Chapter 3 What the Ice Knows

Gunnar's wolves spread out along the bank and took the ferry's bow line. I did not argue. The Council hounds were on the ice and the Alpha was dead in his bed, and the only road out of that hollow was the logging trail that ran behind my dock, and the logging trail was Gunnar's ground as much as mine.

We went single file through the pines. Gunnar led, coat open, snow up to his thighs, and I came behind him with Maren between me and the wolves. She did not stumble. She did not ask where we were going. She walked with her chin down and her hands loose at her sides, and twice I saw her turn her head to the wind the way a wolf does when it is counting what is out there in the dark.

The dock shed stood at the end of a short timber pier, a low building of tarred planks with a stovepipe and a padlock. I kept a lamp inside and a cot and a shelf of rope and a chest of tools, and under the floorboards, in a hollow I had cut myself with a chisel, I kept the things that mattered. I got the door open and got Maren inside and shut it behind us. Gunnar stood in the doorway with the snow blowing past his shoulders.

"I'll take the wolves and put a line on the trail," he said. "If the hounds come this way I'll send word by Tamsin. She's got a reason to be out at this hour and nobody counts her."

"Tamsin counts everything," I said.

"That's why she's useful." Gunnar looked past me at Maren, who had taken off her coat and was standing by the stove with her back to the wall. "She stays in here. She does not go near the pack house. Ostrander has called a gathering for dawn and he has already told the pack that you put a needle in the Alpha's neck and then ran for the border. He has the Council's ear and half the warriors, and he is saying he will have you dragged out of whatever hole you are hiding in."

"And you believe him?"

Gunnar's broad face did not move. "I believe the Alpha is dead and you were not at the house and there is a Council chain in your boat. I believe you have been running cargo under a false manifest for five years and I have looked the other way because your brother was my friend. What I believe about the rest of it will keep until dawn."

He left. The door thumped shut. His wolves went up the trail and their paws made soft, steady sounds in the new snow, and then the shed was quiet except for the stove ticking as it heated and the lake working at the pilings under the floor.

I lit the lamp. Maren had found a rag and was wiping the snow off her boots. Her hair had come loose from behind her ears and hung around her face in damp copper ropes.

"Sit down," I said. "You're white as the snow outside."

"I am cold. I told you." She sat on the edge of the cot anyway, and her hands went to the stove and she held them there. The red lines from the silver chain had faded to pink. Her healing had taken the worst of it, then.

"Your father," I said. "The one in the Council prison. What's his name?"

She looked up at me. "Why do you want to know?"

"Because you're going to tell me who put a needle in your neck, and I'm going to need names."

"Roderick." She said it the way a person sets down something heavy. "His name is Roderick. He was the Silver Warden for nineteen years and he was good at it. He knew every ore road in the territory and every clerk who signed for a shipment. Eight years ago a Council audit found forged manifests in his office and a silver chain in his desk, and he signed a confession and they put him in Iron Bay. I was nineteen. I have visited him twice a year since."

"What did he confess to?"

"Smuggling silver out of the Council's mines. Selling it to rogue packs. Undermining the Council's authority." She turned her hands over in front of the stove. "He told me once that he signed the confession to keep me out of it. That was the only explanation he ever gave me. He said the Council wanted someone to hang the crime on and he was the closest neck."

I went to the shelf and took down the tin cup and poured her a measure of the coffee I had made that morning and kept in a stone bottle. It was cold and bitter, and she drank it without complaint.

"Tell me about the coffin," I said. "Not the order. The coffin. How did you get into it?"

"I was at the landing at Coldwater. I had finished my report and I was waiting for the mail sled to take me back to the capital. A man in a Council coat came up to me and asked me to step into the receiving shed to sign a manifest. I remember the coat and the smell of the shed. I remember a hand on the back of my neck and a sting. Then I woke up in the dark with straw in my mouth."

"Did you see his face?"

"I saw his coat. Council grey with the silver braid on the cuff. That is all."

"Then it could be any clerk in the territory."

"It could." She set the cup down on the floor and looked at me. "But a clerk does not have a silver chain that fits a warden's wrists. A clerk does not have the keys to a receiving shed. Whoever put me in that box had access to the Council's own stores. That narrows it."

I thought about Ostrander. Silver haired, grey eyed, with a voice like warm honey and a hand that had been in every pie on the north shore for thirty years. He had been at the pack house when I left for the crossing. He had watched me load the coffin. He had asked me twice about the weight of it.

"You have a face," Maren said.

"I have a lot of faces. Which one?"

"The one that means you have thought of something and you are deciding whether to tell me."

