Chapter 4

The mill had been dead for fifty years. The wheel was a skeleton, half its paddles gone, the race choked with dead leaves and ice. The roof had fallen in on one side, and through the hole the winter sky came down in a long grey column onto the old millstones, and snow had drifted in a neat white heap against the far wall like flour nobody had swept up.

He was sitting on the bottom millstone, reading.

I stopped in the doorway. I don’t know what I had expected. A soldier, maybe. A clerk with a ledger. Not a man in a long dark coat with his boots crossed at the ankle and a small battered book open on his knee, reading in the cold with the absorbed, private face of someone who had forgotten anyone else existed.

He was very tall, even sitting. Black hair, long and badly tied back with a strip of leather. A face that was all angles—strong nose, hard jaw, a mouth that looked as if it didn’t smile often and had forgotten how. And under the cedar and the cold, the smell that had come through two feet of stone and made my wolf sit up.

He turned a page. Then, without looking up, he said, “You’re letting the snow in.”

“The roof is letting the snow in,” I said. “I’m standing in a door.”

He looked up.

His eyes were green. Not the green of anything in Ashgrove—not grass, not moss, not the green leather on the Alpha’s books. Sea-green, like the colored glass in the old chapel window that the pups used to throw stones at. And when they met mine, something went through me from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, like stepping into the river in February. I put my hand on the doorframe.

He closed his book, slowly, and looked at me for what felt like a long time.

“You came,” he said.

“You drew a lantern.”

“I did.” The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn’t quite a smile. It looked like the beginning of one that had been out of practice for a very long while. “I didn’t think a name would get you up those stairs. I thought a lantern might.”

“I’ve been calling you Lantern,” I said. “In my head.”

That did it. The smile arrived, crooked and startled, and transformed his whole face. “Have you.”

“It was that or the man who reads other people’s papers at three in the morning, and that’s very long.”

“It is very long.” He set the book aside on the millstone. “You have a name too, I assume, copyist. Or shall I keep calling you the girl who presses too hard on the eleventh line?”

I hesitated. Nobody had asked my name in eight years. Delphine called every girl in the house Nell, after the first war child who had worked the kitchens, because she couldn’t be bothered to learn the rest.

“Elowen,” I said.

“Elowen.” He said it slowly, as if he were trying the weight of it. “That’s an old name. It means an elm tree.”

“I know what it means.”

“You don’t look like an elm. Elms are tall and dull and get sick.” He considered me. “You look more like a Holly. Small, and sharp at the edges, and green all winter when everything else has given up.”

“You look like a man who reads poetry in derelict mills and thinks that makes him mysterious.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“It makes you cold.”

He laughed, then. A short, surprised sound, as if it had been surprised out of him, and it echoed up into the broken roof and a pigeon took off from the rafters in a clatter. I found I was smiling. My face felt strange doing it.

“Sit,” he said, and moved over on the millstone. “Please. I’m not going to bite. And I have questions, and I would rather ask them without craning my neck.”

I sat. Not close. The stone was freezing through my skirt.

“Lantern isn’t my name,” he said. “But it will do for today, if you don’t mind. Tomorrow I’ll tell you the other one.” He looked at me sideways. “The eleventh line.”

I had known it was coming. My hand went to my coat anyway, to the stiff folded square against my ribs.

“There was a boy called Tam,” I said. “He died the first winter of a fever. He wasn’t eleventh. He was seventeenth. The Alpha moved him up to fill a space.”

“Whose space?”

I took out the brown roll and unfolded it on my knee, and held it so he could see, without letting go of it. The old elder’s spidery hand. Twenty-one names. The eleventh one.

He read it. He read it twice. I watched his face go very still, and then very cold, in a way I didn’t understand yet and that frightened me a little.

“Elowen of Thornwood,” he read aloud. “Taken in the autumn raid, aged twelve. Ward of the Ashgrove Pack.” He looked up. “Ward. Not adopted. Not ranked. Not mated and gone. Ward.”

“Ward,” I agreed. “It’s a polite word. I work the cellar at night and the kitchen before dawn, and I’m not allowed to be seen or heard by guests, and I’m not paid, and I don’t leave. The pack didn’t want me as a member and didn’t want to let me go, so I stayed a ward. Eight years.” I folded the roll again, carefully, along its old creases. “And now, as of the Long Night, I’m not even that. As of the Long Night I’m a boy called Tam who died of a fever.”

He was quiet for a long time. The wind moved through the broken wheel outside, and the snow came down through the hole in the roof in a slow grey curtain.

“May I hold it?” he said at last. “Only to look. I’ll give it back.”

I shook my head.

I thought he would be angry. Men in Ashgrove were angry when you told them no. He just nodded, as if no were a perfectly good answer.

“Then keep it somewhere safe,” he said. “Not in your coat. Somewhere nobody would think to look.”

“It’s the only thing in the world that says I was ever taken,” I said. “I’m not letting it out of my reach.”

“That,” he said quietly, “is exactly why you shouldn’t keep it on you.” But he didn’t argue further.

He looked out through the door at the river for a while. Then he asked, without turning his head, “Do you have a mate?”

I had known that would come too. Every wolf asks, sooner or later.

“No. I never felt the pull. Not at sixteen, not since. I don’t think I ever will.”

He turned his head and looked at me then—looked at me as though I had said something far stranger than I had. It was there and gone, whatever it was, before I could name it.

“Then why haven’t you run?” he asked. “You’re clearly clever. You know every book in that house; you must know every path off its land. A wolf can be over the border in a night. There’s no shame in living rogue. I did it myself once, for longer than this pack has existed. It’s hard. But it would be yours.”

Nobody had ever said that to me aloud as if it were a reasonable thing for a person to do. I had said it to myself, at night, a hundred times.

“I can’t,” I said. “A rogue who can’t shift doesn’t last a winter. I’ve never shifted. Not once.”

He frowned. “Every werewolf shifts by thirteen. It isn’t a choice.”

“I’m not a werewolf.”

“Then what are you?”

He had turned fully toward me on the millstone now. We were closer than I had meant to sit. I could feel the warmth coming off him in the cold, as if he were a stove somebody had lit. His heart was slow and steady; I could hear it. Mine was not.

I had never said it aloud to anyone. Not to Molly, not to Jasper, not to my grandmother’s grave.

“I’m a Lycan,” I said.