The bus from Port Calder dropped me at the Calder road turnoff at four in the afternoon, and I walked the last nine miles in a good wool coat with my savings sewn into the lining.
I hadn't told Mrs. Pell I might not come back. I'd paid her two months ahead. She'd looked at the money, and at me, and said, "Whoever he is, love, make him crawl."
The border stones came into view along the east ridge just as the light went copper. I didn't touch them. I walked between two of them with my hands in my pockets and felt the old ground take my weight like it recognised me.
My wolf turned over, once, in her sleep.
The Hollow looked smaller. That's how I knew I'd grown.
The lane was the same lane. The Tillers' gate still had the broken latch tied up with baling twine. Smoke from forty chimneys hung in the valley in a blue layer, and the lake beyond it had gone the colour of pewter under a sky full of weather coming in from the west.
People stopped what they were doing.
Old Garrick, splitting wood outside the smithy, let the axe hang. Two boys on a fence, who'd have been in short trousers when I left, stared like I'd walked out of a story. A woman pinning sheets on a line lowered the peg from her mouth.
Nobody said anything. That was worse than shouting.
"Wren? Wren Holloway?"
Dellah Tiller came out of her mother's gate at a run, wiping flour on her skirt. We'd been friends once, the way girls are friends at twelve, swapping ribbons and secrets. She'd got tall and freckled across the nose and there was a baby on her hip I'd never heard about.
"You're alive," she said. "Everybody said... Oh, look at you. Look at your coat."
"Hello, Dell."
"Does Ilse know? Did someone get word to her?"
My stomach went cold. "Get word where?"
Dellah's face fell. She shifted the baby to her other hip.
"Your mum's gone, Wren. Since August. Packed nothing, told nobody. Royce says she went over the river to Fenmark." She dropped her voice. "He says she was a turncoat all along. That she'd been passing them our patrol routes for years."
"That's a lie."
"I know." Dellah looked up the lane, then down it. "I know. But Fenmark hit the north fields three weeks after she left, and they knew exactly where our people would be. So."
So.
"Where's Crewe?"
"At her place." Dellah hesitated. "With him."
Old Crewe's cottage sat on its own at the end of the birch track, low and crooked, with a roof of moss so thick it looked like a sleeping animal. Bundles of drying plants hung under the eaves. The door was open.
The smell hit me on the step. Blood, old and new. Woodsmoke, wet bandages, and under it a bright metallic tang that made my teeth hurt.
"Shut the door," Crewe said from inside. "You're letting the heat out."
She hadn't changed at all. Same felt hat, same knotted hands, grinding something green in a stone bowl by the fire. She looked me up and down once.
"You took your time."
"Your letter took four years."
"Mine took three days. Your mother's took four years." She tipped her head toward the back room. "He's through there. Don't touch anything."
I didn't want to go through there. I went.
Cade Ashby was propped against the wall on a narrow cot with a grey blanket pulled to his waist.
Four years had sharpened him. The boy's softness was gone from his face, and what was left was all bone and hollows and that stubborn jaw. His hair had grown long, curling over his ears and the collar of his shirt. Under the wheat colour there was grey skin, the wrong grey, like ash under a crust of bread.
Bandages wound around his ribs on the left side. They were soaked through, dark red, fresh.
He opened his eyes.
"You came," he rasped.
"Don't flatter yourself." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I came for the truth. About my mother. About what she said that night."
"Wren..."
"I'm not here for you."
"I know."
"Stop saying you know."
His mouth moved. If he'd had the blood in him for it, it might have been a smile.
Under my ribs, on the left side, something rolled over.
It was a small thing. A weight rolling over. Like a dog in front of a fire lifting its head at a sound outside. The place where the thread had snapped four years ago, where there had been nothing but scar for so long that I'd stopped feeling for it.
I put my hand there before I could stop myself.
Cade's eyes followed it. His face went very still.
"Fenmark blade," Crewe said behind me, in the doorway, wiping her hands. "Nine days ago, at the river crossing. Silver in the edge. It won't close, and it won't stop bleeding, and I've tried everything in that cupboard twice."
"Then why am I here?"
"Because I'm out of everything in the cupboard." She came in and stood at the foot of the cot. "Kneel down. Put your hand on the bandage. Press."
"Crewe, I'm not a healer."
"I didn't say you were. Press."
Cade turned his head away toward the wall. "Don't make her," he said. "Bettany, don't."
That was what decided me. That he didn't want it.
I knelt on the cold boards beside the cot and laid my palm flat against his side, over the wet bandage, and pressed.
He was burning hot. I felt his heart under my hand, too fast, and his breath hitch, and the blood, slick and warm, pushing up between my fingers.
Then it stopped.
It stopped all at once, as if a door had closed somewhere inside him. Under my palm the bandage stayed red but nothing new came. Cade made a sound in his throat and his whole body went slack against the wall.
I snatched my hand back. It was clean. Perfectly clean, like I'd never touched him.
Crewe let out a long breath through her nose. She didn't look surprised. She looked like a woman who had been waiting twenty years to be proved right and wasn't glad about it.
"Well," she said quietly. "So it's true, then. You're one of them."