Chapter 4 The Road North

The gate shut behind me like a mouth.

I stood upon the north road, in bare feet, the stones cold under my feet, and heard it close, the great bar dropping into iron arms on the other side. Adrian didn't call again. The bell had stopped. The road was pale before me, between the wet fields, and the Emberfall horses stamped and blew, and four men in plain dark coats stood watching me as you watch a fire you have been sent to carry home in a bucket.

Kellan went through the wicket gate last, followed by his Beta, and the wicket was closed behind Kellan. He glanced at my feet. He studied my wrist, and the purple had extended from the five finger marks into one dark flower. He didn't touch me. It was a thing that I noticed right away, a thing that my whole body noticed, after a morning of hands that grabbed.

There are extra boots in the packs," he said. "And a mare; she is slow and she has no opinions. Will you ride?"

"Yes," I said. "Thank you."

The first time in 2 days that someone asked me a question and waited for my reply. It was painful in my throat.

The Beta would come down and catch the mare. He was red haired, tall, freckled like a boy, built like a wall, and he held the reins out to me with a small nod, not pity. He said, "Peter Nolan. On this road, if you get tired, you let us know, I carry the left side of the alpha, "Bad luck" we do not drop wardens in ditches on this road.

"Clara," I said. I shall not be dropped, I will try not to be dropped.

Gravely, "Try is all we ask," he said, and one of the guards snorted, and I felt something in my face move that was almost, almost a smile.

Boots were too large. I put the toes in a little piece of dead bread cloth and rode north and Tara's cloak was wrapped around me tightly, and I would not be parted from my father's spoons and the iron token in a knot of cloth at my waist again. The mare was slow. She didn't have a word to say. She hauled up my wide body without complaint to the first hill and blessed me on the way.

Kellan was sitting next to me and remained silent for a long time. First towers, then roofs, then only the tower above the trees, and then Silvercrest was gone behind us, falling into its valley, and when it was gone I realized that I had been breathing since I reached the gate.

He can't follow, Kellan said without turning his head toward me. Thirty days, the law is with us, his father knows it whatever the son feels.

“On the thirty first day?” I asked.

On the thirty first day, you'll be a warden of Emberfall in your name," he said. “And your name is more difficult to steal than a girl at a gate.”

The road showed me the truth of my old home, mile by mile.

The watch posts were located every two miles on the royal border road, stone towers no taller than a house, and each of these should have blazed with the Scentveil atop, a deep bitter smoke that covered the fields. The first station we went to was okay. The second one was burned thin and in the wrong mix and the smell of it and Aurora's court copy died on its way to the tree line. There was no smoke at all at the third post.

I said "Stop," and my voice was hard, as it had never been at court.

Kellan raised one hand. Everyone in the party froze in place. Peter glanced at me, then looked at the post, then back at me. It's dead," I said. It's been dead for days – can't you smell it? There was nothing; cold ash and old rain, rogues could walk past that post whistling.

I scrambled down before anyone got to me and up the post steps on my oversized boots. The top of the bowl was a bummer. Black, wet and ash crusted. A few withered flowers for show, sweet ones, that do nothing. In the bowl's own herb niche, in the old plantings, the old plants were still in place, as they are left to be: nightbane, dark leaved and bitter, a little wild for a cutting. My herbs. My mother's garden had been from this same source. I was still working with my hands before I got over my anger with my mind.

This was not an actual laying. I want that plain. A real Scentveil layer takes a copper pot, some time and some weight and makes a mix and I had a ring of brass spoons, a dead fire and a road party watching. However, a post may be awakened. I bit off the nightbane with my teeth, as my father had taught me, and never for a long time with bare fingers. Scraped pine resin from post trees. I measured with the spoons into the bowl, ash, resin, leaf, ash, and blessed nothing, and sang nothing, because the work is not magic. It's all about weights and layers, and patience. Then, without being asked, Peter put his flint in my good hand.

The smoke rose bitter, deep and clean. It rolled over the top of the post, and lay down along the wind towards the trees, and all the wolves on that road turned their faces towards it and breathed.

Peter Nolan looked at me like I pulled a sword out of a lake!

That, he said, "was the scent that sustained us in the snow, the true scent.

“Yes,” I responded, and my eyes stung, and I culled the smoke.

We rode on. Before the noon, an empty farm was there, doors open, a child's shoe in the yard, the well rope cut. Old claw marks were on a barn wall, high above my head, and no one out of the court had ever seen them. I could see Kellan's face get harder at every mile and he wrote nothing down, forgot nothing. He stopped himself near the corner stones, and turning down and examining my right hand that held the rein, he called the halt. My cloak's cloth had twisted up. The finger marks were now plum coloured and the wrist had swollen due to the heat of the ride.

You had to hide that one," he said.

“It's just a bruise.”

It's a hand you use to work with. He reached out with a clean strip of cloth from his own saddle roll, but did not take my arm as all other men that day had done, but he paused. "May I?" he asked.

I nodded, for my voice had gone somewhere. He had wrapped the wrist firmly and lovingly, his fingers cold from the wind, never tight if it weren't necessary. “Shaw will see it tonight,” he said. Our doctor, she has no court manners and good hands.

I had heard it before, I said, and he almost smiled. It transformed his entire appearance. It made him younger and more tired at the same time, and I looked at the road very hard after that, because my chest already had one broken thing in it and no room for a second wonder.

The turning of the day was the boundary stones. Two weathered and rounded stones, one grey, carved with a wolf. The road was wide and kept on the Silvercrest side. It narrowed on the Emberfall side, and climbed up into the pine hills, poor land, hard land, with smoke standing thin over a valley, and the smell of wood fires and cooking and, faint and far, a true bitter thread of Scentveil laid by hands that had learned from shipped mixes of mine.

Mine. Even here. This was my own and no one had ever called my name over it.

“Emberfall,” Kellan said, and it wasn’t a boast, it wasn’t an apology. It was a man who gave his house a name like a scar. "It is not pretty."

Then he looked at me for a long time, slow nodding like a man dropping a stone into a wall he's going to build.

As the light was fading, we descended into the valley. At its head was the Fort House, stone, square shouldered, with a patched roof and lamps in narrow windows, and a yard wall, built for war and not for show. Wolves came in that yard, lean wolves, busy wolves, a she wolf with timber on her shoulder, like it was kindling, two pups chasing a bucket. As we rode in one by one they halted. They saw how big I was. They examined my wrapped wrist and my bare ankles under the cloak, and the Alpha riding at my side, and not in front.

An old woman was waiting at the door of the Fort House.

She was small and white haired, her hair in a knot and a walking stick in her hand, she looked at me like a judge does at evidence. She then aimed the stick at Kellan, at me, and at the long table I could see through the open door behind her, filled with wooden plates and lit with simple candles.

“So,” said Elder Agnes Brooks, in a voice that was to be obeyed through weather, "my friend, you are welcome to the church. “My friend, you are welcome to the church,” said Elder Agnes Brooks in a voice to be obeyed through weather. This is the guy they threw away as warden. She took my wrapped wrist in her two old hands, as soft as feathers, and she looked at the purple, and her mouth went thin as a blade. When she is doctored and rested, Kellan Brooks, sits at your table where every wolf in this house can see her face, and if any soul in Emberfall has words about that," she said, raising her voice to the whole yard, "they can bring them to me first.

The doors of the Fort House were open. The whole pack turned and looked at me in the lamplight, in my borrowed cloak, a bruised wrist in the hands of an old woman, as though it were something worth guarding.

And not one of them laughed.