The first thing I knew was the taste of metal, and the second was that I was naked on a stone floor with no memory of how I got there. Rain came through the high window of the old kelp store in slow, cold drops that found my shoulders and the small of my back. My clothes lay in a heap near the door, which meant someone had undressed me. My boots were gone. My coat was gone. The silver chain I wore at my throat, the one my mother had given me before she died, had been torn off and left in a coil near the drain. It had melted at one link. I tried to call my wolf. Nothing. Not a stir, not a growl, not the low familiar pulse under my ribs that had been there since I was fourteen years old. I reached for him the way a man reaches for a light in a dark room, and my hand found empty air. I reached again. I lay there on the wet stone and reached until my jaw ached from clenching and sweat ran into my eyes, and the room stayed as silent as the inside of a coffin. "Right, then," I said, because there was nothing else to say, and my voice came out flat and strange, like a stranger's. I sat up. The room tilted. I got my knees under me and stayed there, breathing, counting the things I could still feel. Cold. Wet. A cut on my forearm that was not healing. I watched it for a long moment, waiting for the slow draw of skin closing, the small warm itch that had always come before. Nothing happened. The blood ran down to my wrist and dripped onto the stone and made a small dark circle that spread and spread. Silver. I knew silver the way a sailor knows a storm. It had gone into me somewhere, and whatever it had touched, it had burned out of me. The window showed a sliver of sky the color of old pewter. Somewhere out past the harbour wall, the sea was working at the rocks with its usual patience. I could still hear the water. That was something. My ears were still sharper than a human's, or they had been a minute ago. I could hear the creak of a rope on the far side of the harbour and the low complaint of a gull and a man coughing in his house three streets away. The wolf was gone but the wolf's habits stayed, and there was a kind of cruelty in that I did not want to look at too closely. I got to my feet, took the coat from the heap, and pulled it on. It smelled of brine and smoke and, faintly, of someone else. A woman. Not perfume, nothing so easy. Wool and chalk and something clean like rain on stone. I told myself it was the coat and not the scent that made my stomach turn over. The coat was mine. No woman had worn it. The metal taste came back stronger, and I leaned against the wall and was sick into the drain, and afterward I wiped my mouth and looked at the stain on my hand. It was too dark. There was something in it that was not only blood, a grey shimmer that caught the window light. The pack house would be waking soon. Agnes would have the bread in the oven and the kettle on, and Bram would be arguing about the boats with whoever would listen, and Marcus would be in his study with the ledgers and the whisky he thought no one knew about. If I walked in like this, they would see. They would smell the silver on me before I got through the door. A Beta who cannot shift is not a Beta. Pack law is not kind about these things. Marcus would have to make a show of it, and I had seen what his shows looked like. The thought of Marcus was a strange one, and I turned it over while I pulled on my boots. I had known him since we were boys. He had pulled me out of the surf when I was nine and the tide took me, and I had stood at his shoulder at his father's funeral and at his challenge and at every hard thing since. He would want to know who had done this. He would want blood for it. I was certain of that in the way a man is certain of the ground under his feet, and it did not once occur to me to doubt it. I did not know yet that the ground was a lie. The door of the kelp store gave onto a lane that ran down to the harbour, and I took the lane slowly, keeping to the wall. The rain had stopped. The sky was going pink over the hills, and the first boats were sliding out past the breakwater with their lanterns swinging. Thomas the magistrate stood at the end of the pier in his good grey coat with his hands behind his back, watching the boats go. He turned his head when he saw me, and something crossed his face, quick as a bird. "Elias," he said. "You're out early." "Couldn't sleep." I kept my voice easy. "You're out early yourself, Thomas." "Customs men in Oban got word of a run," he said. "I'm deciding whether to know about it." "You always decide the same way." "I do." He looked at me a moment longer than a man looks at another man in a grey morning. "You all right? You've got a look to you." "Bad oysters." He laughed, and the laugh was real, and he waved me on. I felt his eyes on my back the whole length of the pier. Thomas was a good magistrate and a better smuggler, and a good smuggler counts everything twice. The