Chapter 3 What the Salt Left Behind

I did not go to Isla's cottage that night. I told myself it was because I needed to see the valves in daylight, and that was true, and it was also a coward's excuse. I went home to my rooms above the gatehouse, slept badly, and was back at the plant before six with a torch and a notebook.

The tide was out again, and the intake hall looked different in the grey morning. Smaller. The pipes I had walked past for nine years were crusted white with salt at every joint, and when I ran my thumb along the nearest flange it came away gritty. I opened my notebook and started with the main corrosion valve.

Her marks were everywhere.

Not the wrench. The wrench had been a decoy, or a tool she had left behind on purpose. What she had done was subtler. On the underside of the housing, where nobody would look unless they were lying on the floor, she had scraped away the worst of the rust and packed the gap with something grey and waxy that smelled of tallow and ash. I dug a little out with my fingernail and rolled it between my fingers. It held its shape. It did not dissolve in the water.

I sat back on my heels. Whatever it was, it had stopped the corrosion where it touched. The pipe above her patch was still clean metal. The pipe below it was orange.

"You're on the floor."

I looked up. Rowan stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and his sandy blond hair still flat from sleep. He was nineteen and built like our father, broad through the shoulders, and he had our mother's bright blue eyes, which were watching me with an expression I did not like.

"I'm inspecting a valve."

"You're lying on the floor of an intake hall at six in the morning inspecting a valve." He came down the steps. "Magnus says you chased a woman out of here last night."

"Magnus says a lot of things."

"He says you had your hands on her." Rowan grinned. "Was she pretty?"

"Rowan."

"That's a yes." He crouched beside me and looked at the pipe. "What's that grey stuff?"

"Something that shouldn't be there."

"Then why is it the only part of the pipe that isn't rotting?" He reached out to touch it, and I caught his wrist. His skin was hot. Not warm from the climb, not warm from the morning. Hot, the way a fever is hot, and I let go of him faster than I meant to.

"Your hands," I said.

"What about them?"

"Are they steady?"

He looked at me for a moment. Then he stood up, and he put his hands behind his back, and he gave me the smile he used when he wanted me to stop asking questions.

"Steady as anything," he said. "You should have seen me at training yesterday. Magnus said I nearly took his shoulder off."

"Magnus would say that if you tripped over a bucket."

"You're funny in the mornings. I forgot that." He walked back to the steps. "Isla's in the pack kitchen, by the way. She's been up since four making something that smells like a bog. She asked if you'd been to see her."

"Did you tell her no?"

"I told her you were busy being mysterious." He paused at the top of the stairs. "Alasdair. If something's wrong, you can tell me. I'm not a child."

"You're nineteen."

"That's not the same thing." He went up and out, and his boots faded along the corridor, and I sat on the cold floor with the grey wax on my fingers and the rust creeping back around the edge of it.

I finished the inspection in an hour. I found her marks on four valves and a junction beneath the turbine housing, all of them the same. She had been inside my plant for months, and she had done nothing except slow the rot down. She could have opened a gate, dropped a bolt into a turbine, killed half the pack in their beds. She had chosen to pack wax into my pipes instead.

I put the notebook in my coat and walked up to the pack house.

Isla was in the kitchen as Rowan had said, and the kitchen did smell like a bog. She had a pot on the stove and a wooden spoon in her hand, and her black hair was braided so tight it pulled at the skin of her temples, and when she saw me she did not smile.

"Sit," she said.

"I'll stand."

"Sit down, Alasdair." Her sharp dark eyes went to my hands, and I put them behind my back before I could stop myself. "That's what I thought."

"What do you know?"

She stirred the pot twice and set the spoon down on a saucer. "I know the water in this town has been wrong for longer than you've been alive. I know three wolves in this pack have failed to shift in the last year, and I know what it looks like when it starts, because I saw it in your father."

My mouth went dry. "My father died in the sea. That was an accident."

"That was the story we told you." She looked at the pot. "Your father's hands shook for six months before he walked into the water. He was fifty-one years old and he could not hold a pen. He did not drown because the tide took him, Alasdair. He drowned because he could not shift, and a wolf who cannot shift in this pack is a wolf the Council will take."

I did not move. The kitchen clock ticked above the stove.

"Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"Because you were twenty-two and angry and you would have gone straight to the Council, and then you would have been the one they took." She picked up the spoon again. "Drink this. It won't cure anything, but it will keep your hands steady for a few days."

I looked at the pot. "What's in it?"

"Wolfsbane and sea salt, and before you say anything, the dose is small enough that it won't burn your wolf. It will simply make it harder for the curse to find him."

"Curse." There it was again, the same word Eilidh had used. "You both use that word. What curse?"

Isla put the pot on the table and set a cup down beside it. She did not pour.

"Thirty years ago a debt was cast into the water at this plant," she said. "It was meant to bring this pack to its knees, and it has been doing exactly that, slowly, one pipe and one wolf at a time. I know who cast it. I have known since before you were born. And I have done nothing about it because I was paid to keep my mouth shut." She looked up at me. "There is a letter on its way here from the Council. It will arrive today. When it does, you will understand why I am telling you this now and not ten years ago."

I opened my mouth to ask what she meant, and the front door of the pack house banged open, and Rowan's voice came down the corridor, loud and bright and a little too high.

"Alasdair! Magnus wants you in the Alpha's study. There's a man at the gate with a silver pin on his coat."

Isla's hand closed around the cup.

"Cup, Alasdair," she said quietly. "Drink it now, before you go in there, or your hands will shake in front of the whole Council and there will be no hiding what you are."