Chapter 2 She Knew My Name

I did not sleep well.

The room at the end of the corridor had a narrow bed, a stove that smoked when I opened the damper, and a window that looked east into nothing but snow and the dark. I lay on my back with my boots off and my coat still on and listened to the wind work at the roof. Every so often the stove ticked and the sound went through me like a footstep.

Three weeks. She had found my scent on the east ridge three weeks ago, and she had not written to the pack house, and she had not written to the Council, and she had sat in her kitchen with her tea and her letters and waited to see which one of them would walk through her door.

That was either patience or a trap. I had spent three years learning the difference and I still could not tell them apart in the dark.

I got up before the light did. The corridor was cold enough that my breath hung in front of me, and the kitchen lamp was already lit, and Elsie was at the table with a pencil in her hand and a sheet of graph paper in front of her. She had not heard me come in. Her coat was over the back of her chair and she was in a jumper the color of wet moss with the sleeves pushed up, and there was a smudge of pencil lead on the side of her hand.

"You're up," she said, without looking round. "Porridge in the pot. It's not good, but it's hot."

I helped myself. The porridge was lumpy and it needed salt and I ate it standing at the counter because the chair across from her felt like a decision. She kept working. Her pencil moved in small tight strokes and every so often she stopped and looked at the barometer on the wall and wrote something down.

"You do that every hour?"

"Every hour on the hour. Temperature, pressure, wind direction, wind speed, cloud cover, visibility. Then I radio it down to the met office in Aberdeen and they pretend to be interested." She turned the page. "The barometer's the one that matters. Pressure tells you what the sky is going to do before the sky knows itself."

"And three weeks ago it started lying."

She put the pencil down. "Sit."

I sat. She folded her hands on the graph paper and looked at me, and in the grey morning light her eyes were the color of the inside of a mussel shell, and the freckles across her nose were darker than they had been at night. She had a small chip in one of her front teeth that I had not noticed before. I noticed it now and I did not want to be noticing it.

"You want to know why I didn't report your scent," she said. "I'll tell you, and then I'll ask you something, and you'll answer it honestly or you'll take your dead man and your keys and your bad temper back down the mountain."

"I'm listening."

"Three years ago I was in Aberdeen for a conference. Storm tracking, mostly. On the second night a wolf came to the back door of the hotel and asked me to come out to the alley, and when I did he told me that the Cairngorm pack had exiled its best enforcer and that the enforcer would be going north, and that if a woman with red hair ever found his trail in the snow she should let it lie." She picked up her pencil and turned it end over end. "He gave me a description. Platinum hair. Brown eyes. A jaw like a doorstop. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about and I shut the door."

"Who was he?"

"An old wolf with grey hair and a tired voice who smelled of the pack house. I didn't ask his name. I've been kicking myself about that for three years, because it might have saved me a lot of trouble."

Duncan. Duncan had gone to Aberdeen and found a stranger and told her to leave my trail alone, and she had shut the door in his face and then spent three years with my description folded up in the back of her mind.

"Why are you telling me this now?"

"Because yesterday you walked in with my dead man and I recognized you before you took your hood down, and I have been sitting on that for a night, and it's gone sour on me." She set the pencil down flat. "Now my question. On the night you were exiled, what did you actually do?"

The stove ticked. I looked at the chip in my mug and I turned it away from me, and she saw me do it again, and I hated that she saw it.

"I failed a challenge," I said. "There was a wolf from the coast pack who came to the border and called out our Beta. The Beta was old. I stepped in front of him. I lost."

"You lost."

"I lost. Broke my shoulder in two places and my wolf went quiet for a month. Duncan called it a failure of judgment and sent me north with a pack's worth of shame on my back, and that's the whole of it."

"That's the version you tell."

"It's the version that's true."

She looked at me for a while. Then she got up and went to the window and stood with her arms folded, looking out at the snow.

"The wolf who came to my door in Aberdeen," she said, "he told me something else. He said if the enforcer ever came back to the mountain, I should watch him for a week before I trusted him. Not because he was a traitor. Because he had a habit of carrying other people's secrets without knowing he was carrying them." She turned round. "So I'm watching. Don't take it personally."

"I take everything personally."

"That's going to be a problem."

She said it without heat, and then she went to the stove and poured herself more tea, and the conversation moved on as if she had not just put a knife in the middle of the table. I sat there with my porridge going cold and my wolf pacing behind my ribs, and I could not decide whether I wanted to walk out into the snow or ask her to keep talking.

She talked. She talked all morning, in fact, because the road to the village was closed and the radio was down to one channel and there was nothing else to do. She showed me the instrument shelter, a white box on legs out behind the station, and the rain gauge and the anemometer and the mast, and she explained how each one worked in a flat reciting voice that made it clear she had explained it a hundred times and expected me to be the hundred and first fool who got it wrong.

I got it wrong. She corrected me. I got it wrong again and she corrected me again, and the third time she corrected me she was almost smiling, and I caught myself watching her mouth and had to look away.

Around noon the wind dropped and the snow eased and we went out to check the fence. She walked fast for someone with short legs and she did not look back to see if I was keeping up.

"Tell me about Finn," I said.

"Mechanic. Twenty seven. Good with engines, better with excuses. He came up here two years ago with a reference from a garage in Inverness that I later found out had burned down." She kicked a drift out of the way of a fence post. "He's quick and he's funny and he's never once told me a lie I couldn't see through, which is either honesty or laziness. I haven't decided."

"And he's a wolf."

"He's a wolf. No rank. No pack. He doesn't talk about it and I don't ask." She stopped at the broken fence and looked at it. "He'll be back tomorrow. Be careful what you say in front of him. Not because I think he's your traitor. Because he gossips like a widow."

We fixed the fence with wire and a hammer and my hands went numb twice. She worked beside me and said nothing and her shoulder brushed mine once when the wind shifted, and the touch went up my arm like a struck match and I stepped away so fast I nearly went into the drift.

She noticed. She did not say anything. She just picked up the hammer and went on working.

That night she made stew and I ate two bowls of it and she poured us each a finger of whisky from a bottle with a cracked label, and we sat in the kitchen with the stove roaring and the barometer clicking and the wind down to a low mutter.

"Ask me," she said.

"Ask you what?"

"The thing you've been chewing on all day. You've got a face like a man with a stone in his boot."

I turned my glass on the table. "Last night you said a wolf doesn't learn another wolf's scent from a letter. And you said you found my scent on the east ridge three weeks ago. But I haven't been on the east ridge in three years. So either someone carried my scent up there, or you're lying about when you found it."

She did not flinch. She drank her whisky and set the glass down and looked at me across the table.

"Both," she said. "I found a scent on the east ridge three weeks ago that I thought was yours. I was wrong. It wasn't yours. It was close enough to make me write to the pack house and ask questions, and the answers came back and one of them was your name." She tapped the table once with her finger. "Which means there's a wolf out there who smells like you, Callum. And I would very much like to know who he is."

The barometer on the wall clicked. I looked at it out of habit now, the way you look at a clock in a station, and the black needle had moved. It had moved a long way.

"Elsie."

"What."

"Your needle's off."

She turned in her chair. She looked at the barometer for three full seconds, and then she stood up so fast the chair went over backwards and she was at the wall with her hands flat on either side of the brass face, and her breath had gone shallow.

"That's not possible," she said. "That's a forty point drop. In an hour. In still air."

The needle moved again. It moved the wrong way. There was no wind outside, and the barometer was climbing, and it was climbing fast, and somewhere below us in the dark the mountain gave a long low groan like a door opening in a cellar.

Then the radio in the corner, dead all day, crackled once and spoke in a voice I knew.