pack house stands at the top of the village where the hill meets the pines, a long low building of grey stone with a slate roof and a yard full of boats and nets and the smell of the kilns. I went round the back, through the gate that sticks in the rain, and up the outside stair to my own room under the eaves. I washed the blood off in the basin and burned the rag in the grate and put on a clean shirt and stood in front of the little mirror my mother had left me. My hair was a mess. My eyes were the same grey green they had always been, and they looked like they belonged to someone who had been up all night losing something. I practiced a face. The face was not good, but it was a face. Then I heard her. The howl came from the direction of the shore, out past the village and the last of the houses, where the shingle runs out toward the island that only shows itself at low tide. It was a woman's howl. I knew that at once, the way you know a woman's voice in a crowd, and it was a first shift, because no wolf who had shifted before howls like that. There is a note in it, a long rising note, part fear and part wonder. It goes up and up and does not know where to land. I had heard it twice in my life, both times at a distance, and I had never heard it this close, and I had never heard it while standing on two legs with nothing in my chest but my own heart going hard. I went to the window. The tide was out. The island lay black and wet across the sand with the sea pulling away from it, and on the shingle a shape moved, low and pale, and then the shape stood up and it was a woman with her hands in her hair and her breath coming in clouds. And then she looked at the pack house. Across all that distance, across the sand and the rocks and the wet grass, she looked straight at my window, and I felt it in my teeth. I do not know how to explain what happened in that moment, so I will only put down what I felt. It was as if a rope had been tied to something deep in my chest and the other end of it had been thrown across the shore and pulled tight. My hands shook on the windowsill. The empty place where my wolf had been ached, actually ached, the way a lost tooth aches. I wanted to go down to her. I wanted it with a violence that frightened me, because I had never wanted anything that way in my life, not food, not rank, not the sea, and I did not even know her name. The howl stopped. She stood very still on the shingle. Then she turned and walked, quick and unsteady, back toward the village, and the feeling in my chest eased off by slow degrees like a rope being paid out. I stayed at the window a long time. My breath had fogged the glass. I wiped it with my sleeve, and my sleeve came away with a spot of grey on it, the same grey shimmer as before, and I stared at that spot until the door behind me opened. Agnes stood there with her white braid over her shoulder and a bowl in her hands. She is seventy years old and she has cooked for three Alphas, and she can see through a wall if the wall is hiding something she wants to know. "You missed breakfast," she said. "And you look like a drowned cat." "I was out." "On the shore? Chasing a howl?" She set the bowl down on the table. It was porridge, with a curl of honey on top. "That was a first shift, that was. A late one. The whole village heard it." "Someone new?" "Someone old," Agnes said. "You know her. The schoolteacher. The one who came back in the spring with her books and her city manners. Clara." Clara. I turned the name over and it fit the shape of her in the way a key fits a lock, and I did not like how glad I was to have it. The schoolteacher. I had seen her once at the market, a woman with champagne blonde hair pinned up and a basket on her arm, arguing with a fishmonger about the price of herring. She had won the argument. I remembered that and nothing else, and now I had a name and a howl and a rope tied to my ribs, and I had no wolf to help me make sense of any of it. "Eat," Agnes said. "You'll need it." I sat down and ate because it was Agnes and because my hands wanted something to do. The porridge was good. It was always good. Halfway through the bowl I said, "Agnes, if a wolf took silver and lived, what would the pack say?" The old woman was quiet for a moment. She picked up the rag from the hearth and folded it, and she folded it again, and she did not look at me. "The pack would say nothing," she said, "if the Alpha said nothing. And the Alpha would say nothing if the Beta asked him sweetly." She put the rag down. "Is that what I'm to understand from the state of your arm, Elias?" I put my sleeve down over the cut. "It's nothing." "Nothing," she said. Her warm brown eyes were steady on mine. "Nothing does not smell of silver in my kitchen. Nothing does not leave a streak of it in my basin." She took the empty bowl and set it in the sink. "You watch your Alpha today. Watch him close. There is a thing in this house that has been eating at it for