Chapter 3 The Girl in the Trap

The trap was silver, and it had been waiting in the mud a long time. I knew before I saw it. Silver has a smell when it is working - hot, sweet, wrong, like a coin held in a fire. The girl's screaming had stopped while we were still crashing down the slope, and the silence was worse. Screaming means fighting. Silence means a wolf has started doing the maths. She was sixteen, maybe. Small. One leg folded under her at an angle legs do not fold, the trap's jaws closed above her ankle, and the skin around the silver was already blackening in a ring, neat as a brand. Every few seconds her whole body tried to shift - instinct, a drowning thing grabbing for air - and every time, the silver pushed it back down and she made a sound through her teeth that I will hear for the rest of my life. She saw us and went absolutely still. Not relief. Prey stillness. A half-shifted boy with blood on him and a girl in a torn white dress, coming out of the dark at a run - in the Borderlands, nobody runs toward a trap unless they set it. "Don't," she said. Very clear. She had clearly decided to spend the last of her voice on this. "Please. Don't make it slow." In her right hand, white-knuckled, was a little border knife, the kind girls carry for gutting fish. The blade was snapped off halfway. There was blood on what was left of it that was not from the trap - and on the skin above the trap's jaws, in a ring of shallow, sawing cuts, none of them deep enough, all of them started. She had been working her way through her own leg. An hour of it, maybe more, alone in the rain, an inch at a time - and she had stopped, in the end, not because she could not stand it. Because she had heard the hounds, and decided she would rather we found her defiant than found her in pieces. I put that together in one look, the way you do. She watched me put it together, and her chin came up, and even with a broken knife and a leg in a silver trap she dared me to pity her for it. "We're not-" Finn started. "My name is Elara," I said, and went down on my knees in the mud beside her, because people believe you faster at their level. "This is Finn. We're not hunters. We're the hunted. That noise behind us is for me." Her eyes went to my throat. To the blood coming through Finn's jacket. To my side, where the rain was finding its way in and out of me. Understanding arrived, and with it the thing I least expected: she tried to wave us off. Weakly. Furiously. "Then go," she hissed. "Go, you idiots, they'll-" "What's your name?" "Mira, and I'm not worth-" "Stop." I took the broken knife out of her hand - she fought me for it for one second, pure reflex, then let go - and I got my fingers around the trap. Silver does not burn a direwolf the way fire burns. It burns the way a lie burns when it is finally said out loud - all at once, everywhere, with a smell. The jaws were sprung for a grown rogue and the release bar was rusted half through, and the chain ran to an iron stake driven deep. I pulled. The trap opened perhaps the width of a fingernail and my hands began to smoke, quietly, in the rain. Mira was staring at my hands. "You're burning." "Yes." "For a wolfless girl in a trap you could walk away from- why-" "Because three hours ago," I said, through my teeth, pulling, "two hundred people watched a man call me worthless in a stone circle, and not one of them got up. Not one, Mira. I counted later. I will spend the rest of my life counting." The trap moved. Another fingernail. My shoulder - the one Garrick had ground to bone - lit up white. "Wolfless is a thing you are. Worthless is a thing they say. I am done letting them do the arithmetic." The hounds arrived. They came out of the treeline in a line, low and silent now, which was worse than baying, and behind them three men with the storm breaking around their shoulders. Crossbows down. Not hurried. Men who have run their quarry to ground walk like that, like the ending is a chore they have already been paid for. The one in front I knew. Bram, captain of Silvercrest's hunt, who had taught the pack's pups to track when I was nine years old. He had given me a wooden practice knife once and told me my grip was patient. He looked at me. At the trap. At my smoking hands inside it. Something moved across his face that might have been the ghost of the man who taught pups. Then Elder Rowan's money did its work, and the ghost went out. "Elara Voss," he said. "Rabid in exile. Attacked the hunt. Died resisting. That's written already - I only have to make the ground agree with it." His eyes moved to Mira, and to Finn, and the arithmetic there was even colder. "Rogues took the border girl. Tragic. The rain will wash the rest." "You set the traps on a public road," Finn said. His voice shook. His whole body shook. "The council doesn't know. You lied to your own-" "Stay." Bram did not shout it. Alphas and the men they lend their authority to never need to shout it. The Command rolled down the road like a gate coming down, and Finn folded - knees, spine, head, the whole of him hammered flat by a word. Beside me Mira made a small, suffocated noise and locked up too, caught by the edge of it, a wolfless girl commanded by a man who was not even her Alpha, because out here a Command does not ask for paperwork. It just looks for a wolf trained to obey. It hit me and went past me, like weather going past a mountain. I stood up slowly, with the trap still in my burning hands, and I watched Bram understand - really understand, maybe the first person alive to do it - what had happened in that stone circle when Kael said kneel and one girl stayed standing. "What are you?" he said. "Finding out," I said. "Faster than you'd like. Let the girl go, Bram. Walk