Chapter 2 For Your Own Good

They came for my things before the torches in the clearing had burned out.

I was still in the doorway of my father’s house, fighting for breath, when four of Logan’s guards shouldered past me and began pulling open drawers. One tipped my writing desk onto its side so that ink bottles rolled across the floorboards. Another stuffed my winter cloak into a sack as if he were packing for a corpse.

“That’s my father’s room,” I said. “You can’t go in there.”

Nobody stopped.

I followed the youngest guard down the narrow hall. My father’s room still smelled of pipe smoke and the cedar oil he rubbed into his bad leg every night. His boots still stood by the bed. His spectacles still lay folded on the sill, waiting for a man who would never come home to put them on. The guard flung open the chest at the foot of the bed and lifted out the blue sash of the Silverwolf Beta, the one my father had worn for thirty years and kept pressed in tissue paper like something holy.

“Put that down.”

He laughed. “Murderers don’t get to keep their honours. This goes back to the—”

I didn’t decide to move. One moment I was in the doorway, and the next I had both hands fisted in the sash and was pulling so hard that he stumbled. He was half a head taller than me and twice as strong, but I was heavy, and I did not let go.

“You can take my clothes,” I said, low and shaking. “You can take my books and my bed and every pin in this house. You are not taking this.”

“Let her have it.”

Captain Harlan filled the doorway, grey-bearded and tired-eyed. He had been one of my father’s warriors once. He had eaten at our table more times than I could count. Now he would not look at me.

The guard let go. Harlan drew a folded paper from his coat, sealed with silver wax. The writing was Logan’s, sharp and slanting, and it said almost nothing at all.

By order of the Alpha heir, Fiona Moonwhisper is assigned to the Thornwatch outpost on the northern border, effective at dawn, until further notice.

No reason. No charge. Not one word meant for me.

“Thornwatch? That’s three days’ ride from anywhere. There’s nothing there but a watchtower and snow.”

“I don’t know why, Miss Moonwhisper.”

“Then I’ll ask him myself.”

I climbed to the Great Hall with my father’s sash knotted round my waist to hold my ruined dress together, and by the time I reached the gate, my lungs burned and black spots swam before my eyes. The two guards watched me catch my breath and did nothing to hide their contempt.

“The heir isn’t receiving anyone.”

“He’ll receive me. I’m his—” The word died in my mouth. I was nothing to him now. “I’m the Steward of Stores.”

“Not tonight, you’re not.”

Above them, a single lamp burned in the window of the Alpha’s study. A shadow crossed it, and my foolish heart knew it before my eyes did. I had loved Logan Silverwolf in secret since I was nine years old, and I had never told a living soul, not even Calista. For a long moment the shadow stood still behind the glass, and I let myself believe he would open the window, or come down the stairs and walk me home the way he used to after his mother’s Sunday teas, carrying my basket and stealing my plum tarts.

Then the curtain fell closed.

I did not go home to the wreckage. I went down to the square, climbed the thirty-two stone steps to the Beta office, and lit the lamp on my desk.

For three weeks, ever since the Alpha died, I had sat here until two in the morning writing Logan’s council briefs and grain reports, and left them unsigned on his desk so the pack would not starve while he grieved. He thought the clerks wrote them. Nobody had asked. Silverwolf had six hundred mouths to feed and a thin harvest behind it, and nobody else would even know where to begin.

So I sat down in my ruined dress and I worked. The grain report. A ration schedule for the next four months. The order in which the root cellars should be opened, the river-town merchants who would give fair prices on salt pork, and the names of three families who would need help through the lean months. When the window paled, I carried the bundle up the hill and handed it to the guard.

“For the heir’s desk.”

“From who?”

It would have been so easy, tonight of all nights, to finally put my name on something.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

The supply wagon was waiting at the north gate at dawn, my trunk already loaded. As it creaked past the clearing, I twisted round to find the old oak and the patch of raked earth beneath it where my father lay. I had not been allowed to mark his grave. I touched the sash at my waist and promised him that one day I would come back and do it myself. On the hill, the shutters of the Luna’s window swung quietly closed.

“Fi! Fi, wait!”

Calista came running down the road with her braid half undone and her cheeks wet with tears, a wicker basket on her arm. Eighteen months ago she had come from the capital for a short visit to her mother’s old pack and simply never left. She had sat with me in the Beta office every night since, eating honey cakes while I balanced the ledgers. When they took my father, she was the only wolf in Silverwolf who came to my door. Now she was the only one who had run down a frozen road at dawn to see me go.

“I only just heard,” she gasped, clinging to the side of the wagon. “I thought they’d cast you out, Fi. I thought I’d never see you again.”

“Thornwatch,” I said. “He’s sending me to Thornwatch.”

“Thornwatch.” She said it slowly, as if committing it to memory. Then she pushed the basket into my arms: bottles of the sparkling elderflower drink she always brought me, and two dozen honey cakes still warm beneath a linen cloth. “You’ll need something sweet to keep your spirits up. I made them myself this morning.”

Inside me, so faintly that I almost imagined it, my wolf stirred for the first time since the moonstone and flinched away from the basket.

I was too tired to wonder why. I set it down and reached for her, and she hugged me hard, her cheek wet against mine. She smelled of honey and crushed mint, the way she always did.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” she whispered into my ear. “I’m a tracker, remember? Wherever they send you, I’ll always find you.”