Chapter 2 Fifteen Years of Silence

I did not sleep that night. I want to be clear about that, because I had spent fifteen years being very good at sleeping alone. My bothy has one room, one cot, one chair, and a stove that draws badly when the wind is from the north. I had learned to sleep through all of it, the smoke and the cold and the mice in the wall, the way a man learns to sleep through anything he cannot change.

But I could not sleep through her.

The scent was gone from the air. That was the maddening part. She had walked back down the path with her uncle, and the wind had turned clean and empty, and still my wolf would not lie down. He circled behind my ribs. He pressed his muzzle against the inside of my skin until my shoulders ached. Around midnight I got up and paced from the cot to the door and back, twelve steps each way, and he paced with me.

Mine, he said. Mine. Mine.

"She is not ours," I told him, out loud, because there was no one to hear me and because sometimes saying a thing quiets the animal.

He did not believe me. He showed me her hand on my sleeve, the heat of it, the way her eyes had gone dark. He showed me a picture of the path to the pack house in the dark and her waiting at the end of it, and he pushed against my skin so hard that my fingers ached.

I went outside.

The moon was a thin crescent, low over the western pines, and the moor lay under it like a held breath. I walked to the border with my coat open and my boots unlaced, and I stopped at the fourth cairn, where I had stood that morning with her hand on my arm, and I stood there again like a fool.

The stones were white in the moonlight. Beyond them the ground sloped away into the hollow where the missing cairn should have been. Someone had put a torch there, a long time ago, and burned the heather black in a circle wider than a cart. Grass had grown back, but the shape of it was still there in the way the ground dipped.

I knew that shape. I had walked around it a thousand times.

The first time I saw this border, I was nineteen years old and I came up the path with a Council escort, my wrists bound with rope, a sentence of exile read out to me at the challenge stone in front of the whole pack. The escort had taken the rope off at the cairn and told me the bothy was mine and the border was mine and the rest of the pack's land was not.

I had asked them one question. I had said, "What did I do?"

The escort had looked at me the way you look at a dog that has bitten someone. "You were there," he said. "That is enough."

Fifteen years. I had built a life out of that answer. I had learned to catch hares in a snare and to mend a roof with heather and twine, to read a cloud coming in off the Atlantic and be inside before it broke. I had a kettle and a chair and a knife I sharpened on the doorstep every Sunday. I had learned to be a man with no past, which is a hard thing to be when your past is still walking around inside your head with a torch.

I sat down against the cairn and looked at the burn.

It happened at the old pack house. Not this one, the new one, but the one that stood before it, up on the rise by the pines, a long low building of stone and timber where the Alpha's family had lived since before the moor was fenced. It burned in the autumn, three weeks before my nineteenth birthday. I was in the yard when it caught. I was there because the old Alpha had sent for me, a wolf with no rank and no prospects and a mother who had died in the spring, and I had gone because I was young and foolish and thought a summons from the Alpha was the beginning of something.

He was in his study when the fire came through the roof.

I remembered the smoke. I remembered the heat on my face and the noise the timber made when it split, a crack and then a long groan, and I remembered my wolf taking over my body without asking, pulling me forward. I remembered the old Alpha's voice through the smoke, saying my name, and a sound after that which I have never been able to describe to anyone.

I did not remember what came next. That is the thing I have never told anyone. There is a hole in that night, a black place, and I have tried for fifteen years to see into it and there is nothing there but noise.

What I remembered was waking up on the moor with the building behind me throwing light into the sky, and Duncan's hands on my shoulders, and Fergus's voice above me saying, "He has blood on his hands. Look at his hands."

The blood had been my own. I had cut my palms on the window frame getting out. I knew that now. I had known it for years. But I had not known it then, and I had stood in the yard with my hands open in front of the whole pack and said nothing at all, because I had no memory and no defense and no one in the world to speak for me.

The old Alpha was pulled out of the study. He lived long enough to say something to the healer, Mara, who bent her iron-grey head to his mouth and listened, and then he died on the grass with his family around him.