a long time, and I am too old to be the only one who sees it." Before I could ask her what she meant, the yard below filled up with boots and voices. Bram came in from the boats with his curly auburn hair wet and his cheeks red, calling for his breakfast, and two of the Gamma's men came in behind him arguing about a net. Then the kitchen door opened again and Marcus came in, and the room got quieter the way it always did, and he smiled at Agnes and clapped Bram on the shoulder and poured himself a cup of tea, and I sat at the table with my arm aching and watched him and thought, He is my Alpha. He pulled me out of the surf. He would want blood for this. He turned from the fire with his cup in his hand and looked at me, and his light brown eyes went over my face in a slow, friendly way, and then he said, "Elias. You look terrible. Come to the study, I've something for you." He said it warmly. He said it the way he had said a thousand things to me since we were boys. And I got up and followed him out of the kitchen, and behind me I heard Agnes set the kettle down hard on the stove, and the sound of it went through me like a struck bell, and I did not know why. The study door closed. Marcus set his cup on the desk and leaned against it, and the beauty mark near his lip caught the firelight, and he said, "A woman shifted on the shore this morning. A late bloomer. The schoolteacher. I want you to watch her for me." "Watch her," I said. "Guard her. She'll need it, her first days." He smiled at me, warm and easy, and then he said the thing that took the ground out from under me. "And Elias. If you feel anything when you're near her, anything at all, you come to me first. Before you tell her. Before you tell anyone." The fire popped. I stood there with my arm full of silver and my wolf gone and my chest still aching from the pull of a woman I had never met, and I looked at my Alpha, my friend, the man who had pulled me out of the surf, and I said, "Why?" Marcus picked up his cup and drank and did not answer me right away. "Because," he said at last, "I know what it looks like when a wolf finds his mate, and I will not have this pack torn apart by it again." He said it kindly. He said it the way a man says a thing he has said to himself many times in the dark. And I stood in his study and understood, for the first time in my life, that my Alpha was afraid.

I left Marcus's study with his words still warm in the air and went straight down to the boats, because work was the only thing I knew how to do with a fear in my chest. The Gamma's men had the nets out on the shingle, and Bram was mending a tear in one of them with his fingers going too fast and his tongue between his teeth. He looked up when I came down the slip. "Elias. Marcus says you're to watch the schoolteacher." "Marcus says a lot of things." "He says she's dangerous." Bram said it the way he said everything, hopefully, as if danger were a thing you could be introduced to. His hazel eyes were bright. "He says she shifted on the island, right where the old ones are buried. That's not right, is it? A first shift on the island. My father always said the island was for the old Alphas." I took the net from him and found the tear and began to work it closed. The cord was rough on my fingers. My fingers had always been quick. "Your father said a lot of things too, Bram." "But is it true?" "It's true she shifted there. I heard it." "Then it means something." I did not answer that. I had a stone in my chest where the answer should have been, and the stone was heavy, and I did not want to hand it to a boy of twenty three who still thought his Alpha could do no wrong. I worked the net and let him talk about the catch and the tide and a girl in the village called Ivy who asked too many questions, and when the net was mended I went up to the pack house and made myself busy in the storeroom, counting barrels. Counting barrels is good work for a man who does not want to think. There were forty one barrels of salt herring and six of oil and a crate of something Thomas had brought up from the harbour in the night that I decided not to open. Around noon my arm began to burn. It started at the cut on my forearm and went up to my shoulder and sat there like a hot coal wrapped in cloth. I pushed my sleeve up in the storeroom with the door shut and looked at it. The cut was a thin dark line, the edges gone grey, and the grey had spread out from the line in little threads that reached down toward my wrist. It smelled of the metal taste in my mouth. I took a clean rag from the shelf and a jar of Agnes's salve, the one she makes with beeswax and marigold, and I bound it up myself and pulled the sleeve down, and then I sat on a barrel and looked at the closed door and listened to the pack going about its day on the other side of it. Every one of them would smell it. That was the trouble. A wolf's nose is a delicate thing, and silver is a loud smell, the way a bell