Jude shut his study door in my face at nine on Thursday night, and this time I heard the key turn.
I had spent the day telling him about Silvan's arm. He had spent it telling me Silvan taught him to swim, that Silvan held him up in Lake Briar by the back of his shirt when he was six, that Silvan had cut himself on silver wire in the boathouse and told the whole kitchen so.
"You're looking for a reason to stay past Sunday," he'd said. "I'd rather you just asked."
I had no clean answer to that, which was the cost. Last night on the dock he had nearly touched my face. Today he looked at his boots when I spoke.
If Jude wouldn't hear it, there was one person left in that house Silvan answered to. I went to find her before I could list the reasons not to.
The yard was cold enough that the grass cracked under my boots. Halfway across, I stopped in the shadow of the woodshed.
Silvan was crossing ahead of me, forty feet off, lamp unlit, pipe smoke hanging where he'd been. He wasn't heading for the house. He was heading for the guest wing, where my room was.
He didn't look back. I listened to his stride to the side door, and let him go. I had a door of my own to get to first.
The stillroom sat behind the greenhouse, and it was the warmest room at Greywater: shelves of jars to the ceiling, bundles of yarrow and lavender drying on a line, a kettle muttering on a small iron stove. Isolde sat at the bench in her cardigan with her glasses pushed up in her hair, writing labels with a fountain pen.
"Kit." She lit up like I was a grandchild. "Sit, sweetheart, you're letting the cold in."
I didn't sit. "Silvan was the wolf at the ferry landing. Tuesday night. I put silver into his left foreleg, and now he's wearing the bandage. He's lying to everyone, ma'am. To Jude."
She capped the pen. She did not look surprised. She looked like a woman who had been waiting for the kettle.
"I know about his arm," she said. "I dressed it."
She poured two cups. From a squat jar with a blue lid she stirred honey into mine, three turns, the way you do for a child. Then she set the spoon down, and I reached across the bench for the tall jar beside it, because my hand wanted something to do.
"Not that jar, sweetheart," Isolde said pleasantly. "That one's Jude's."
I pulled my knife from the ankle sheath, gloved fingers only, and dipped the point into the honey.
It came out black. Black from the tip to the guard, the way a spoon goes in a fire.
Isolde watched me do it. She did not move to stop me. She blew on her tea and drank.
"I asked him for one year," she said. "Leave the past alone, I said. Nicely. Ask any mother how that goes."
"Ma'am."
"Edric was always going to take what wasn't his. Some men can't see a chair without sitting in it. And a mother knows, Kit. She knows when a son is going to take everything from her. You can tell by the way he sets down a cup."
Each sentence was a gift she could take back. All together they were a hand around my throat, and she was smiling.
"Say it," I said.
"Say what? I'm an old woman with some honey." She took a sip. "Who would they believe, do you think? A Lowry, named and shamed in council. Dismissed on Wednesday. Who told half the house she'd thought about letting him drink. Or the woman who cut the silver out of her shoulder?"
My left shoulder ached on cue.
"You lost forty minutes on Saturday night," Isolde said, softer. "I watched you stand outside his door with your knife out. You didn't know you were standing there. I let you stand, because I couldn't think how to wake you."
I said nothing. My hands had gone cold inside the gloves.
"Annick hummed. When we were girls, at my mother's table, three notes, over and over. I heard she was humming them at the end, too, the night she walked into the trees. I thought, never again. Not one more girl." Her eyes were wet, and that was the worst of it, because I believed every word. "You stand in a room like someone waiting to be called in, sweetheart. I've known what you want since the day you got here."
I wanted it so badly my teeth hurt.
She opened a drawer under the bench and took out a single folded sheet, heavy cream paper, and laid it between the jars, flat, with two fingers.
"Coldbrook has been held in trust in my name for nine years," she said. "Roof on, wells clean. I can give it back."
I read it standing up. The land, the house, the water rights. The scattered Coldbrook wolves called home by name. A pack bond, sealed under the Accord, that would hold a wolf to her people when the moon pulled and the drift came for her. At the bottom, Isolde Thackery's signature, already dry.
"My terms are small," she said. "On Sunday night, be anywhere but at my son's side. Do nothing. That's all. You have three nights."
The stove ticked. I had come to pull Silvan away from Jude, and she was handing me my mother's house. I looked for the trick and found only the page. Down the left margin ran the names of the pack's offices, and I followed them with my eyes, one line at a time, to the first one.
The line marked Alpha was empty. The Luna uncapped her fountain pen and, while I watched, wrote my name there in the same neat hand that had labelled every jar in that room.
Katherine Lowry.
The ink was still wet.