Chapter 3 The Teacher on the Shore

I did not go straight back up the hill. I walked the shore instead, because my arm had come back to life with a dull ache that spread up into my shoulder and I wanted to be alone with it before I had to be alone with Marcus.

The tide was out. The sand was grey and wet and full of the small ordinary wreckage of a working coast, a broken creel, a length of tarred rope, the rib of a boat that had come apart in some winter I did not remember. Out past the shingle the island lay black and flat with the water still running off it, and the stone that showed at its center was the same stone the old people called the wolf's table. I had been out to it twice in my life. Once as a boy on a dare. Once two years ago, at night, when Nina told me she would not have me.

I sat on the shingle and looked at the island and tried to find the bond.

It was there. That was the thing I could not get my head around. It was there and it was not. When I turned my attention to it the way I would have turned my attention to my wolf, I found a place where something had been cut out, and behind the cut place there was a warmth that was not mine. It had a shape. It had a scent on it, chalk and rain and wool. When I reached for it, it was like putting my hand into a wall of cold water and feeling a fire on the other side.

I tried to shift. I put my hands on my knees and I closed my eyes and I found the place under my ribs where the wolf used to sit curled and warm, and I called him. Nothing came. I called until my jaw ached and my hands were fists and the gulls came down to see what I was doing on the shingle, and then I opened my eyes and the island was still there and I was still a man with a bad arm and a hole in his chest.

A boot scraped on the stones behind me.

Clara stood ten paces away with her shawl pulled round her shoulders and her hair blowing loose from its pins and a basket on her arm. She had come down the path from the village, and I had been so far inside my own head that I had not heard her, and that frightened me more than anything else that had happened in two days. A wolf who cannot hear a woman on shingle is a dead wolf.

"You," she said.

"Me."

She did not go away. She came a few steps closer and stood looking down at me with her eyes narrowed against the wind, and her jaw was set in a way I was beginning to recognize. "What were you doing just now? You looked like a man trying to lift a cart off his own foot."

"Praying."

"You're a poor liar."

"That's not the first time I've been told."

She almost smiled. It came and went so fast I might have invented it. Then she looked past me at the island and the smile was gone. "Is that where they bury your people?"

"Who told you we bury people out there?"

"My grandfather used to say the island belonged to the wolves, and the wolves belonged to the island. He said it like a joke. He was always saying things like a joke." She set the basket down. There were mussels in it and a bundle of green stuff wrapped in dock leaves. "I used to think he was a storyteller. Then I grew up and came back and found out he wasn't."

"Clara." I got up off the shingle. My bad arm hung at my side and I did not try to hide it. "Yesterday you told me you had seen things you could not explain. I am going to ask you a question and I want you to answer it straight. Have you ever seen a wolf on two legs?"

The wind took her hair across her face and she pushed it back with a wet hand. She looked at me for a long moment, and her blue green eyes did not move from mine, and I watched her decide something.

"No," she said. "I have not."

"You're a poor liar."

Her mouth went tight. "I told you what I know. I have seen things in this village I cannot explain, and I have questions, and I came back for answers. That does not mean I have seen a wolf on two legs, and it does not mean I know what you are. I am a schoolteacher. I teach children their letters. Last week I taught Ivy that the letter W makes two sounds and she argued with me about it for a quarter of an hour. That is my life. That is the whole of it."

She was lying. She was lying so hard I could nearly see the shape of the truth behind her eyes, and her eyes followed me as she said it, the way a cat follows a bird. She was afraid. Not of me in the way a woman is afraid of a strange man on a shore. She was afraid of something I could not see, and she was looking at me to find out if I was it.

"All right," I said. "You've never seen a wolf on two legs."

"That is what I said."

"Then we have nothing to talk about." I picked up the basket and held it out to her. "Except the tide. It'll be back in an hour and you'll be cut off out here if you keep wandering."

She took the basket and did not thank me. She turned and started up the path toward the village, and then she stopped and said, without turning round, "My grandfather's name was Andrew. He was a boatman. He drowned in the spring of the year I was born, or that is what my father told me. When I was six years old my father came home from the harbour with a silver cup in his coat and put it on the shelf and told me never to touch it. Then he left, and the cup went with him, and I have not seen either of them since." She looked over her shoulder at me. "Does that answer your question?"

"Which question?"

"Why I came back." She went up the path and the wind took the sound of her feet on the stones and left me standing on the shingle with the sea coming in.

