badger's den. I kicked the drift apart and pulled the boughs back, and we crawled inside and sat with our backs against the rock. The wind went around us instead of through us. It was the first time in an hour I had been out of it, and my hands started to shake now that they had nothing to do.

Maren pulled a tin matchbox from her coat and struck one and held it up. The flame lit her face from below, her round cheeks and her small nose and the two deep dimples that showed even when she was not smiling, and her green eyes looked at me across the little light.

"You're shivering," she said.

"I'm cold."

"You're afraid." She shook the match out and the dark came back. "I can smell it on you. You're afraid of the hounds, and you're afraid of me, and you're afraid of whatever it is the Council wants with that box."

"I'm afraid of a lot of things," I said. "Mostly that I'll be dead by morning and my sister will have to sell the boat to bury me."

"Your sister."

"Isla. She's twenty four and she thinks she runs the pack, and she is going to be very angry with me when she finds out what I did tonight."

Maren was quiet for a moment. I heard her shift against the rock and the rustle of her coat.

"Tell me about the order," I said. "All of it. Not the part you practiced on the ice."

She did not answer right away. When she did, her voice had changed. It was flatter and more careful, the voice of a woman reading from a page she had memorized.

"The order came down from the Council chamber in the capital three weeks ago. It named a smuggler on the north shore of Lake Superior who was moving silver ore under false manifests, and it named the route and the dock and the boat. I was assigned as warden because I have family in this territory and the Council thought I would be... motivated."

"Motivated."

"My father is in the Council's prison at Iron Bay. He was the Silver Warden before me. He signed a confession eight years ago, and the Council has kept him in a cell ever since. The order came with a note attached. If I completed the assignment, his case would be reviewed."

"So they bought you with your father."

"They did not need to buy me." Her voice went hard. "I am a warden. I do what the Council tells me to do, and I do it well, and I do not need a bribe to do my duty. The note was a courtesy. Nothing more."

The wind pushed at the pine boughs over our heads. I thought about the chain in the bottom of the boat, and the red lines on her wrists, and the way she had said the word duty twice in one breath.

"Then why didn't you do it?" I said. "You had the coffin. You had the silver. You could have put that chain around my throat and been done with it before I ever opened the lid."

She was silent for so long that I thought she would not answer.

"Because when I put my hand on the lid," she said, "I felt something. I thought it was the cold. I thought it was my nerves. I lay down in that box to wait for you, and the moment you put your hand on the wood, I felt it through the whole coffin. A pull. Like a rope tied to my ribs."

My wolf stood up in the back of my mind. He did not pace. He stood still, and he listened.

"You know what it is," she said. "Don't you."

I did know. Every wolf in the territory knew the stories, and the Northshore pack told them around the fire at the pack house when the ice was thick and the nights were long. A bond that finds two wolves and ties them together. A scent that gets into your blood. A touch that changes the shape of the world. My father had told me about it once, before he was executed, and he had told it like a warning and not a blessing.

"The mate bond," I said.

"It's not possible." Maren's voice was low and fast. "I am a warden of the Council. I have taken oaths. The Council does not permit its wardens to take mates outside the capital packs. There are rules, there are dispensations, there is a whole office of clerks who decide who is allowed to bond with whom, and none of them would ever approve a ferryman on the north shore with a false manifest and a dead brother and a boat that leaks."

"You've looked into my file."

"I memorized your file." She said it without apology. "I memorized every file on that route. It is what a warden does."

I leaned my head back against the rock. The cold of it came through my hair and into my skull, and it helped.

"Then tell me how it works," I said. "The bond. What did the Council teach you?"

She shifted again, and I heard her hands move in her lap, and then she spoke in that careful, reading voice.

"The bond is a bond of wolves and not of people. It wakes when two wolves touch, skin to skin, or when they are close enough for long enough. It grows with contact and it starves without it. It lets mates feel each other across distance and speak without words, though the speaking comes later, after the mark. It cannot be faked and it cannot be broken except by the Council's ritual, which is done only in the most extreme cases and requires the consent of the Alpha and the Council together."

"And if one of them rejects it?"

"The rejecting wolf pays a price. The bond tears, and the tearing leaves a wound that does not heal clean. Some wolves lose their shift. Some lose their minds. The Council keeps records of eleven cases and none of the eleven lived past the second year."