is a loud sound. It would be under the salve and the wool and my own skin, and anyone who stood close enough and breathed deep would find it. Nina the healer would find it in a second. Nina found everything in a second, it was her curse and her gift, and she had been finding me for years. I had not spoken to Nina alone since the winter before last, when she had come to my door in the rain and told me, in her clinical gentle way, that she could not be my mate and that I should not ask her again. She had not given me a reason. She had given me a list of things that were not the reason, in the way she did, and then she had gone back to her cottage and I had stood in the rain and had it out with my wolf, who had wanted to run after her and had not understood why I would not let him. Now my wolf was gone and the memory of that night sat in my chest like a swallowed stone, and I found that I could look at it without the old clawing at my ribs. Silver takes more than your shift. It takes the edge off everything. I went to Nina's cottage that afternoon because I was a fool, or because some part of me still wanted her to tell me what to do. She was at her table with her dark brown hair pinned up and a mortar of dried leaves in front of her, and her grey eyes came up to mine and stayed there a moment too long. She has a soft face with a small straight nose and long dark lashes, and she has always looked at people as if they were a problem she had been asked to solve, and she looked at me that way now. "Your arm," she said. "Nothing." "Elias." I sat down across from her. "It's nothing you can fix." She got up and came round the table and took my arm without asking and pushed the sleeve back. She unwound the rag I had tied and looked at the grey threads under my skin and her face did not change. That was how I knew it was bad, because Nina's face never changed when it was bad. She pressed two fingers to the cut and I felt the heat of her touch, and then she took her fingers away and wiped them on her apron. "Silver," she said. "In the blood. And your wolf?" I did not answer. "Say it." "He's gone." She sat down. She did not reach for me. That was not what she did. She folded her hands on the table and looked at the mortar and said, "How long has it been in you?" "Since last night. I don't know when it went in." "Who put it in?" "I don't know." "Who would want to?" "Any man with a grudge against a Beta." She looked at me then, and her grey eyes were flat and steady, and she said, "That's not the whole of it." It was her way of talking. She said that to me the first time we met, when I came to her with a gash from a boar and told her it was nothing. That's not the whole of it, she had said then, and she had been right then too. I got up and pulled my sleeve down. "Keep it quiet," I said. "If Marcus hears I can't shift, he'll have to make a thing of it, and I don't want to be made a thing of today." "Marcus already knows." I stopped at the door. "He came by this morning," Nina said. "Before the sun was up. He asked me how a wolf might be poisoned without a wolf noticing, and what the silver would do to a Beta who had too much of it in his blood." She picked up the pestle and turned it over in her fingers. "I told him a wolf would notice. I told him it would have to be put in by someone the wolf trusted, or in his food, or in his cup. He listened to me very politely and then he thanked me and went away." The door felt cold under my hand. "Why are you telling me this?" "Because you are going to ask me to keep it quiet," she said, "and I am not going to lie to you and say I will keep it from him. I will keep it from the pack. Marcus hears what Marcus asks me for." I stood there with the handle under my palm and the stone in my chest turning over. "Is there a cure?" "I don't know. I've never heard of a wolf taking silver and living to tell it. There are stories of it in the old books. They all end the same way." "Which way is that?" She did not answer. She set the pestle down in the mortar and said, very quietly, "Go and see the schoolteacher. Marcus will ask you today whether you've done it, and you'd better be able to tell him yes." The schoolhouse stands at the bottom of the village green, a low white building with a slate roof and a bell in a wooden frame at the gable, and there is a stone wall round the yard that the children sit on in fine weather. There is a smell to the place. Chalk, and wet wool, and the ash from the stove, and something underneath it all that belongs to no one. I stood at the gate with my hand on the latch and told myself that this was work, that Marcus had given me an order and I was a soldier who followed orders, and I stepped into the yard and the door opened and Clara came out with a pail of water in her hand. Her hair was down today, champagne blonde and soft over her shoulders, and her eyes when she saw me were blue green and wide and her full lips parted, and her strong jaw went