I carried the peace stone to Crewe's cottage at midnight with it wrapped in my coat like a baby, and I didn't knock.
She was awake. Of course she was. Sitting by the fire in her felt hat with a cup of something steaming, as if she'd been expecting me since about the time I was born.
"Shut the door."
I shut it. I put the stone on her table, on top of a heap of drying yarrow, and peeled back the coat so the knotted mark showed in the firelight.
"Warden," I said.
Crewe looked at the stone for a long time.
"I told Ilse," she said at last. "I told her the day you were born. You can't keep a thing like that in a drawer, I said. It'll find its own way out, and it'll pick the worst possible night to do it." She took a sip from her cup. "She said she'd tell you when you were eighteen. Then Royce moved the moot."
"Moved it?"
"The mating moon was meant to be the night after your birthday. The real full moon. Royce called it a night early. Said the almanac was wrong." Crewe's mouth thinned. "The almanac's never been wrong in sixty years. Your mother had a cart hired for that next morning, Wren. She was going to take you across the river. To Fenmark. Before the bond could show."
Not yet. He wasn't supposed to do it yet.
I sat down hard on the bench.
"Tell me," I said. "All of it. No more not tonight."
Crewe got up and went to the tall cupboard in the corner, the one with the brass lock she wore the key for on a string round her neck. I'd been frightened of that cupboard my whole childhood. Every child in the Hollow was. It was where she kept the things that could kill you.
She unlocked it. Inside, on the top shelf, between two brown bottles with skulls scratched into the glass, was a bundle of papers tied with green thread.
"Your mother's," Crewe said. "Things she wrote down, in case."
She didn't hand them to me. She sat back down with them in her lap.
"There've been Wardens on this valley as long as there've been wolves," she said. "Not many. A handful in a generation. They're born to one line, mostly, on the Fenmark side. They can feel the borders. They can hold them. The stones on the east ridge are plain granite, girl. They work because a Warden walks them, and touches them, and the land remembers. Wardens can close a wound. Settle a frightened pup. And they can feel the bonds, all of them, every thread between every wolf in a pack, like strings on a fiddle."
"And?"
"And a Warden mated to an Alpha's line can pull those strings." Crewe's voice dropped. "She can unmake an Alpha's claim. Pack goes where she goes."
The fire popped. I didn't move.
"That's why," I said slowly. "Royce. He figured out what I was."
"He's always known what Ilse was. They signed the Stone Peace together, the two of them, after Aldous died." She leaned over and turned the peace stone on the table with one knotted hand. On the back, smaller, carved shallower, as if by somebody less sure of himself, was a second mark. A plain axe-head. The Ashby sign. It was on Royce's chair in the long hall, on his signet ring, on the lintel of his house. "He needed her. Without a Warden the stones fail and Fenmark walks straight in. So he let her live. But a daughter, mated to his own son?" Crewe shook her head. "That's a Warden with the whole pack in her hand. He couldn't allow that."
"So he made Cade reject me."
"So he made Cade reject you."
"How? Cade's not a child. He could have said no."
Crewe looked at me over the top of her cup, and her pale eyes were very tired.
"What would you say," she asked, "if the Alpha of your pack took you aside the night before your mating moon, and told you that he'd killed one Warden already, with his own hands, on that ridge? And that if you accepted the bond in the morning, he'd do it again?"
The room went very small.
"He didn't..."
"Royce told that boy that if he took you, you'd be dead within the month. Royce has never told a lie he couldn't make true." Crewe set the cup down. "Cade believed him. So did I."
My hands were shaking. I put them flat on my knees.
"He could have told me. Afterwards. He could have come and told me."
"With his father watching every step he took? With you halfway to Port Calder?" Crewe snorted softly. "And there's the rest of it. The part none of the elders know."
"There's more?"
"A true bond, rejected under force, doesn't die cleanly. It rots. In the one who spoke the words." She turned her cup in her hands. "Did you think a Fenmark knife alone brought a wolf like that so low? He's been dying a little at a time for four years, Wren. I've patched him more times than I can count."
"Where is he now?"
"Wherever he likes." Crewe looked away. "He left the hall before the parley ended."
From behind the back room door, very low, came a sound I knew.
A breath. Slow and deep, in a chest far bigger than a man's.
I'd heard that breath in a gully three miles past the border stones, and across a fire. I was on my feet before I knew I'd decided.
"Wren," Crewe said. "Wait. Not that door. Not tonight."
I opened the door.
The back room was dark except for the coals in the little grate. The cot was against the wall where it had been the day I came home, the grey blanket fallen to the floor.
There was a wolf on it.
A huge wolf, too big for the cot, its back legs hanging off the end. Grey as wet slate. A pale blaze down the chest, rising and falling too fast with fever. Its eyes were half open and glazed.
And the left ear had a notch in it, healed long ago into a neat V. My wolf, from the gully and the rail yard, here in Crewe's back room as if it had followed me home.
I took a step toward it, and the coals flared, and I saw its side.
The fur along the left ribs had been shaved away for bandages. Under it ran a shiny pink seam the length of my hand, exactly where, four days ago, on these same boards, I had pressed my palm to Cade Ashby's wound until it stopped bleeding.