back up that hill and tell Rowan the rain took my scent. Tell him I'm dead in a ditch. You were kind to me once. I keep accounts of that too." "And them?" He set his boot on the trap chain and leaned his weight on it, almost gently. An inch of chain. That was all. An inch was enough. The jaws shifted inside Mira's leg and the scream came out of her through a jaw the Command had locked - a sound with its edges torn off. Finn, folded flat on the road, made a noise like an animal in a sack. Bram watched my face while he did it, the way a merchant watches a scale. "There it is," he said quietly. "You'd have run from a bolt aimed at you. I know your grip, girl. Patient. You always could outwait pain - your own." He leaned a fraction more, and then, mercifully or cruelly, I will never know which, he stopped. "Not hers, though. Hers, you'll pay to end. So pay attention." The crossbow came up - not at me. At Mira. At the small, trapped, wolfless girl who could not run, could not shift, could not even fall down without permission from his word still sitting on her chest. "Rabid wolves don't negotiate, Elara. Drop the trap. Step away from the road. Or she stops being a witness first, and then she's just the reason you should have run." Mira looked at me. She could not speak - the Command had her jaw. But her eyes said it plainly, in the oldest language there is: go, go, leave me, it's just me. Two hundred people had said it to me with their silence. I was not saying it back. "Here's the thing about that trap, Bram," I said, and pulled - with everything, with the shoulder, with the torn ribs, with hands that had stopped hurting in the way that means damage - "Silvercrest builds them well." The jaws sprang wide with a crack like a breaking bone. Silver keeps accounts too. When I let go of the trap my hands were not hands - they were red, blistered ruin, black lines already crawling out of the burns and up my wrists like ink finding cracks, and they had started to shake with a fine, fast tremor that had nothing to do with fear. Silver-poisoning. I had seen a Silvercrest hunter die of less, over two days, screaming at the end for water that was not there. I set that thought aside with the others. It could queue. Mira screamed - free, pain, all of it at once - and in the same breath the Command on the road snapped the other way, because a boy who had been leashed for a year had just watched a girl open a silver trap with her bare hands for a stranger, and Finn chose. That is the only word for it. He chose. The second hunter fired first. The bolt took Finn in the shoulder as the Command broke off him - I saw it punch through and keep going, saw the spray of it in the rain - and Finn shifted through it. That is the part I will tell anyone who ever calls that boy weak. He shifted through a silver-tipped bolt with the wound still open, fast and clean and furious, the first true shift of his life with no leash on it - seventeen years old and all of it rage - and he hit Bram's crossbow arm a heartbeat before it fired. Bram's bolt went up into the storm. The hounds surged. The second hunter got his bow up and I put the trap chain - stake, rust, mud and all, ripped out of the ground by the same pull that freed her - around his shot without aiming, the way a drowning thing throws a rope, and it took him off his feet into the ditch. Then there was no plan. There was rain and teeth and my wolf coming up through my ruined ribs whether my body could afford her or not, because Mira was on the ground and the world had shown her exactly once that somebody comes back, and I was not going to let that be a lie she died believing. I do not remember the riverbank. Finn says my wolf carried Mira the last stretch in her jaws, by the coat, gentle as a mother cat, which I do not believe and he swears to. I remember the river itself - black, swollen, fast enough to kill us the honest way. Hounds will not cross running water after a scent. Everybody raised in Silvercrest knows it. Bram had taught me that too, when I was nine. We went in. The cold closed over my cuts like a hand pressing down, and for whole seconds it was almost peace. Then the current took my ruined shoulder, turned me, and put the river in my mouth. I went under with my hands clawed useless from the silver and my ribs full of knives, and the black water closed over my head, and some honest part of me - the part that had been running and bleeding and burning for hours - simply agreed to it. Down was rest. Down was nobody needing anything. Something caught my hair. Caught it and held, with a strength that should not have existed in a starved sixteen-year-old with a shattered ankle, and dragged my face back into the air a mouthful at a time, screaming my name the whole way in a voice with no Command on it, no permission asked or given. Mira. In the water. On a leg a silver trap had tried to take off her, holding a direwolf's head above a flood river by the hair, because nobody had told her she was too wolfless to save anybody. Then the far bank, and mud, and Finn human again, hauling us both out by main force with a hole through his shoulder, all of us shaking apart, alive, alive - and my wolf let go of me all at once, the way a cliff lets go of a stone. I came back to myself lying in wet grass with a wolfless girl holding my face in both hands, hard, the way you hold something you are refusing to let the world have. "You came," Mira said. She was crying, furious about it. "You were dying and you came. Nobody comes for girls like me." "Then girls like you," I said, very quietly, because the dark was coming down fast now and I wanted it on the record before it arrived, "will have to start coming for each other." The dark arrived.