Chapter 3 The Tooth She Left Behind

I got as far as the first line of pines before I stopped. The running wolf was three miles out by then, maybe four, and the pack yard behind me was full of voices. If I went after her now, I would be a wolf who ran from his Alpha's body toward the scent of the woman he had spent the night with. Even I could hear how that sounded.

So I turned back. It took more out of me than the long walk from the meadow had.

The yard was crowded by the time I came through the gate. Someone had put a trestle table out and laid Reinhard on it, still wrapped in the inn's grey blanket, and the pack had gathered around it in a ring. When one of them dies the others come to stand in the cold and say nothing. I found a place at the back and stayed there.

Dietrich stood at the head of the table with his coat finally buttoned right. He had washed his face and combed his hair back, and every wolf who came near him he received with a word and a touch on the arm. I watched him for a quarter of an hour. He knew every name. He knew which ones to embrace and which ones to leave alone with a nod, and when old Henrik's widow came up the path he went out to meet her before she reached the gate.

My wolf would not settle. I turned it over while I stood there and could not find a single thing wrong with his behavior. That was the trouble. Grief makes wolves clumsy. It makes them forget names and drop cups and say the wrong thing to the wrong person. Dietrich did not forget one name.

Marta found me before the sun was over the roof. She came out of the pack house with a basin and a cloth and her blonde hair tied back, and she put the basin down on the low wall beside me and took hold of my hand.

"You are bleeding," she said.

I looked down. There was blood under my fingernails and a long scratch on my wrist that I had not noticed. "It is Reinhard's."

"I know whose it is. Sit down."

I sat on the wall and let her work. Her hands were quick and sure, and she talked while she did it, which was Marta's way.

"The whole house is in an uproar," she said. "Tobias wants to send a war party to the Bosbach border tonight. You should hear the yard when they say the mining clans did it."

"Nobody is going anywhere until the Council sends someone."

"That is what I told them." She wrapped the cloth around my wrist and tied it. "The whisper in the kitchen is different. Half the pack is saying a rogue did it. The other half is saying the rogue was not alone."

Her blue eyes came up to mine and stayed there.

"Did you kill him, Konrad?"

The question came out of her so plainly that for a moment I could not answer.

"No," I said. "I did not kill him."

"Then find who did before the pack finds a wolf to hang. There is talk about the woman at the inn. There is talk that she was seen leaving the border road with a hood over her head."

"Who is doing the talking?"

"Tobias. And Tobias heard it from Dietrich."

I looked across the yard. Dietrich stood by the table with his hand on Reinhard's shoulder and his head bowed, and a group of wolves had gathered behind him in a line that looked a great deal like a queue waiting to speak to the Alpha. Marta followed my eyes and then picked up her basin.

"Be careful who you tell things to," she said, and went back into the house.

The pack house has a room off the kitchen where the enforcer keeps his things. A cot, a table, a chest with a lock on it. I went in and shut the door and put the silver tooth on the table in the light from the small window.

Seen properly, it was a fine piece of work. The silver was old and worn smooth at the edges, and the tooth itself had been cast from a real one, some ancestor's fang. The cord had been broken rather than untied. I turned it over and found a mark on the back of it, three small strokes cut into the metal in a row.

Three strokes. I had seen that mark before, on the iron collar of a rogue wolf I had brought to the stone six years ago. The rogue had been a woman, and she had said nothing all the way up the road, and when I had asked her what the collar meant she had told me to ask my Alpha.

I had never asked. It had not seemed like my business.

I sat down on the cot and put my head in my hands.

There was a proper way to do this. I should carry the tooth to the pack, tell them what I smelled on it, and let the law run. That is what an enforcer does. Reinhard had taught me himself, standing in this same room, that the law does not care who it hurts. He had said it without a trace of shame, as if it were a virtue.

And the law would take one look at my face and ask me how I knew the scent. I would have to say I knew it from my own bed.

Someone knocked.

I swept the tooth into my pocket and opened the door, and Dietrich stood there with his cup in his hand and his black hair neat, and behind him the hallway was empty.

"May I come in?" he said.

I stepped back. He came in and looked around the small room, and then he sat down on the chair by the table without being asked, the way he sat down everywhere.

"You left the yard this morning," he said. "I called after you."

"I had to walk. I needed the air."

"Of course. It has been a hard morning for you." He set his cup on the table and folded his hands. "Konrad, I have been thinking about what happens next, and I want to say this before the rest of them get their teeth into it. You are the best enforcer this pack has had in a hundred years. That is not flattery. It is the reason I am sitting in your room instead of sending someone else."

"Say what you came to say."

"The pack meets tonight at the stone. I will stand up in front of them and say that Reinhard trusted you above every wolf in this territory, and that the investigation belongs to you and no one else." He watched me. "That is a great deal of weight to put on a wolf who was out wandering the pines at dawn instead of doing his duty."

"I was not wandering."

"I am glad to hear it." He stood up and took his cup and paused at the door. "Tonight, then. Bring me a name. Any name that will hold up under the law. If you bring me nothing, the pack will decide for you, and they will not be gentle about it."

He went out and pulled the door shut behind him. I heard his boots go down the hallway toward the kitchen, and then I heard him greet someone by name and laugh.

I waited until the house was quiet, and then I took my coat and went out the back, across the yard, past the chicken house, into the pines. The scent of her was faint as a breath on cold glass, and it led north and east, away from the border road, toward the old hunting trails. I followed it until the light went, and then I stopped and stood still in the dark and listened.

Nothing. No wolf running, no birds, no wind even. Then, very close, no more than twenty paces off among the trunks, a twig snapped under a foot and a voice I knew said my name.

I turned toward it, and a hand came out of the darkness and closed around my wrist.