I was exiled the next morning. Fergus arranged it. I remember him standing at the challenge stone, his silver hair still full of ash, his voice calm and sad, saying that the Council had agreed that a wolf with blood on his hands should not be allowed to remain where the Alpha's daughter slept. I remember Isla at the back of the crowd, sixteen years old, dark hair loose, a grey-eyed girl with her hands pressed over her mouth.

I had never spoken to her. I had seen her from across the yard a hundred times and never once said a word, because she was the Alpha's daughter and I was nobody. And on the morning I was exiled, she was the only person in that pack who was not looking at my hands. She was looking at my face.

I thought about that more than I should have, those first years. Then I stopped.

I leaned my head back against the cairn and looked at the thin moon. My wolf had quieted, a little, walking me out here. The night was very cold and very still, and I could hear the burn running down in the hollow and a fox somewhere in the pines, and I closed my eyes.

That is when it happened.

My wolf came up inside me like water coming up a well, and I had no time to fight him. He wanted to run. Not the pacing he had done all night in the bothy, not the pressing against my skin. He wanted to be on four legs with the moor under him and the wind in his fur and the border gone, and he pushed so hard that my hands went to the stone beside me and my nails scratched it.

I held on. I held on to the cairn with both hands and I counted the stones to keep my head. One, two, three, four. My mouth was full of the taste of copper. The moon, that thin crescent, pulled at my spine like a tide, and I felt the shape of my jaw start to change, and I had not shifted in almost four months.

The first shift comes when you are young, at thirteen or fourteen, and it is like being turned inside out. After that it comes easier, most of the time. Not for me. My wolf and I had been at war since the night of the fire, and the shifting had gotten harder every year, and the last full shift had been at midsummer, and it had taken me an hour and a half to come back to my own hands afterward. My wolf was a feral thing, half starved, living in the back of my body like a tenant who never paid rent.

I do not know how long I held the cairn. Long enough that when I let go my fingers had gone white, and the dawn had started in the east, grey behind the pines. I was still a man. My hands were still hands.

I got up and walked back to the bothy and drank cold tea and put on the only shirt I had without a hole in it. Then I heard the footsteps again.

Not Fergus this time. A single set of boots on the path, light and sure, and a scent of rosemary coming through the door before the knock.

I opened it. Isla stood in the grey light with her dark hair pinned up and a wool coat buttoned to the throat and a paper parcel in her hands.

"I brought you gloves," she said.

I looked at the parcel. I looked at her. The wind lifted a strand of her hair and I smelled her so clearly that my wolf turned around twice and lay down.

"Alpha," I said, and my voice came out like a gate that needed oil. "You should not be here."

"I know." She held the parcel out. "But my uncle is not as subtle as he thinks he is, and I do not like being managed. He told you to come to the gathering before the whole pack to answer questions. That was not the Council's idea, and it was not mine. He wants you in front of a crowd. So I thought I would come and ask you myself, before he has a chance to make it a trap."

I took the parcel because my hands did it before I told them to. The gloves were good ones, dark leather, lined with something soft.

"Why?" I said. "Why would the Alpha care what happens to a border guard she met yesterday?"

She looked at me for a moment. The grey eyes did not blink. Then she said, "Because when my father died, I was in the yard, and you were standing in front of the whole pack with your hands open, and I saw your face. I have thought about your face for fifteen years, Callum. I would like to know what I was looking at."

The pines behind her went very quiet. The fire in the bothy popped and settled. My wolf lifted his head and made a low sound of want that I could feel in my teeth.

"Isla," I said. It was the first time I had said her name, and it came out of me like a stone out of a pocket, heavier than I expected.

She put her hand on the door frame and leaned in a little, close enough that I could see the grey and blue in her eyes in the grey morning light, and said, very quietly, "Come to the gathering. Stand where I can see you. And when my uncle asks you his questions, do not answer a single one until you have looked at me first."