tight. She was not a small woman. She was tall and she carried herself like she expected to be argued with. She wore a grey dress and her sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, and her forearms were pale and clean, and there was a little burn on the back of her wrist from a pot. She stopped. She did not say good afternoon. She looked at me the way a person looks at a dog they are not sure about, and she said, "You're the Beta." "I'm Elias." "I know who you are." She set the pail down. Water slopped over the rim and made a dark mark on the step. "What do you want?" And then I caught her scent. It came off her like the smell of the shore after rain, wool and chalk and that clean rain on stone, the same smell that had been on my coat in the kelp store, and it went into me and found the rope that had been tied to my ribs that morning and pulled it tight. My hands went cold and then hot. I could not look away from her face. My body did not care at all that my wolf was gone. My body knew what it wanted and it did not need a wolf to tell it. But there was nothing behind it. I stood in the yard and waited for the mate bond to open like a door, the way I had heard it described all my life, the warm flood of knowing, the sense of a place found. There was nothing. There was a rope and a pull and a terrible ache in a place where the wolf used to be, and that was all. I could feel the bond reaching for me through a wall I could not see and could not get past, and it was like hearing a voice on the other side of the water. "You look ill," Clara said. Her voice was careful. "Are you ill?" "No." "You're the color of a fish." "That's a kind thing to say to a stranger." "I wasn't being kind." She picked up the pail again. "I'll be honest with you, since you've walked into my yard without an invitation. I know what you are. I know what all of you are, up at that house on the hill. I came back here to bury my grandfather and I have seen things since that I cannot explain, and I am not going to stand here in the wet and be polite about it. Whatever Marcus wants from me, he can ask me himself." The name landed between us. She had said his name like a thing she had been turning over. I felt the rope go slack and then tight again. "How do you know my Alpha's name?" Her chin came up. "Everyone knows the man who runs the boats and the kilns and the magistrate. My father worked for him once. My father left. I came back." "Why?" "Because I have questions," Clara said, "and this is the only place that has answers." She turned and went into the schoolhouse and shut the door. Through the wall I heard her set the pail down and say something to a child inside, and a girl's voice answered her, bright and curious, and then the stove door scraped. I stood in the yard with the rain beginning to fall and my arm burning under my sleeve and a bond I could not feel pulling at a place where nothing lived anymore. I went to the gate. I had my hand on the latch when the pain in my arm turned to a hot bright line and I looked down and saw a thread of grey light running up under the skin of my wrist, moving under it like a fish under ice, and it went up past my elbow and into my shoulder and stopped. The whole arm went numb. And in the numb place, for one heartbeat, something moved. It was small and far away and it was not my wolf. It was something old and hot and it did not know my name. Then it was gone, and the rain came down harder on the green, and I stood at the gate of the schoolhouse with my good hand on the latch and my bad arm hanging useless at my side, and I heard Clara's voice through the door again, saying to the child, "Ivy, fetch me the long spoon, the one on the hook." The name Ivy went through me like a spark. I knew that child. Everyone knew that child. And on the other side of the door, in the warm chalky dark of the schoolroom, Clara was teaching her letters, and neither of them knew yet what was coming up the hill from the sea.

I did not go straight back up the hill. I walked the shore instead, because my arm had come back to life with a dull ache that spread up into my shoulder and I wanted to be alone with it before I had to be alone with Marcus. The tide was out. The sand was grey and wet and full of the small ordinary wreckage of a working coast, a broken creel, a length of tarred rope, the rib of a boat that had come apart in some winter I did not remember. Out past the shingle the island lay black and flat with the water still running off it, and the stone that showed at its center was the same stone the old people called the wolf's table. I had been out to it twice in my life. Once as a boy on a dare. Once two years ago, at night, when Nina told me she would not have me. I sat on the shingle and looked at the island and tried to find the bond. It was there. That was the thing I could not get my head around. It was there and it was not. When I turned my attention to it the way I would have