Chapter 5 Chapter 5

Isolde POV

I woke to the smell of tallow and wet wool, and for a moment I thought I was still at Stillwater.

Then I opened my eyes. The ceiling was wrong. It was made of old planks with gaps between them, and there was a lamp hung from a nail, and a warm weight of blankets over me that smelled of smoke and horse. I was in a loft. Below me, someone was talking quietly, and someone else was feeding a fire.

I tried to sit up and my body refused.

"Don't," said a voice. "You'll only open the bruises."

An old woman sat on a stool beside the bed. She was bony and gray-haired and wore a man's coat over a patched dress. Her hands were large for her size and stained brown at the fingertips, the way an herbalist's are. She was looking at me the way I look at a column of figures that does not add up.

"Marga," she said, and tapped her chest. "The camp's healer, such as it has. You are at Cinder Mill. You went through the Brevna ice last night. You were dead for the better part of a minute. Then you were not."

"The ledger," I said. My voice was a rasp.

"On the stool. Dry. Mostly." She nodded to it. The ledger was open to a page near the end, propped against a candlestick so the heat would reach it. "You held it so hard we had to cut your coat. Nobody read it. I checked."

I breathed out. It hurt.

"I'll tell you what I found," Marga said, "because it will be worse if you hear it from someone else. When we stripped you to warm you, I saw your back."

I did not move.

"You have silver in your spine," she said. "Seven rings, from the neck to the base. They are tattooed into the skin in a silver ink, very fine work, the kind done on infants. You were not born with them. Someone put them there, and someone kept them fresh. Your skin has a bitter smell I have not smelled in thirty years. Stillroot. It is in your breath and your sweat. You have been drinking it for most of your life."

"It is for the nerves," I said. It sounded stupid even as I said it.

"Girl. Stillroot is for putting down a wolf."

The words landed, and I did not understand them. I turned them over once and they would not fit.

"Veiled daughters are born without," I said. "It is what the house teaches. We carry no wolf. We are kept because there is nothing in us to lose."

"That is a lie. I'm sorry." She said it plainly, with no softness. "There is no such thing as a wolfless daughter of a strong line. There are only girls whose wolves have been put to sleep. The rings do it, and the tea keeps the rings working. Without both, you would have shifted at seventeen, eighteen."

I said nothing. I looked at the ledger.

Stillroot, up every quarter. Silver, delivered under the physician's name. Thirty-one daughters, and then nineteen.

I had written the numbers down myself. I had known what they were. I had known it the way you know a tooth is loose, by not touching it.

"They did not leave," I said. "The ones who went. They were not transferred."

"I don't know what you mean."

"There were thirty-one of us." I could hear how flat I sounded. "Seven years ago. There are nineteen now."

Marga's face did not change. But after a moment she put her hand over mine, and it was warm, and I let her.

"I'm going to tell you what happens next," she said. "Your body has had stillroot every night. Now it has not. You skipped it last night, and tonight, and you will not have it again. In a few hours, you will be sick. Fever, sickness, bad dreams. It can go on for nine days, and it will be worse before it improves. Your wolf is going to wake up, and she has been asleep for twenty-four years, so she will not wake gently."

"I have a wolf," I said. It was the first time I had said it aloud. I waited for it to sound like a joke. It did not.

"You have a wolf," Marga said.

---

I insisted on going downstairs.

Marga did not approve. But she wrapped me in a blanket and let me lean on her arm, and I took the steps one at a time, and the room at the bottom was large and warm and full of faces.

I counted them. It is a habit. Fifteen, scattered along the walls, men and women, all armed in some way. Most of them were looking at me with the flat caution of people who have been hurt before. At the long table, a stout woman with a tally board stood with her arms crossed. Dorian was on a bench, still damp, with his hands around a cup. Emeric was by the door. He did not look at me, and I was sure he knew exactly where I was.

And by the fire, with his back to me, a tall man was standing very still.

He turned. He had dark hair and a hard jaw, a scar down one side of it, and eyes the gray of a winter lake. He looked at me for exactly as long as it takes to read a name on a door. Then he looked away.

