A night tray lay on the floor outside Jude's door, the cup on its side, a dark tongue of tea soaked into the runner. I had not put it there. I had no memory of arriving.
My right palm was blistering around the hilt. I pried the fingers open with my left hand, one at a time, and every one of them left skin on the silver. Forty minutes, gone. And in them somebody had carried a cup to this door, and somebody had stopped it.
Sweet, the spill. Honey, a lot of it. I crouched and touched the point of the blade to the wet. The bright steel went black from the tip up, like a shadow climbing a wall.
A second cup, then. The wolf in me had decided, on her own, who was worth guarding.
Eleven yards down the corridor, Marten Rhee sat in the night guard's chair with his hands on his knees. He was looking at me. I did not know how long he had been looking, and he did not say a word. I stood up barefoot in my undershirt with a drawn knife and let him look.
The door opened. Jude, in shirtsleeves, one side of his hair flat from a pillow, a lamp behind him.
"Katherine," he said. "It's customary to knock."
"Tray." I tipped the blade toward the runner. "Did the kitchen send it?"
His eyes went to the knife, then to my hand, then to the tray. The lazy came off his face. "No. Night tea's an old habit. The old cook used to send a cup up when I was a boy. Nobody's done it in years."
"Somebody has."
"What did you hear?"
"A step at your door." It came out smooth. I had been practicing lies for nine years, and none of them had ever cost me less. "I drew. They were gone."
"You drew on a teacup."
"On whoever carried it."
He looked at me a beat too long. Then he crouched, and picked up the cup with the hem of his shirt, and passed it to me without a word. "Go and sleep, Katherine. You're no use to me in pieces."
I took the cup.
Back in the last room of the east corridor, I wrapped my hand in a strip of sheet and held the knife to Isolde's jar of honey. Honey in the tea. Honey on the sill.
I dipped the point through the gold and waited.
The steel stayed bright as a dime. I wiped it on my knee and sat there with the jar in my left hand until the window greyed.
The heir's boundary run is old custom, the last week before a Claiming: the heir goes the pack's land in wolf shape, lakeshore to ridge, so the stones know him. I told Jude at six that I was running it with him. He said that was not in the contract. I said neither was dying.
On the porch, in frost, I stripped to skin and left my clothes on a stump with the knife on top. The shift took me the way it always does when I let it: the pull in the long bones, the floor of my mouth stretching, then the world flooding in. Lake. Pine. Cold iron. My right forepaw burned where the palm had blistered, and I ran on three-and-a-half legs and did not slow.
Silvan and two wolves took the far flank, grey shapes in the mist along the water.
At the first cairn I put my shoulder into Jude's and turned him uphill, into the birch strip. He gave me one look, grey wolf's eyes, and came. I had told nobody. Not Silvan. Only him.
We were forty strides into the trees when I smelled it. Iron, and oil, and, under both, silver.
I threw myself across him.
The bolt took me high in the left shoulder, and the world went white. Silver in a wolf's meat is a verdict. My legs lost the shape of themselves. My jaw came apart into a mouth, my fur went to skin, and I hit the frost on my back, human, naked, with a hand's length of tipped steel standing out of me.
Jude was human too, before I could see him do it. He swore. He tore off his own shirt, and wrapped my arm, and picked me up as if I weighed what the bolt did.
"Don't talk," he said, running.
I followed his strides. Past eighty, I lost track.
Isolde worked in the kitchen, because it had the best light and the longest table. She had her sleeves pushed up and her glasses on her head, and her tools lay on a clean cloth like a place set for tea.
"Bite this, sweetheart."
It was a strip of leather. I bit.
The silver came out in three pulls. Her hands were small and dry and absolutely steady, and between pulls she hummed something with no tune, the way you hum to a bee that has landed on your wrist. The cut edges went black the moment the air touched them. They would go on being black for weeks.
"There," she said. "You were very good. Somebody taught you not to cry."
Somebody had. I was thinking of a kitchen in Coldbrook, and a needle held in a candle flame, and a splinter dug out of my heel by hands as small as these. My mother had hummed too. I shut my eyes so that I would not see the resemblance and could keep it.
"Drink," said Isolde, and held a cup to my mouth. Willow bark, and something that tasted of hay. The room went soft at the edges.
I did not know how long I had been under when I heard the voices in the corridor, through a door that someone had not quite closed.
Pipe tobacco, first. Then the voice that went with it, low and flat.
"I knew the jaw when she turned in the birches. And the way she goes down on one knee. I sat through that trial, Evander. Nine years ago. I watched her father stand there."
Evander's laugh, soft, with no mead in it for once. "Whose?"
"Tobias Lowry's girl."
A long pause. Then Evander, delighted and careful: "Does Jude know?"
I lay on the kitchen table with a hole in me and my left arm gone dead, and I understood that by tonight every wolf at Greywater would know my name.