I did not know then what the cup was. I did not know that I had seen it already, in a heap of clothes on a kelp store floor with one link melted, and that the thing she had put on a shelf as a child had been in my mouth as silver and in my blood as fire. That would come later. What I knew then was that my Alpha had asked me to watch a woman who lied about wolves and whose father had carried a silver cup out of this village, and that Marcus had asked me to tell him first if I felt anything near her.

I went up the hill.

The pack house in the late afternoon smells of onions and wet wool and the peat in the stove. Agnes had the big pot on and two of the young ones were peeling turnips at the long table, and Bram was in the yard with a bucket of pitch, and the whole house had the ordinary busy sound of a place where people live. I went through it to Marcus's study and knocked and he called me in.

He was at the window with his back to me, and the light was behind him so I could not see his face. "You've been with the schoolteacher."

"I have."

"And?"

"She says she has never seen a wolf on two legs. She says her grandfather was a boatman who drowned the year she was born, and that her father left the village with a silver cup in his coat and never came back. She came back for answers."

Marcus was quiet. Then he turned round and the window light fell across him and I saw his face, and for a moment there was something wrong with it. Not the shape of it. The look in it. His light brown eyes were looking at me and past me at the same time, as if I were a word he had read in a book and was trying to place.

"Silver cup," he said.

"You know the cup?"

"I know a cup." He went to the desk and picked up his own and turned it in his hands, and it was not silver, it was plain pewter, and he looked at it as if it had told him something. "Tell me exactly what she said. Word for word."

I told him. I told him about the shelf and the warning and her father's coat, and while I was talking he set the cup down and walked to the fire and stood with his hands clasped behind him, and I watched him, and I remembered Agnes in the kitchen telling me to watch my Alpha close.

"Elias," he said at last. "I want you to bring her up here tomorrow. Not to the pack house. To the chapel. Father Callum can be there. I want her to swear an oath before the pack that she will keep what she has seen to herself. A first shift is a delicate thing. A late bloomer is more delicate still. She needs to be brought in properly, or she will do damage."

"She's a schoolteacher with a basket of mussels, Marcus. What damage is she going to do?"

He turned round and looked at me and his eyes were his own again, warm and certain. "You are my Beta," he said. "You have been at my shoulder since we were boys. I am asking you to trust me and to bring the woman to the chapel tomorrow at noon. Can you do that for me?"

There is a thing that happens in a pack. When the Alpha asks you a question like that, the answer is not a word, it is a thing your body does. My body had done it for twenty years. My body had stood at his shoulder at his challenge and at his father's grave and at every hard thing since. My body wanted to say yes.

But my wolf was gone, and my body was not so sure anymore.

"I'll bring her," I said.

He smiled at me and it was the old smile, and he said, "Good man," and I went out of the study into the corridor, and there was Nina coming up the back stair with a bundle of dried herbs in her arms and her dark hair coming down, and she stopped when she saw me.

"Your arm," she said.

"It's the same as it was."

"It won't be." She looked past me at the study door, and then at me, and her grey eyes were flat and steady. "I have been in the old books since you left me. There is a thing I did not tell you this afternoon because I did not understand it. A wolf who takes silver and lives, the books say the wolf can come back if the silver is drawn out. But it has to be drawn out by a mate."

I stood in the corridor with my arm aching and my mouth dry.

"You are not my mate, Nina. You told me so in the rain two winters ago."

"I know what I told you." Her voice was low. "I am telling you now what the books say. If the bond you have with the schoolteacher is real, then she is the only one who can draw it out, and if you do not let her, the silver will go on burning through you until there is nothing left of the man or the wolf. I do not know how long it takes. The books are not kind about the ending."

She went past me down the corridor with her bundle of herbs, and I stood at the top of the stair with the noise of the kitchen coming up through the floor and the pack going about its evening, and down the hill in the schoolhouse the lamp would be lit by now, and the woman with the champagne hair and the questions would be marking a child's letters with a stub of pencil, and the rope that ran between us was pulling, pulling, and I could not feel the other end of it.

The next morning I would take her to the chapel and Marcus would make her swear an oath, and I did not know yet what my Alpha was going to do with her, and neither did she. What I knew was what the old woman had said in the kitchen, and what the healer had said in the corridor, and what I had seen with my own eyes on the shore. It was not much. It was enough to make me stand at the top of that stair for a long time with my hand on the rail before I went down and sat with my pack and ate my supper and said nothing at all.