His Mate, Her Choice

The Ashgrove Pack kept two kinds of books. The ones it showed to guests lived upstairs in the Alpha’s study, bound in green leather with gold on the spines. The others lived in the cellar with me.

I had been copying them for eight years. Births and matings. Debts and land. Who had fought in which raid and who had come home. I wrote it all out in a clean, small hand by the light of one oil lamp—Gareth would not waste electricity on a cellar that only a ward used— at a slanted desk under the stairs, while the pack slept above me. Luna Delphine’s first rule was that I should not be seen. Her second was that I should not be heard. Her third, which she had never said aloud but which every wolf in the house understood, was that a girl who knows how to write should be kept somewhere she can’t write anything that matters.

So she gave me the cellar. It had not occurred to her that a cellar full of records is the one place in a pack where everything that matters is written down.

On the night of the Long Night, the shortest day of the year, I was copying the war rolls.

“Fair copies,” Alpha Gareth had said that morning, dropping a stack of loose pages on my desk without looking at me. “Every roll since the eastern raids. The Alpha King arrives tonight and will stay until the full moon. His clerks will want to see our books. They’ll see clean ones.”

His draft was on top. I knew his handwriting; I had been reading it for eight years. Underneath, in the box where it had always been, was the original war roll from the Thornwood raid, in the old elder’s spidery hand, the ink gone brown.

I had copied that roll once before, when I was fourteen and they first taught me to hold a pen properly. I knew what was on it. Twenty-one children were taken from the Thornwood Pack, eight years ago, in the autumn. Twenty-one names. Mine was the eleventh.

Gareth’s draft had twenty-one names too. Nineteen of them were the same. Beside each one, in his tidy new ink, he had written what had become of them: adopted. Ranked. Mated and left the pack. Initiated.

The eleventh name on his draft was a boy called Tam, who had died of a fever the first winter. I remembered him. He had shared his blanket with me in the cart. Tam belonged seventeenth, not eleventh. And on the seventeenth line, where Tam should have been, Gareth had written a name I had never heard in my life: Brin. Adopted by kin in the east. There had never been a Brin.

My name wasn’t anywhere.

I sat for a long time with the two pages side by side under the lamp. Upstairs, I could hear the house getting ready for its guests: boots on the stairs, Delphine’s high bright laugh, the clatter of the good silver coming out. I had polished that silver. I had folded the napkins for the Long Night feast into the shape of swans, forty of them, because Delphine liked swans.

Then I did what I had been told to do. I copied Gareth’s draft in my best fair hand, every word of it, and when I came to the eleventh line, I wrote Tam and deceased and my hand did not shake at all.

And then I folded the old elder’s brown roll in quarters and slid it into the lining of my coat.

I don’t know why. I want to say I had a plan. I didn’t. I only knew that if that page went upstairs, it would go into a fire, and then there would be nothing anywhere in the world that said I had ever been taken.

***

There were things the pack didn’t know about me, and I liked to count them on nights like that one, the way other girls might count their blessings.

The first was that I wasn’t a werewolf. I was a Lycan, like my mother, though I had never shifted and had no idea why. The second was that my wolf talked to me—not the way the pack talked about their wolves, as an itch or a hunger, but in words, quiet and dry and usually right. The third was that I could hear through stone. The cellar ceiling was two feet of it, and still I heard everything.

That was how I heard them arrive.

Cars on the gravel. Many cars. Then doors, and voices, and a sound I had never heard in eight years in that house: silence. The whole pack, two hundred wolves in the great hall above my head, going quiet at once, the way birds go quiet when something large walks under the trees.

And then a smell came down the cellar stairs, through the crack under the door, through two feet of stone. Cold air and cedar smoke and something under it, darker, like the inside of a church in winter.

My wolf sat up.

She did not often sit up. She had slept through my one great crush, on a boy called Jasper who used to make me laugh until he decided I was embarrassing. She had slept through the Initiation two years ago, when the Alpha read out every name but mine and I stood at the back of the yard in a borrowed dress until the lanterns went out. She had slept, more or less, for eight years. Now she was awake and straining toward the ceiling like a dog at a door.

What is that? I asked her.

She didn’t answer. She just kept straining.

I didn’t have a mate. I had decided that at nineteen. Every wolf feels the first pull of the bond by sixteen, Molly had told me—like being hit by lightning, she said, you can’t mistake it for anything else. Molly felt hers at sixteen and was gone within a week. I felt nothing at sixteen, or seventeen, or after. No pull meant your mate had died or chosen someone else, and I preferred to believe he had died. It was less embarrassing.

So whatever my wolf was straining toward, it wasn’t that. I told her so firmly, and went back to copying.

***

At three in the morning, the cellar door opened.

Nobody came to the cellar at three in the morning. Nobody came to the cellar at all, except Delphine’s woman Petra once a week to check that I hadn’t stolen anything, and the boy who brought down my supper tray and left it on the top step like food for a dog he didn’t trust.

I blew out my lamp.

Footsteps on the stairs. Slow, and heavy, but placed very carefully, the way a big man walks when he is trying not to wake a house. A lantern came down with them, swinging, throwing long shadows of the shelves across the floor. The cedar smell came with it, so strong now that my eyes watered.

I was behind the third row of shelves, crouched between the tithe ledgers and the birth books, with the brown roll pressed flat against my ribs inside my coat. I had been hiding in that cellar for eight years. Nobody had ever found me there when I didn’t want to be found.

The lantern stopped at my desk.

I heard pages turning. My fair copy of the war rolls. He was reading it. Slowly. He turned back a page and read it again.

Then he set the lantern down on my desk and said, to the dark, in a low, unhurried voice that did not belong to anyone in Ashgrove:

“Your ink’s still wet.”

I didn’t breathe.

“And your chair is warm, and there’s a cup of tea on the floor by the desk leg that someone has been drinking out of for the last hour.” A pause. “You can come out. I’m not going to tell anyone you were here. I only want to ask you something about this page.”

My wolf was pressing against the inside of my skin so hard that it hurt. Go, she was saying. Go, go, go.

I stayed exactly where I was.

He waited for a long time. I heard him breathe in, slowly, the way you breathe in when you are trying to find something by scent, and I knew he must be able to smell me, because I could certainly smell him. But he didn’t come round the shelves. He didn’t raise his lantern. He just stood at my desk and waited, as if he had all the patience in the world and was prepared to spend it.

At last I heard him pick the lantern back up.

“The eleventh line,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “Tam. Deceased. Odd. The ink on that line is darker than the rest. As if whoever wrote it pressed very hard.”

Then he went back up the stairs, slow and careful, and the door closed, and the cedar smell faded until it was only a thread in the air.

I sat in the dark between the tithe ledgers and the birth books until my legs went numb.

When I finally lit my lamp again, my fair copy was exactly where I had left it. My tea was exactly where I had left it. And on top of the copy, squared neatly to the corner of the page, was a small square of folded paper that had not been there before.

On it, in a strong, slanting hand I had never seen in any book in that cellar, someone had written: Who taught you to write like that?