Chapter 3

I had not been outside the house in daylight for four years.

That isn’t quite true. I crossed the kitchen yard twice a day, to the well and the woodpile, with my head down and my shawl up. But I had not gone anywhere—not past the laundry lines, not past the orchard wall, not into the trees—since I was sixteen and Alpha Gareth caught me in the forest at the edge of the pack lands and broke my nose against the trunk of a beech to teach me where the edge of the pack lands was. It had healed a little crooked. I touched it sometimes, without meaning to, when I thought about leaving.

I touched it a great deal that morning.

It is a mill, my wolf said, with enormous patience, while I stood in the box room with my coat half on. It is not the moon. It is twenty minutes’ walk.

“It’s twenty minutes’ walk past the edge of the pack lands,” I told her. “In daylight. To meet a stranger who could be anyone.”

He is not anyone.

“How do you know?”

She didn’t answer. She never answered that kind of question. She just leaned toward the door the way she had leaned toward the ceiling on the night of the Long Night, and I felt it in my chest like a hand pulling.

There were nine hundred and ninety-nine ways it could end badly, and I could list most of them. Being seen. Being reported. Petra’s delight. Delphine’s cellar—the real cellar, the one under the old smokehouse, with the iron ring in the wall. A beech tree.

Damned if you do, Elowen, I thought. Damned if you don’t.

I put the folded note in my pocket with the brown roll and went.

***

The safest way out was through the laundry yard. In the days after a feast, every sheet in the house was out on the lines, drying slowly in the winter cold, rows and rows of white, snapping in the cold wind like sails, and a girl in a grey shawl could walk the whole length of the yard behind them without anyone in the house seeing her at all. I had done it before, when I needed air badly enough. I was nearly at the orchard gate when I heard the laugh.

High, bright, carrying. Delphine’s power laugh. And under it, Petra’s, lower and wetter, the laugh of a woman who had once had eight laundresses flogged for gossiping about the Alpha and had enjoyed every stroke.

They were coming down the yard. Between the sheets. Toward me.

I didn’t think so. I stepped sideways between two lines of wet linen and stood perfectly still, with a damp sheet against my face and another against my back, and I made myself as small and quiet as I had been making myself for eight years.

That was when I realized I wasn’t alone between the sheets.

Rhys was standing three feet away from me, in his plain soldier’s coat, with a peg in one hand and the corner of a pillowcase in the other, looking at me with exactly the expression of a man who has just been caught doing something he cannot possibly explain.

I stared at him. He stared at me. Then, very slowly, he put one finger to his lips.

“Oh! Hello.” Delphine’s voice, on the other side of the sheet. Sweet as syrup. She had seen his boots. “Are you lost? The guest wing is that way.”

Rhys pushed the sheet aside with his forearm and stepped out into the aisle, smoothly, letting it fall closed behind him. “Not lost, Luna. Just admiring your laundry. We don’t get linen this white in the King’s barracks. It’s very—restful.”

A pause. I could hear Delphine deciding whether he was mocking her.

Then she sniffed.

I felt it rather than heard it: the air between the sheets moving, very slightly, toward her. Delphine was an Alpha’s daughter; her nose was better than most. And she had been smelling me in her house for eight years. I heard her breath catch. I heard Petra beside her sniff too, and make a small, hungry sound.

“How strange,” Delphine said lightly. “I could have sworn I smelled one of my girls out here. A dark-haired one. She isn’t supposed to be in the yard in the daytime. Have you seen her, by any chance?”

She knew. She knew exactly where I was. She wanted him to point. It would be worse that way—not just a girl out of her place, but a girl caught bothering one of the King’s men, with the King’s man as the witness. Petra would make sure it was a story for weeks.

I closed my eyes against the wet sheet and waited for it.

“No,” said Rhys. “Only a great deal of laundry, Luna.”

Silence.

“Are you quite sure? I really do think—”

“Are you suggesting I can’t tell a girl from a pillowcase?” His voice dropped—only a little, but it went somewhere low and flat that made the hair on my arms stand up. It wasn’t a question. It was a warning, and every wolf in that yard knew the difference. “Or that I’d lie to my host?”

I heard Delphine’s heart speed up. I heard her bow her head; I could tell from the way her breath changed. She was afraid of him. I had never in my life heard Delphine afraid of anyone, and some small, mean, delighted part of me wanted to frame the sound and hang it on the wall.

“Of course not,” she said. “Forgive me. Petra, come. We’re late.”

They went. The laughter didn’t come back with them.

I stood between the sheets until I couldn’t hear their steps anymore. When I finally pushed the linen aside, Rhys was leaning against the post at the end of the line with his arms folded, looking extremely pleased with himself.

“Nobody really admires laundry,” I said. My voice came out rusty. I hadn’t used it on anyone but my wolf in weeks.

His eyebrows went up. Then he grinned, wide and delighted, like a boy who has won a bet.

“She speaks,” he said. “I told him you would, eventually.”

“Told who?”

He just looked at me, and I knew. Of course I knew. The cedar on his sleeve.

“Does she hurt you?” he asked, more quietly. “The Luna.”

I thought about the cellar under the smokehouse, and the iron ring in the wall, and the beech tree. I thought about how to explain eight years to a stranger between two lines of wet laundry, and I couldn’t think of a single place to start.

So I did what I always did. I gave him a small smile that meant nothing, and I went through the orchard gate, and I ran.

“Twenty minutes’ walk!” he called after me. “The track by the river. You can’t miss it. He’s been there since eleven.”

I didn’t look back. But I ran faster.