Chapter 2 Blood on the Heather

The bothy sat halfway down the south slope, half sunk into the hillside. Finn pushed the door open with his shoulder, and the smell that came out was sheep and wet ash and a hundred years of smoke soaked into the walls.

"Inside," he said. "Quickly."

I ducked through the low doorway after him. There was one room, a hearth at the far end with a few cold turfs beside it, a wooden bench along the wall, and a pile of old straw in the corner. Finn laid Ronan down on the straw and stepped back, and I saw him look at his own hands, at the blood drying there that was not his.

"Whose blood is that?" he asked.

"Mine, mostly. Some of it is his." I knelt and pulled Ronan's shirt up. The wound along his ribs had stopped bleeding, but the edges were angry and dark, and when I pressed the skin around it he did not stir.

Finn crouched on the other side of him. "How long has he been like this?"

"Two days. He took a blade meant for me." I said it flatly, because there was no way to say it that did not make me want to break something. "He is a late bloomer. His first shift should have come a year ago. Every day it does not come, he gets weaker."

"He needs a healer."

"He needs to not be found by enforcers." I looked up at him. "You said you would bring bread. Bring it, and then leave us alone until morning."

Finn did not move. He was watching me with those gold-brown eyes, and in the dim light of the bothy his face was harder to read than it had been on the ridge. He was young, I realized. Younger than I had first thought, though not by much.

"You are bleeding too," he said. "Your arm."

"It will close."

"That is not the same as healing clean." He stood and crossed to the door. "I will bring bread, and water, and something for the wound. Do not go anywhere."

"Where would I go?"

He paused in the doorway, one hand on the frame. "I do not know. That is what worries me."

Then the door closed, and I was alone with the smell of old smoke and my brother's shallow breathing.

I sat back against the wall and let my head fall against the stone. My wolf was still pacing, still pulling toward the door he had gone out of. I told her to be quiet. She did not listen.

He came back before the moon had moved a hand's width. The door opened and he stepped in with a cloth bag over one shoulder and a clay jug in his other hand, and he set them both down on the bench without a word.

"Bread, cheese, water. There is a salve in the bag. Maeve makes it, the pack healer. It will help the boy's ribs." He straightened. "I will take the first watch outside. If anyone comes up the slope, I will hear them."

"You are not going to ask me anything else tonight?"

"No." He said it simply. "I have had enough of tonight."

He went out, and the door clicked shut, and I heard his footsteps move away and then stop.

I fed Ronan what I could get into him, which was not much, and put the salve on his ribs, and then I ate a piece of bread standing at the bench because I could not remember the last time I had eaten anything that had not been stolen. It tasted of salt and woodsmoke.

When I was done I went to the door and opened it.

Finn was sitting on a flat stone a few paces from the bothy, his back to me, his shape dark against the pale line of the loch below. He did not turn around.

"You should be resting," he said.

"I have rested enough. Move over."

He turned his head at that, and I saw the surprise on his face before he masked it. Then he shifted along the stone, and I sat down beside him, close enough that the heat of his shoulder reached me through my torn sleeve.

For a while neither of us said anything. The moon was high, silver and cold, and the heather around us had gone the colour of old iron. Somewhere down in the glen a bird called once and went quiet.

"How did you come by that wound?" Finn asked at last.

"Which one?"

"The one on your arm that you are hiding from me."

I looked down at my sleeve, at the dark patch spreading through it. I had forgotten I was bleeding. That was the trouble with running for three years. You learned to ignore your own body when it complained.

"A knife. Not silver, or I would not be sitting here." I flexed the arm and felt the pull of it. "Three men found us crossing the low road two nights ago. They were not enforcers. They were just men who thought a rogue girl and a sick boy would make easy sport."

"And what happened to the three men?"

"Two of them ran." I looked out at the loch. "The third one is on the low road still. He will not be getting up."

Finn was quiet for a long moment. "You killed him."

"He gave me no other choice. I am not sorry." I turned to look at him. "If that changes what you think of me, then it changes it. I would rather you know now than find out later and decide I lied to you."

The moonlight caught his eyes and made them bright. His pale golden hair had fallen forward over his brow, and he pushed it back with one hand.

"It does not change what I think of you," he said. "It changes what I think of the road you have been walking."

I did not know what to do with that. It was the first kind thing anyone had said to me in three years that did not come with a price attached, and I found I could not look at him anymore, so I looked at the loch instead.

"You should go back to your pack house," I said. "If your father finds you gone, there will be questions."

"There are already questions. My father will ask them in the morning whether I am there or not." He paused. "What is your brother's name?"

"Ronan."

"Ronan." He said it the way he had said mine, carefully. "And your pack. Ashfall. I have heard the name before, in the Council's reports. Three years ago there was a fire."

The word hit me somewhere under the ribs. I kept my face still. I had learned to keep my face still.

"There was a fire," I agreed.

"Elara." He turned toward me on the stone, and his knee brushed mine, and neither of us moved away. "I am going to ask you something, and I want you to think before you answer. Why is an enforcer of the Council of Alphas hunting you? Not a wolf who lost her pack. Not a rogue who crossed a border. You. By name. For three years."

The wind came up off the loch and pulled at my hair, and my wolf pushed forward hard, wanting to tell him. Wanting, for the first time in three years, to put the weight down.

I opened my mouth. And then I heard it.

A howl rose from the ridge above us, long and low and carrying. Then a second howl answered it, and a third, and the sound moved along the ridge line like a wave breaking.

Finn was on his feet before I was. His hand went to the knife at his belt, and his face in the moonlight had gone completely still.

"That is not my pack," he said quietly. "Those are not Cairn wolves."

I stood up beside him and turned toward the ridge. The howls were closer now. Somewhere on the dark slope above the cairn stones, shapes were moving through the heather.

"Get inside," Finn said. "Get inside and do not open that door."

"Finn."

"Elara, please."

But I had already seen what he had not. The lead shape on the ridge was silver grey and ran with a long, unhurried stride, and I knew that stride. I had been running from it for three years.

"He is here," I said. "Torin is here."