turned my attention to my wolf, I found a place where something had been cut out, and behind the cut place there was a warmth that was not mine. It had a shape. It had a scent on it, chalk and rain and wool. When I reached for it, it was like putting my hand into a wall of cold water and feeling a fire on the other side. I tried to shift. I put my hands on my knees and I closed my eyes and I found the place under my ribs where the wolf used to sit curled and warm, and I called him. Nothing came. I called until my jaw ached and my hands were fists and the gulls came down to see what I was doing on the shingle, and then I opened my eyes and the island was still there and I was still a man with a bad arm and a hole in his chest. A boot scraped on the stones behind me. Clara stood ten paces away with her shawl pulled round her shoulders and her hair blowing loose from its pins and a basket on her arm. She had come down the path from the village, and I had been so far inside my own head that I had not heard her, and that frightened me more than anything else that had happened in two days. A wolf who cannot hear a woman on shingle is a dead wolf. "You," she said. "Me." She did not go away. She came a few steps closer and stood looking down at me with her eyes narrowed against the wind, and her jaw was set in a way I was beginning to recognize. "What were you doing just now? You looked like a man trying to lift a cart off his own foot." "Praying." "You're a poor liar." "That's not the first time I've been told." She almost smiled. It came and went so fast I might have invented it. Then she looked past me at the island and the smile was gone. "Is that where they bury your people?" "Who told you we bury people out there?" "My grandfather used to say the island belonged to the wolves, and the wolves belonged to the island. He said it like a joke. He was always saying things like a joke." She set the basket down. There were mussels in it and a bundle of green stuff wrapped in dock leaves. "I used to think he was a storyteller. Then I grew up and came back and found out he wasn't." "Clara." I got up off the shingle. My bad arm hung at my side and I did not try to hide it. "Yesterday you told me you had seen things you could not explain. I am going to ask you a question and I want you to answer it straight. Have you ever seen a wolf on two legs?" The wind took her hair across her face and she pushed it back with a wet hand. She looked at me for a long moment, and her blue green eyes did not move from mine, and I watched her decide something. "No," she said. "I have not." "You're a poor liar." Her mouth went tight. "I told you what I know. I have seen things in this village I cannot explain, and I have questions, and I came back for answers. That does not mean I have seen a wolf on two legs, and it does not mean I know what you are. I am a schoolteacher. I teach children their letters. Last week I taught Ivy that the letter W makes two sounds and she argued with me about it for a quarter of an hour. That is my life. That is the whole of it." She was lying. She was lying so hard I could nearly see the shape of the truth behind her eyes, and her eyes followed me as she said it, the way a cat follows a bird. She was afraid. Not of me in the way a woman is afraid of a strange man on a shore. She was afraid of something I could not see, and she was looking at me to find out if I was it. "All right," I said. "You've never seen a wolf on two legs." "That is what I said." "Then we have nothing to talk about." I picked up the basket and held it out to her. "Except the tide. It'll be back in an hour and you'll be cut off out here if you keep wandering." She took the basket and did not thank me. She turned and started up the path toward the village, and then she stopped and said, without turning round, "My grandfather's name was Andrew. He was a boatman. He drowned in the spring of the year I was born, or that is what my father told me. When I was six years old my father came home from the harbour with a silver cup in his coat and put it on the shelf and told me never to touch it. Then he left, and the cup went with him, and I have not seen either of them since." She looked over her shoulder at me. "Does that answer your question?" "Which question?" "Why I came back." She went up the path and the wind took the sound of her feet on the stones and left me standing on the shingle with the sea coming in. I did not know then what the cup was. I did not know that I had seen it already, in a heap of clothes on a kelp store floor with one link melted, and that the thing she had put on a shelf as a child had been in my mouth as silver and in my blood as fire. That would come later. What I knew then was that my Alpha had asked me to watch a woman who lied about wolves and whose father had carried a silver cup out of this village, and that Marcus had asked me to tell him first if I felt anything near her. I went up the hill. The