Chapter 5 Built For A Very Large Wolf

Agnes did not let go of my wrist until she had given it, hand to hand like a parcel of eggs, to the woman waiting inside the Fort House door.

"This is Shaw," she said. Obey her, she is rude and she is right, that is the worst kind of doctor.

The doctor's room was small and hot and clean and working and a hand under my ribs holding me up and I smelled of boiled cloth and bitter herbs. She was forty four, and already grey was winning in her dark hair, and her sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and she looked at me once, whole, like Kellan at the bowls in the feast hall. The first-hand experience of the object. Not the story of the thing.

"Sit," she said. Cover your arms and shoulders. Arms out on table. Who wrapped this?"

I said, "The Alpha.I told him, "The Alpha. "On the road."

It's the best thing that he's ever done with the cloth and it's still wrong. With small scissors, she quickly and easily unrolled the wrapping, and I saw the purple emerge into the light of the lamp. Five finger marks, away together in one dark blossom, where my pulse beats under my skin like a trapped bird. Shaw took my hand in both of hers and turned it, slow, and pressed her thumbs along the bones, and her hands were warm and rough and sure.

She said, "Move your fingers. I did, it hurt, I did it again. “Good. No bones broken. He broke the little bones and pulled the cords, that's what a man does when he thinks that a wrist is a handle.” She said it levelly, while she was at work, not turning her face to mine. Cold first, then the salve. This hand won't lift two days, warden or not, and if I hear you lifted it, I will sit on you.

Yes, Doctor," I replied, and my eyes filled at once, for her anger was for me. Not at me. For me. I heard anger all my life, I had to stand in it. This was anger in front of me, but turned away.

The cold well water did its work in a basin but her eyes went to my left arm where the cloak had fallen back. Up my forearm were three thin white lines, like stitching.

I didn't ask her, I said a vial. Scent work, I was nineteen, it blew in my hand.

"And they sent you back to the pots the next week, I suppose." She snorted. “Wardens – worse than warriors.” She pulled my right wrist out of the water, dried it and started rubbing a green salve into the bruise, her thumbs, and I hissed and she nodded as if the hiss was information. Now the rest of it," she said, "You're shaking, and it's not all pain. When was the last time you ate a meal, girl? Not that a court lady's apology on a plate.

I opened my mouth and nothing came. I thought of thin tea as I have to. I remembered little bits that I was served at family dinners, and my mom watching my fork. I imagined a loaf of bread in the mud at the north gate.

Shaw read it all off my face like print. She got up, went to her door and roared down the passage as would a drill yard, "Agnes! Stew! If Kellan Brooks is hovering out there he can be useful, he can carry it!

Kellan said with a tone of someone who had definitely been hovering, "I'm not hovering.

Then hover usefully, Shaw said, and shut the door in the face of the Alpha of Emberfall, and I made a sound that shocked me. A laugh. It came out of the crack in my chest, like water out of a stone, and when it began I could not stop it, and then I was crying with my good hand over my mouth in the hot little room of the doctor, and laughing and crying at the same time, and salve on my wrist and cold water dripping off my elbow on a stone floor, a hundred miles and one whole world away from the hall where three hundred wolves had laughed at me alone.

Shaw let me. She wrapped the wrist firm and clean, and I shook and she said no soft, and soft was her own.

As the crying subsided she sat back and tilted her head to look at me, as my father would do when measuring shelves for a room.

Now I'll tell you something about wolves, warden, I do not, the court doctors do not. She laid one hand on my forearm, on the solid width of my forearm. A she wolf is built for a wolf she carries, small wolf small frame, it's plain as carpentry, I have set bones for thirty years in this valley, and I know the shape of a thing. She nodded once, at all of me, at the hips and the belly and the strong thick arms that court silk could never make fashionable. It's not a fault in this body, it's not an extra stone of it, this house fits the wolf, Clara Beaumont.

The room went very quiet. The lamp ticked. Somewhere down the passage a pot lid rang.

All my life I had apologised to mirrors. To seams. To chairs. To my mother's eyes at the table. It was a mere plain woman, grey in her hair, who had just picked me up, by the whole of my body, and set me down right, like a bone set right.

The stew came. Kellan carried in himself a bowl as deep as a helmet, and bread on a board, and set it down, and went out again, and did not say a word; for Shaw pointed at the door, and I ate. I ate the whole bowl. I ate the bread. When Agnes brought in a tray of a second helping, carried like an offering, no one was watching my fork. No one counted. I have eaten that too, and the taste of it was like the tide coming back into harbour which had been dry for years.

When the horn was blown at the yard wall, it was full night.

Not the war horn. Gate horn, two short notes, rider. I heard footsteps in the passage and Peter's voice, low and quick, and then Kellan was at the doctor's door, with a sealed letter in his hand and his face of stone. One look, and Shaw began, calmly, to sweep all the breakables off her table.

“From the King,” Kellan replied. Led by the safe conduct of the law, rode straight from the court. He held the letter out, Not to Shaw. To me. It is named after your name; I didn't open it.

It was my good hand that grabbed it. The black wolf head with red wax was the seal of Roland, and my fingers knew court wax like they knew herbs. I broke it standing in a doctor's room with my bad wrist bound to my chest, smelling of green salve and stew.

The King maintained the sanctuary. The law was older than his crown, he wrote, and no son of his would break it in his name. During the next thirty days, no one at Silvercrest would touch me. After that, his father's voice in the letter turned into a king's. On the thirty first day I was brought before him at Silvercrest and had to explain myself for having left the post of the royal Scentveil in time of danger. If I didn't show up, Emberfall would say that he had taken in a deserter.

There was a second sheet attached to the King's letter. No seal. No wax. Only my name, a hand in which I recognized my face, the smooth school hand of the Prince of Silvercrest.

You have 30 days of his law," it said. I have the rest of my life to live. The law will expire, and I will come to get what is mine. A.

I read it twice. My hands weren't shaking. That was the thing that really caught my eye, and over the page I looked at Kellan and held the letter out to him, two people should carry some things or they bend the one who carries them.

He read it in the doorstep, with the lamp behind his back. His face didn't change. But the paper, very slightly, began to tremble at its edge, and I understood that it was not fear, and that his hands were still only because he was making them be still, the way a held dog is still.

“Thirty days,” Kellan said quietly, like snow falling. He folded the Prince's letter once, just right, and he placed it in his coat as evidence. Like a promise. Then we must make good use of them, warden, "

The Emberfall night was pressing to the glass in the small window, pine dark and honest, and over the yard-wall the gate-watch lit the first post of the border line. The smoke that came out of it was thin and old and fading.

My thirty days had a smell, and it was running out.