Chapter 2

My father asked about Cassian on the twentieth day.

He had been sitting up for a week by then. The second treatment had gone in on the eleventh and his counts had come down again, and the healers had started using words like ‘maintenance’ instead of the words they had been using in November, and he had begun complaining about the food, which is how I know a Halloway is recovering.

"He has not been," he said. It was not a question.

"He has been on the coast."

"Maren."

"He has been busy."

My father looked at me for a while. He is 74 years old and he ran this pack for twenty six years and there has never been any point in lying to him, and I had been doing it steadily for four months and getting away with it, which told me something about how ill he was.

"Is it done?" he said.

"It is filed. It is spoken at the full moon."

He nodded slowly and turned his head toward the window and did not say anything for a long moment, and I sat there and let him have it, because I have never in my life been able to watch that man be disappointed.

"I brought him into this house," he said at last.

"You did."

"I put my title behind him in front of the Silver Council."

"Its not your fault."

"And then I let you marry him." He closed his eyes. "You were nineteen, and you came and told me, and I thought about it for one night and I said yes. I have had four months in this bed to think about that one night–"

"Papa."

"No, let me say it and then I will not say it again." He opened his eyes. "There was no bond between the two of you. I knew there was not. I told myself a chosen bond is a real bond, which it is, and that you were the most sensible child I had ever raised, which you are, and I let you hand a boy I had rescued the seat my father died in. I have wondered lately whether I was thinking about you at all that night, or whether I was thinking about how it would look."

There was a knock at the door before I could answer, which I have been grateful for ever since, because I did not have an answer.

It was Ewan Calder.

He had been one of my father's trackers years ago, one of the last group he trained personally before the raids, and he had gone north to the survey stations afterward and I had not seen him since I was about twenty-two. He had a paper bag under one arm and the particular awkwardness of a large man in a small room.

"Alpha," he said, and then he caught himself. "Sorry. Gideon."

"You may call me Alpha," my father said. "I am dying and it costs you nothing."

"You do not look like you are dying." The other man smiled.

"That is the tragedy of it. Nobody will take me seriously." My father waved him in. "Maren, you remember Ewan."

"I do."

He shook my hand. It was a perfectly ordinary handshake. I want to note that plainly, because of everything that came later. Nothing happened. There was no pull and no heat and no sound in my head, and he was simply a large quiet man from the northern survey who had heard my father was ill and had driven six hours with a bag of the honeyed walnuts my father has liked since before I was born.

He stayed fourty minutes. He talked about the survey and the state of the northern roads and did not once ask about Cassian, which I noticed and appreciated, and when he left he stopped in the doorway.

"Your father was the only Alpha on this coast who would look at a 14 year old with no pack and see a tracker," he said. "Whatever else is going on out there, I wanted him to have the walnuts."

Then he went, and I did not think about him again for a long time.

Twenty three days into the grace period I went back to the Warden's House for my father's records.

I had put it off as long as I could. Everything the healers needed was in the study on the second floor, eleven years of blood counts and silver readings in my mother's filing boxes, and there was no version of the afternoon in which I did not have to walk through my own front door to get them.

I went at four, when the council floor is empty and most of the house is down at the training yard. I had my hand on the study door when Sable came out of the corridor behind me.

"Maren." She sounded delighted. "You are alive. Nobody has seen you in weeks."

"I am collecting papers."

"Of course." She leaned against the frame with her arms folded and looked at me for a moment, and I understood that she had been waiting somewhere in this hallway for a good while. "Can I ask you something, and you must tell me if it is none of my business."

I said nothing.

"I found a rejection notice in Cassian's study a few days ago. With Elder Kane's seal on it." She said it clearly and at a volume that carried, and the corridor outside the study runs directly down to the front hall, where at four in the afternoon there are always eight or nine wolves coming off rotation. "I honestly thought the two of you were joking. It is real, then?"

The hall went quiet the way . . . well the way a hall does.

I have gone over that moment many times since, more than it deserves. What I keep returning to is not the cruelty of it, because I had already taken her measure by then. It is that she asked as though she were doing me a kindness. She had the tone people use when they clear up a small misunderstanding for you.

"It is real," I said.

"Oh, Maren." She pressed her fingers to her mouth. "I am so sorry. He has not said one word."

"Then he has not said one word."

She followed me into the study and stood by the window while I went through the boxes, talking the entire time, and I let her, because refusing would have taken more out of me than listening did. She told me about the coastal delegation and the rooms they had been given and the wolves she would be meeting in her first month. She told me that Cassian had been sleeping badly.

Then she said, "You will come tomorrow night, of course."

I looked up.

"The farewell." She seemed genuinely surprised. "For the two of us going down to the coast. Elder Kane has arranged it at the long house. Half the pack will be there."

"I have not been invited."

"You are the Luna of Emberfell." She said it lightly. "For another eight days, anyway. If you are not there, people will talk about why, and it will be very ugly for you, and I do not want that. Come and let them see you, and it will all be much easier."

She was right, which is the part I disliked most. She was right about most things that winter. That is the difficulty with a woman like Sable Winter, and I have never once heard anybody say it out loud, so I will say it. She is not stupid and she is not even particularly dishonest. She simply arranges the truth into the shape that suits her and then hands it to you politely, and by the time you have worked out what she has done you have already agreed to something. She was almost always right about that sort of thing. It is the only talent I have ever envied in her.