pack house in the late afternoon smells of onions and wet wool and the peat in the stove. Agnes had the big pot on and two of the young ones were peeling turnips at the long table, and Bram was in the yard with a bucket of pitch, and the whole house had the ordinary busy sound of a place where people live. I went through it to Marcus's study and knocked and he called me in. He was at the window with his back to me, and the light was behind him so I could not see his face. "You've been with the schoolteacher." "I have." "And?" "She says she has never seen a wolf on two legs. She says her grandfather was a boatman who drowned the year she was born, and that her father left the village with a silver cup in his coat and never came back. She came back for answers." Marcus was quiet. Then he turned round and the window light fell across him and I saw his face, and for a moment there was something wrong with it. Not the shape of it. The look in it. His light brown eyes were looking at me and past me at the same time, as if I were a word he had read in a book and was trying to place. "Silver cup," he said. "You know the cup?" "I know a cup." He went to the desk and picked up his own and turned it in his hands, and it was not silver, it was plain pewter, and he looked at it as if it had told him something. "Tell me exactly what she said. Word for word." I told him. I told him about the shelf and the warning and her father's coat, and while I was talking he set the cup down and walked to the fire and stood with his hands clasped behind him, and I watched him, and I remembered Agnes in the kitchen telling me to watch my Alpha close. "Elias," he said at last. "I want you to bring her up here tomorrow. Not to the pack house. To the chapel. Father Callum can be there. I want her to swear an oath before the pack that she will keep what she has seen to herself. A first shift is a delicate thing. A late bloomer is more delicate still. She needs to be brought in properly, or she will do damage." "She's a schoolteacher with a basket of mussels, Marcus. What damage is she going to do?" He turned round and looked at me and his eyes were his own again, warm and certain. "You are my Beta," he said. "You have been at my shoulder since we were boys. I am asking you to trust me and to bring the woman to the chapel tomorrow at noon. Can you do that for me?" There is a thing that happens in a pack. When the Alpha asks you a question like that, the answer is not a word, it is a thing your body does. My body had done it for twenty years. My body had stood at his shoulder at his challenge and at his father's grave and at every hard thing since. My body wanted to say yes. But my wolf was gone, and my body was not so sure anymore. "I'll bring her," I said. He smiled at me and it was the old smile, and he said, "Good man," and I went out of the study into the corridor, and there was Nina coming up the back stair with a bundle of dried herbs in her arms and her dark hair coming down, and she stopped when she saw me. "Your arm," she said. "It's the same as it was." "It won't be." She looked past me at the study door, and then at me, and her grey eyes were flat and steady. "I have been in the old books since you left me. There is a thing I did not tell you this afternoon because I did not understand it. A wolf who takes silver and lives, the books say the wolf can come back if the silver is drawn out. But it has to be drawn out by a mate." I stood in the corridor with my arm aching and my mouth dry. "You are not my mate, Nina. You told me so in the rain two winters ago." "I know what I told you." Her voice was low. "I am telling you now what the books say. If the bond you have with the schoolteacher is real, then she is the only one who can draw it out, and if you do not let her, the silver will go on burning through you until there is nothing left of the man or the wolf. I do not know how long it takes. The books are not kind about the ending." She went past me down the corridor with her bundle of herbs, and I stood at the top of the stair with the noise of the kitchen coming up through the floor and the pack going about its evening, and down the hill in the schoolhouse the lamp would be lit by now, and the woman with the champagne hair and the questions would be marking a child's letters with a stub of pencil, and the rope that ran between us was pulling, pulling, and I could not feel the other end of it. The next morning I would take her to the chapel and Marcus would make her swear an oath, and I did not know yet what my Alpha was going to do with her, and neither did she. What I knew was what the old woman had said in the kitchen, and what the healer had said in the corridor, and what I had seen with my own eyes on the shore. It was not much. It was enough to make me stand at the top of that stair for a long time with my hand on the rail before I went down and sat with my pack and ate my supper and said nothing at all.