Chapter 5

He didn’t say anything for so long that I began to wish I could take it back, the way you wish you could take back a step onto thin ice.

He didn’t look shocked. That was the strange thing. He looked like a man doing a very long sum in his head and not liking the answer.

“You have a wolf,” he said at last. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“And you’ve never once touched her shape.”

“Never.”

“Then how do you know she’s there?”

“Because she talks to me.”

His head came up. “Talks.”

“Not all the time. She’s—” I tried to think of how to explain it. “Dry. She has opinions about my choices. Mostly she sleeps. She’s been very awake since the Long Night.” I heard what that sounded like as I said it and went hot to the ears. “That isn’t—I mean she doesn’t—”

“Elowen.” He said my name gently, the way you might put a hand on a horse. “A wolf doesn’t talk. Not ours, not anyone’s. She’s a pull, a hunger, a second pair of eyes. Sometimes a picture, if she’s very strong. Never words. Not in a thousand years have I heard of a wolf that used words.”

My stomach dropped through the millstone.

I had known. Of course I knew. I had been eight years in a house full of wolves, hearing them talk about their wolves as if they were weather, and I had never once heard anyone say she told me. I had just never let myself put it together. As long as I didn’t, it was only one more thing I didn’t mention.

Now he had put it together for me, sitting on a cold stone in a dead mill, and I didn’t know what that made me.

It makes you mine, my wolf said—clear, and quiet, and very close, as if she were standing just behind my ear. And I am you. We are different, little Holly. That is all. The difference is not broken.

She had never called me anything before. Warmth went through me from my chest outward, slowly, like tea in cold hands, and the panic loosened its fingers.

A lantern was staring at me.

“Your eyes,” he said.

“What about them?”

He didn’t answer. He reached out, very slowly, giving me every chance to pull away—and I didn’t—and turned my face toward the column of grey light falling through the broken roof. His palm was warm against my jaw. His thumb rested on my cheekbone as lightly as if I were made of paper.

“They’ve gone silver,” he said. “They were grey a moment ago. Now they’re silver right through, like moonlight on water.”

I had never seen my own eyes do anything. There were no mirrors in the cellar. The only one I had ever looked into was the cracked one in the scullery, and only to check for soot.

“Is that—bad?”

“I don’t know.” He was still holding my face. He didn’t seem to have noticed. “A werewolf’s eyes go blue when she reaches for her wolf. A Lycan’s go gold, or amber, or red if he’s very dominant. Silver—” He shook his head. “I’ve been alive a long time, Holly. I have never seen silver.”

“Don’t call me Holly.”

“You called me Lantern.”

“That’s different. You drew one.”

“You look like one,” he said, and then seemed to hear himself, and let go of my face, and looked away at the river with the expression of a man who has said one sentence more than he meant to.

The silver was fading; I could feel it go, like a warmth draining out of the backs of my eyes. My wolf had gone quiet again, but not asleep. Watching.

“Are you going to tell anyone?” I asked. “About her. About the eyes.”

“No.”

“Not even your King? I copied a letter once from Gareth’s friend in the north. It said the King collects strange creatures. Keeps them in a menagerie under his castle, to look at when he’s bored.”

Lantern made a small choked sound. “Does it?”

“It said he keeps a two-headed cat and a mermaid in a bathtub.”

“It doesn’t say that.”

“It does. I copied it in my best hand. I was fourteen and I had nightmares about the mermaid for a week.” I looked at him. “Have you seen her? The mermaid?”

He had put his hand over his mouth. His shoulders were shaking. “Elowen. Have you ever seen the King?”

“Wards don’t see kings. Words see the bottoms of stairs.” I shrugged. “Delphine makes sure the guests never set eyes on me. I imagine he’s very old and very fat and has a beard he combes with oil.”

He took his hand away from his mouth. His face was perfectly grave. His eyes were not.

“I imagine,” he said, “that he’d be very hurt to hear it.”

***

It was then that the silver came back, and this time it took me with it.

I felt it start behind my eyes, the same warmth as before, only stronger—and then it wasn’t warmth at all. It was a pull, low in my chest, as if something deep inside me had stood up all at once and the rest of me had been jerked after it on a rope. The mill tilted. The column of grey light swung sideways. My wolf was right there at my ear, closer than she had ever been, and I couldn’t hear a word she said for the roaring.

His hand was on my arm before I knew I was falling.

“Easy,” he said. “Easy. Put your head down. Right down.”

I did, because I didn’t have a choice. I sat bent over on the cold millstone with my forehead almost on my knees and his hand flat between my shoulder blades, not pressing, just there, and breathed until the floor stopped moving.

“What was that?”

“Her.” He sounded very calm, in the way people sound calm when they are being careful. “She reached for you. Properly, I think, for the first time. A wolf who has been asleep for twenty years doesn’t do that gently.” A pause. “How long since you slept?”

I tried to count. The Long Night feast. Forty pages of war rolls. Forty plates. Two nights with the notes on my chest. The bread at five. The laundry. They run through the snow.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Two days. A little more.”

“Then that’s the rest of it.” He took his coat off—I heard the heavy wool move—and folded it into a square and put it on the millstone behind me. “Lie down until the floor stops moving. I’ll sit in the door and watch the track.”

“I can’t. The bread for supper—if I’m not back—”

“If you stand up now, you’ll go into the river on the way home, and then nobody will set the bread at all.” He said it quite gently. “Lie still, Elowen. You won’t be alone here. Not for a minute. You have my word, for whatever a stranger’s word is worth.”

I should have argued. A week ago I would have walked home on my hands rather than close my eyes in front of anyone in Ashgrove, let alone a strange man in a dead mill. But my legs weren’t mine, and the coat smelled of cedar and cold and something under it like a fire banked for the night, and my wolf, for once, said nothing at all against it.

I lay down. He went and sat on the step in the doorway with his back to me and his face to the river, a dark shape against the snow.

Just before sleep took me, I opened my eyes once more.

“Lantern,” I said. “If someone gave me a chance to leave that house—a real one, not a rogue’s winter—”

He turned his head.

“Before you finished asking,” I said. “That’s the answer. In case you were going to ask.”

It was the first time I had ever said it out loud. It didn’t sound like a wish. It sounded like a plan someone had been keeping for me.

He didn’t answer. He looked at me for a long moment from the doorway, and then turned back to the river.

The last thing I saw was him sitting there with his eyes closed, very still, the way people sit when they are listening to something far away. His lips moved. I heard his voice, but not the voice he had used with me. Lower. Colder. Speaking to someone who wasn’t there.

“Find out who she belongs to.”

I should have asked who he was talking to. I should have got up and run for Ashgrove, because the light was already going, and any girl who missed evening roll call met Petra in the smokehouse at first light.

But the coat was warm, and the river was loud, and sleep had already closed its hand around me. I didn’t ask. I would spend the rest of that day wishing I had.