I turned away and opened the small door of the stove and put a stick of birch in on the coals. The bark caught and the flame came up yellow.

"There's a Councilman," I said. "Ostrander. He runs the silver trade out of the receiving house at Iron Bay. He came to the pack house three days ago and he asked me about a coffin on my route and I told him it was ore and he smiled at me like I had told him a joke he already knew."

"And you think he put me in it."

"I think he put something in it. Whether it was you is a question I don't have the answer to."

Maren stood up. She crossed the shed in three steps and stopped in front of me, and she was close enough that I could see the green of her eyes had gone darker, the way a wolf's eyes go when the animal is near the surface.

"You are not telling me everything either," she said. "The box was not full of tobacco. I smelled the pine and the pitch and the rope, and under it I smelled paper. A lot of paper. Old paper, the way a library smells. So tell me, ferryman, what is in the coffin?"

"Letters."

"Whose letters?"

"My brother's."

That stopped her. She stood there in the lamplight with her mouth open, and her dimples showed, and then her face closed up like a door.

"You have a brother."

"I had a brother. His name was Rhys. He was two years older than me and he was the best ferryman on this shore and he died on the ice four years ago in a storm off the point. He was carrying a load of mail for the Council and the ice opened under him and they found the boat three days later and they found his coat and his pole but they never found him."

"And the letters?"

"Rhys kept a ledger. Every load he carried, every man who paid him, every clerk who signed for a crate. He wrote it all down. He used to say a ferryman who keeps a ledger never gets cheated twice." I picked up the poker and turned the birch over. "When he died I went through his things and I found the ledger under his mattress and I read it and I found some things in it that did not match what the Council told us about his last crossing. So I kept it. I cut a hole in the floor and I put it in a tin box and I never showed it to another living soul until tonight."

Maren's green eyes did not leave my face.

"Show me," she said.

"Why should I?"

"Because someone buried me in a box and someone put a needle in my neck and someone killed your Alpha in his bed and blamed you for it. Because I have a bond to you now that I did not ask for and cannot afford, and I would like to know whether the man on the other end of it is honest or a liar." She held out her hand. "Show me the ledger."

I could have refused. I should have. A man in my position learns early that the only thing worth keeping is the thing nobody else knows about. But she stood there with her hand out and the stove glow on her copper hair and her green eyes steady, and my wolf had already decided for me, and I hated him for it.

I got down on my knees and pulled back the loose board and took out the tin box. It was a cracker tin, red once, now mostly rust, and the lid had a picture of a sailing ship on it. I set it on the cot and opened it and took out the ledger.

It was a fat book with a cracked leather cover and a ribbon marker. Rhys had written in it with a stub of pencil in a small, neat hand, and the pages were foxed along the edges from four years of cold and damp.

Maren sat down on the cot and opened it. She turned the pages one by one, and her finger moved down the columns, and I watched her read.

Then she stopped. Her hand went still on the page.

"What is it?" I said.

"Your brother's last crossing." She looked up at me and her face had gone pale again, and not from cold. "The load he was carrying for the Council. It was not mail. It was a sealed crate with a Council stamp and a code. I know that code. It is the code the Silver Wardens use for ore shipments."

I stared at her.

"The Council told the pack he was carrying mail," I said.

"The Council told you wrong." She turned another page and stopped again. "Ewan. The man who signed for that crate. His name is on this page."

"Who?"

She looked up at me and her green eyes were very still.

"Ostrander."

The stove ticked. The lake worked at the pilings. I stood there in the lamplight with my brother's handwriting under Maren's finger and the name of the man who had killed my Alpha and buried a warden alive sitting on the page like a stain.

Then someone knocked on the shed door. Three slow knocks and a pause and two quick ones.

Tamsin's knock.

Maren closed the ledger. I put it back in the tin box and the tin box back under the floor and the board back over it, and I had the padlock in my hand when the door opened without me touching it.

Tamsin stood in the snow with her blonde hair coming loose from her hood and her blue eyes wide and her breath going in and out in short white puffs. She had her apron on under her coat, which meant she had run from the tavern without stopping.

"Ewan," she said. "You need to come. The hounds have gone up to the pack house and Ostrander is standing on the porch with the Alpha's blood on his shirt and he is telling the whole pack that he found it in your shed. He's got a silver chain and a needle and he is saying the Alpha's death is proof that you are a rogue and a traitor and a murderer."

She stopped. She looked past me at Maren, who had come up behind me with the tin cup still in her hand.

Then Tamsin's face changed. Her mouth opened and she pointed.

"And who," she said, "is the woman with the Council brand on her wrist?"