Chapter 2 — Echoes in the Moonshadow

Six years, and the forest had not forgiven him either.

Logan Kane came over the Blackmoor line a little after moonrise, where the pines grew close enough that a man could walk between two patrol routes without hurrying. He knew the gap because he had walked it as a boy with a stolen loaf under his coat. Nobody had thought to close it. Packs never closed the gaps their own children made.

He moved slowly. Not from caution — from the thing in his brow.

It had started an hour ago, when the ridge came down toward the clearing: a dull ache along the old scar that split his left eyebrow, the way a badly set bone aches before rain. He had carried that scar since he was nine and had spent twenty years explaining it. A fall. A branch. A cousin with a blunt knife and a bad temper.

It had never hurt before. It hurt now, and it hurt more the closer he came to Blackmoor Clearing, and he had stopped twice on the ridge to hold the heel of his hand against it and wait for it to pass.

He took the knife out of his belt instead of thinking about it.

It was a hunter’s knife, human work, taken off a human body thirteen days ago at the far end of the Ravine, and it should have been nothing: a heavy blade, a wrapped grip, silver laid into the edge the way the hunters had been doing since his grandfather’s time. That part was ordinary. Wolves had been dying of ordinary for a hundred years.

What was not ordinary was the tang. He had stripped the grip off it the same night, sitting in the dark with his back against wet rock, and found the cutting: three short strokes and a curl, laid into the steel before the smith ever ground the edge.

Shadowfang work. His mother’s people. The kind of cutting that was supposed to live behind a wall of black rock two hundred miles east and never come out.

Somebody was selling it to men who used it on wolves.

Logan wrapped the knife again and went on, and at the top of the last rise he lay down in the wet needles and looked at the clearing.

They had it lit. Braziers all round the edge, torches on poles, and the altar in the middle of it under a moon like a paring. Fifty wolves at least, maybe eighty, and the smell coming up to him of woodsmoke and hot iron and the sharp animal warmth of a crowd.

There was an old woman with a whetstone. There was a boy being scolded. It was so exactly the thing he had lost that he had to put his forehead down on his wrist for a moment before he could go on looking.

He found Marcus first. That was easy; Marcus Blackthorne had never in his life stood where he could not be seen. The Alpha was near the fires with the elders around him, and one of them was talking with his hands, and Marcus was listening with his chin down in the way that meant he had already decided.

Then he found her.

She was at the eastern edge, apart from the noise, with a small dark-haired woman beside her. She had grown. That was the stupid thought that came first, and he let it come and be stupid.

The girl he had hauled out of the river ice at fourteen had been all elbows and fury. This was a woman who stood the way her father stood, and hated it, and did it anyway; he could see her hating it from four hundred paces.

She was rubbing her thumb along the strap of her gauntlet, over and over.

“Don’t hold your hand out tomorrow,” he said, out loud, to nobody, in a forest where saying it changed nothing at all.

Because that was the other thing.

He had not come back for the rite. He had come because a hunter in the Ravine had told him, with a broken jaw and no reason left to lie, that his people were paid on a schedule now and that the schedule came from inside a pack.

And because two nights ago the pines along the eastern border had started to be marked — sigils cut into the bark at head height, sap running out of them black, and no wolf in Blackmoor had noticed because Blackmoor was busy sanding its altar.

And because he could feel them.

That was the part he had never told anyone. In the dark, without wind, without a track, he knew where wolves were. Not their scent — their place, a set of small pressures against the inside of his skull, the way you know a room is occupied before the light goes on. He had told himself for twenty years that he had good ears.

Tonight the clearing sat in his head like a hand laid flat on his brow. Sixty-odd small pressures. And in among them, four that were wrong: heavier, colder, pulling at the ache in his eyebrow the way a magnet drags a nail across a table.

Four wolves in that clearing were not entirely their own, and Logan had no word for how he knew it.

Below him the crowd shifted. A horn went, one long note, and the wolves began drifting toward the altar for the elders’ blessing, and the crescent moon came clear of the pines and put a thin white edge on everything.

Logan got up out of the needles. He could not walk into that clearing. If he did, he would be face-down in the frost inside a minute and dead by morning, and the four cold ones would go on standing there being useful to somebody.

But she came out to the forest. She always had; it had been half the trouble of her, back when trouble was all they had.

He went east along the ridge, into the deep pines where the moonlight came down in pieces, and found the old place — the fallen giant with its roots torn out of the bank, where a girl with a soaked braid had once sat shaking and refused to cry in front of him.

He sat down against the root-ball to wait, and pressed the heel of his hand to his eyebrow, and waited for the ache to stop.

It did not stop.