Chapter 3 — Beneath the Whispering Pines

She went out at the turn of the night, when the fires had burned down and the last of the elders had gone to bed, and she told herself she was walking off her temper.

The forest took her the way it always did. Frost cracked under her boots. The pines closed the clearing away behind her, sound first, then light, until there was only the crescent coming down in pieces and the black shapes of the trunks.

Her father would say a wolf who walks alone the night before a rite is asking for a story to be told about her. Her father could say what he liked. Tomorrow her hand would be in somebody else’s and the whole pack would be howling about it.

Eliza walked until the ground began to fall away toward the old windthrow, where the big pine had come down eleven winters ago and torn its roots out of the bank.

She stopped.

There was someone sitting against the root-ball.

Her dagger came out without her deciding it. “Get up.”

“I’d rather not,” said the shape. “You’ve got better light than I have and you always were quick with that thing.”

She knew the voice before she knew the face, and the knowing went through her like cold water. He stood anyway, slowly, hands out from his sides, and moved into the broken light, and it was him: taller, thinner in the face, dark hair badly cut, and the old split through his left eyebrow gone silver with age.

His silver-grey eyes caught what light there was and threw it back — the colour she had spent a year and a half describing to herself as ordinary.

“Logan Kane,” she said. “You’re dead.”

“Exiled.”

“In Blackmoor those are the same document.” Her hand was steady on the hilt. That surprised her. Nothing else about her was steady. “Do you know what my father’s patrols do to a rogue inside the line? They don’t bring him in, Logan. They don’t have to.”

“I know exactly what they do.”

“Then why?”

“Because nobody else was going to say it to your face.” He tipped his head at her hand. “Put that away or use it. Standing there deciding is the worst of the three.”

She did not put it away.

Six years ago this man had been Blackmoor’s best tracker and the only wolf in the Hall who had ever told her the truth about anything.

Six years ago she had stood behind her father in a lit clearing while the elders read out what Logan Kane had sold and to whom, and she had waited for Marcus to speak, because Marcus had trained the boy since he was thirteen and Marcus knew, he knew—

Marcus had looked at the ground until it was over.

“I didn’t come to talk about that night,” Logan said, watching her face.

“Good, because I’d rather be stabbed.”

“Then here.” He took something out of his coat and crouched and laid it on a flat stone between them, and stepped back three paces so she could come to it without turning her back on him. Old habits. He had always understood exactly how far away to stand.

It was a knife with the grip stripped off.

Eliza came forward, keeping him in the corner of her eye, and turned the bare tang toward the moon.

Three short strokes and a curl. The curl turning back on itself, no longer than her thumb.

She stopped breathing for a moment.

“You know it,” Logan said.

“Where did you get this?”

“Off a hunter at the mouth of the Ravine, six days ago. He had six more in a roll on his back and a schedule of when the Blackmoor patrols change.” He crouched again, elbows on his knees, and the grey eyes came up to her. “Eliza. Where have you seen that mark?”

“On the altar,” she said. “Tonight. Cut into the middle of the stone, after they sanded four hundred years of names off it.”

The silence that followed had a shape to it. She could hear the frost ticking in the branches.

“Say that again,” Logan said, and there was nothing left of the dry tone.

“They’ve been sanding since noon. The whole slab. Every name.” Her voice had gone flat, the way it did when she was frightened and refused to be.

“Kellan says the runes haven’t taken light since spring. Sabine has been asked to attend the rite, which has never happened in her life. And there’s a mark cut in the middle of the clean stone that isn’t a letter and isn’t a name, and when an elder saw me looking at it he wiped dust over it and told me not to be underfoot.”

Logan sat back on his heels. He looked, for a moment, like a man doing arithmetic he did not want the answer to.

“What is it?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not lying to you. I know what it isn’t.” He nodded at the tang. “That’s not a smith’s stamp and it’s not decoration. That was cut into the steel before the edge was ground, which means somebody wanted it in the metal, not on it. And it’s my mother’s people’s work.”

“Your mother is dead.”

“So am I,” Logan said. “Ask anyone.”

She should have called the patrol then. There was a horn at her belt for exactly this and a father four hundred paces away who would have been at the treeline in ninety seconds with thirty wolves behind him.

Instead she said, “Tomorrow they cut my palm and bind my hand to a man of their choosing, on a stone they’ve scraped clean, with a chant nobody has read but the elders.”

“Yes.”

“You came here to tell me not to hold my hand out.”

“I came here to find out who’s cutting,” Logan said. “I thought I’d have a week. I didn’t know it was tomorrow.” He stood, and the ache in his eyebrow made him wince without his permission, and he covered it badly. “Don’t hold your hand out.”

“And what would that be? A daughter of Blackthorne refuses the rite in front of four packs.” She laughed, one breath, without any humour in it. “My father is holding this pack together with his fists. If I break the Choosing in front of everyone, I hand it to whoever wants it — which is exactly what somebody may be counting on.”

Logan said nothing, because there was nothing to say. She had done the arithmetic too.

“Take your knife,” she said.

“Keep it.”

“If it’s found in my room I’ll be standing where you stood.”

“Then don’t let it be found.” He was already moving back into the dark, and he stopped at the edge of it, half a shape. “Eliza. Whatever it feels like tomorrow when the blade goes in — remember it. Exactly. The temperature of it.”

“The temperature?”

“I’ll be here tomorrow night,” he said, and the forest took him so completely that she was left standing over a flat stone and a stripped knife, listening to the frost, with her heart going like a hunted thing.