I thought about my father again. He had never told me that part.

"What about the other one?" I said. "The wolf who gets rejected. What happens to them?"

"The bond does not care about fairness," Maren said. "The rejected wolf feels the tear as well. They simply do not pay the same price."

The wind changed and the boughs over our heads rattled. Somewhere out on the ice a fox screamed, and I heard it for what it was and nothing more.

"Give me your hand," I said.

"Why?"

"Because I want to know if you're telling the truth, and because I want to know what happens when we touch."

"I told you what happens. The bond wakes."

"Then let's see it wake."

She did not move for a long moment. I heard her breath go in and out, slow and deliberate, the way a person breathes when they are trying to be calm. Then her hand found mine in the dark.

Her fingers were cold and her palm was warm, and the moment her skin met mine the blind filled with a light that had no source. It was not a glow and it was not a spark. It was a warmth that started in my hand and ran up my arm and into my chest and settled behind my ribs like a coal taken from a fire, and my wolf threw back his head and howled in the back of my mind, and I heard her wolf answer him.

Maren made a sound I had never heard a woman make. It was not a gasp. It was lower than that, and it came from somewhere under her ribs, and her hand closed hard around mine and did not let go.

I saw things. I saw a green field in summer and a house with a red door and a man with grey hair reading a letter at a table. I saw a silver chain and a cell and a face I did not know. I saw a lake at dawn with the ice breaking up and a boat I did not recognize, and I saw a child with copper hair and green eyes running along a dock.

Then it was over. The warmth receded, the coal banked itself, and I was sitting in a hunter's blind with a warden's hand in mine and the snow coming through the boughs over our heads.

"That was not a flicker," Maren said. Her voice was unsteady. "That was the whole thing. That was the bond waking all the way up."

"I know."

"That is not possible." She pulled her hand back and pressed it against her chest. "That is not possible. The bond takes weeks. It takes months. It takes a proper courtship and a proper ceremony and a dispensation from the office of clerks, and it does not happen in a hunter's blind in the middle of the night with a smuggler who smells like fish."

"I don't smell like fish," I said. "I smell like tar and cold iron. There's a difference."

She laughed. It was a short, surprised sound, and it stopped almost before it started, but it was a laugh, and it changed the air in the blind.

Then the howls came back.

They were close this time, and they were not the same howls. These were sharper and more urgent, and they were coming up the bank from the water, from the gap in the rocks where we had left the ferry.

Maren's head came up. "They found the boat."

"They found the chain." I pushed myself to my feet and pulled the boughs back and looked out into the trees. The moon was behind the clouds and the snow was coming down in a slow, steady fall, and through it I could see shapes moving between the trunks. Four of them. Maybe five. They were not running. They were walking in a line, and the line was coming straight toward the blind.

Maren came up beside me with the pry bar in her hand.

"Your pack," she said. "Will they help us?"

"If they know what's good for them, they'll stay in their beds."

"That is not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

The lead shape stopped at the edge of the trees and lifted its head, and the wind brought me its scent, and my wolf knew it before I did.

Gunnar. The Northshore Beta. Brown fur and a heavy shoulder and the smell of pine smoke and the pack house kitchen, and behind him three more wolves I knew by name.

Gunnar shifted first. He came up out of the snow on two legs with his coat already in his hand, a stocky man with a brown beard and a broad face, and he pulled the coat on and stood there in the falling snow with his breath steaming.

"Ewan," he said. "You have got about ten seconds to tell me why the Council's hounds are on our shore and why there is a Council chain in your boat and why there is a strange woman standing in a hunter's blind with my Beta's scent all over her."

I stepped out from the boughs. The snow came down between us.

"Gunnar," I said. "This is Maren. She's a silver warden. Someone tried to bury her alive in my coffin tonight, and the hounds are not here for her. They're here for the box. If they get that box, the pack is finished, and I mean finished, because the box is not full of tobacco and I think you already know that."

Gunnar's face did not change. He looked at Maren for a long moment, and then he looked at me.

"The Alpha is dead," he said. "They found him in his bed an hour ago. Ostrander has called the pack to the house, and he is saying you did it."

The snow kept falling. Somewhere behind me Maren's chain shifted in the bottom of the boat, and the hounds howled again, closer now, and I stood in the middle of it with my hands empty and my wolf silent and the whole north shore coming apart under my feet.