I went.

The long house at Emberfell was built by my grandfather and it holds three hundred wolves when it is full, and that night it was full. There were tables down the length of it and the young ones were serving, and Elder Kane had put out the good lamps.

I came late and I sat where Bree Fenn had saved me a place, halfway down on the left, well back from the head table.

Cassian was at the head with Sable on his right. He had put on the gray formal coat that my mother had commissioned for my father twenty years ago and that I had altered for him myself the week after the summer gathering. I sat and looked at my own stitching across a room of three hundred people.

He found me once, early, over the top of somebody's shoulder. He held my eyes for perhaps two seconds and then somebody spoke to him and he turned away, and he did not look again for the rest of the night.

Bree put her hand on my knee under the table.

"You do not have to sit through this," she said.

"I do, though."

"You do not. I will walk out with you right now and I will tell anybody who asks that I dragged you."

"Bree, I'll be fine."

She let it go, but she kept her hand there.

Elder Kane came down the tables partway through the meal, the way he does, stopping at each group for a word. He is 81 years old and he has been the Elder of this pack since before I was born, and he taught me to read the boundary maps when I was six.

He reached us and put his hand on the back of my chair.

"Maren." He looked at me carefully, and I let him, because there was no point in doing anything else. "I heard your father is doing better."

"He is stable."

"Good. That is good." He nodded a few times. "I have been so tied up with the coastal arrangements that I have not managed to get out there. It has been on my conscience. I will come this week, if he is up to visitors."

"He would like that."

"He was Alpha of this pack for 26 years," Kane said. "I do not forget it, whatever anybody else does."

I did not answer that. From the head table Cassian had turned to listen, and I watched him take it in, and I watched something move behind his face that I could not name at the time and can name perfectly well now.

My father had been in that hospital for four months.

Cassian had not asked after him once. Not at the summer gathering when the healers first told us the autumn would be bad, not in October when I gave him the lot number, not on any of the eleven calls he did not answer, and not in the four days since he had come home to a pack that all knew where I had been sleeping.

He had lived in my father's house and worn my father's coat and held my father's title, and he had not asked.

Kane moved on down the table. Bree's hand tightened on my knee.

"Do not," I said quietly.

"I have not said anything."

"You are about to."

"I am absolutely about to," Bree said, and then Sable's voice came down the length of the room and neither of us said anything at all.

"Maren. While I have you."

She had turned in her chair to face down the tables. She was not shouting. She has a carrying voice and she knows the size of the room she is in, and I have never once seen her misjudge it.

"I wanted to ask, and I keep forgetting. Do you have any of the moonpetal left over?"

I heard Bree stop breathing beside me.

"Left over," I said.

"From the Highmarket." Sable was smiling. "I know it is a great deal to ask. It is only that Clover took to it so well, and she has been off her food again since the weather turned, and the northern preparations do nothing for her at all."

Somebody at the far end of the room set a cup down.

"The supplements Cassian brought back were a real hit with her," she said. "She would not touch her greens for a week afterward. If there is any left at all I would take even a little of it."

I want to describe what happened in that room, because it matters for everything that came after.

Nothing happened. That is what I want to describe, and I am aware it is a strange thing to want to describe. Three hundred wolves heard a woman ask the Luna of Emberfell for the leftovers of a flower that had gone into a rabbit, and every one of them understood what a moonpetal is, and every one of them knew where my father was, and not one person made a sound, not Kane, not the trackers who had eaten at my table, not the river farm women who had known me since I was born, nobody.

Bree started to stand and I put my hand flat on her arm and held her down.

At the head table, Cassian said, "Sable."

That is all he said. And It was not sharp. It was the voice you use to a friend who has told a joke that landed badly, and there was an apology in it, and the apology was not directed at me.

Sable put her hands up and laughed and said that she was only asking, and the room came back to life around her the way a room does when it has been given permission.

I sat through the rest of it. I ate what was in front of me, or I moved it about the plate in a way that would pass for eating, which is a skill you learn quickly in a pack this size. When the toasts began I stood with everyone else and I raised a cup to Cassian Rourke and Sable Winter and the honor they would bring to Emberfell on the coast, and I drank it, and I set the cup down.

Then Bree walked me out to the yard and stood with me in the cold while I got my breathing back.

"Eight days," she said.

"Eight days."

"Maren." She had her arms wrapped around herself and her jaw was working. "I am going to say one thing and then I will leave it alone. I have known you since we were nine years old and I have watched you carry that man for six years, and I want you to hear me say out loud that not one wolf in that room tonight thinks you owe him anything. Not one."

She is right, Vesper said.

Vesper had been almost silent for three weeks. She had gone somewhere far back in me the night of the parking lot and had not come out, and I had stopped expecting her to.

"I know," I said.

Behind us the long house door opened and threw a wedge of light across the gravel, and Cassian came out into it.

He stood there with the light behind him, and he looked at me the way a man looks at a problem he has just noticed is not going to solve itself.

"Maren," he said. "We need to talk about your father.”