"This is Rhys Calder," Marga said, low. "He leads this camp."

The Calder line. I knew it. Every veiled daughter knew the name. They had been taught it in the same lessons as the names of poisons. A burned house, a dead family. They had said none of it was left.

"You are from Thorne's house," Rhys said.

"Stillwater. It is not his house, but it is his property."

"You were betrothed to him."

"Until Oath Night. He ended it. He sold me to Ferrant Gale for a levy."

"I heard." His voice gave away nothing. "Then you ran, and you came across my river, and my men pulled you out of it. That is two debts you owe this camp."

"I know."

"You will rest here tonight. Marga will see to you. Tomorrow, or the day after, when you can walk, you will go back across the ice."

"To Gale?"

"To wherever you came from."

"That is Gale," I said.

The room had gone quiet. Rhys took a half step toward me, and then stopped, and it was as if I had seen a man walk into the heat of a forge. His jaw moved. His hand came up and stopped. He drew a breath through his teeth.

"You are a risk," he said, a bit hoarsely. "You come from the house that burned my father. You will be missed. When you are, they will hunt for you, and the first place they will look is across this river. I cannot have it."

"I understand," I said.

"Then you will not argue."

"I would like to make an offer first."

Hesper, the stout woman, made a small sound. Rhys did not move.

I let go of Marga's arm. It took more effort than I wanted to show.

"I kept the accounts at Stillwater for seven years," I said. "Every order that went through that house passed my desk. Grain, silver, stillroot, linen, the names of the carters and the roads they took. I have a copy of all of it, in my own hand, in a ledger upstairs. It is dry. It is the only thing I took."

"And what is that to me?" Rhys said.

"Alaric Thorne feeds his hunters and his household from the same warehouses. I know the dates and the quantities and the routes. I know when his stores are thin and which roads the carts use. I can tell you where he is weak." I turned to Hesper. "You run the stores here. You know what it is worth to see another man's books."

Hesper's arms came uncrossed. She looked at Rhys, and then at me. It was a small movement, but I saw it.

"It is not nothing," she said.

"It is nothing if it brings his hunters here," Rhys said.

"It will not. They do not know where I went. I did not tell anyone, and I did not leave a trail on the road." It was not entirely true, but it was close. "I have one request, and it is the only one. Do not hand me to anyone. Not to Alaric. Not to Gale. If you want me gone, I will go on my own feet, and I will not look back. But I will not be given."

It was a plain sentence. It did not feel plain in my mouth.

For a long moment, no one spoke.

"She can't be moved," Marga said. "Not for a week. Not for nine days. She's coming off stillroot, and if you put her on the road, she will die of fever in a ditch. I won't have it."

"Marga—"

"I won't have it, Rhys."

The room waited. Rhys looked at the fire, and then at Marga, and then, for one second, at me. Something in his face closed like a door.

"Until she is well," he said. "Then we decide."

It was not a promise. I had heard enough of those to know the difference. But it was not no.

"She stays," Dorian said. He sounded hoarse. "I'll take the first watch."

"I'll take the second," Emeric said. It was the first time I had heard his voice. It was low and flat, and it made the hair rise on my arms.

Rhys turned and walked out. The door banged. The cold came in and went out again.

---

Marga took me back upstairs. I lay in the bed and listened to the camp settle. Someone laughed below. A dog scratched at the floor. I could hear Dorian's heartbeat, steady, from where he sat at the foot of the stair.

I could hear it. I was sure of that. Without trying, without leaning in, I could tell which of the three of them was awake.

My head ached. My skin felt too tight, and there was a hot, dry feeling beginning behind my eyes. The fever, I thought, and I let it come.

Something knocked, very faintly, inside my chest. It was not my heart. It was lower, and slower, and it answered when I held my breath.

I put my hand over my ribs.

For twenty-four years, everyone I had ever known had looked at me and told me there was nothing there. The matron. The physician. The women who braided my hair for the oath. Alaric. I had believed them, because I had no reason not to.

I had a wolf.

And somewhere in a ledger, in my own handwriting, were the names of everyone else who had been told the same thing.