The lake had been talking to itself all evening, and by midnight it had settled into a low, grinding mutter under the ice. I knew that sound the way a farmer knows hail. It meant the freeze was shifting, opening seams out past the point, and any man foolish enough to be out on the crossing would do well to keep his weight spread and his pole moving. I was that foolish man. The coffin sat behind me in the flat bottom of the ferry, strapped down with two lengths of rope and a canvas tarp that had gone stiff as a board in the cold. It was a plain pine box, nothing fancy, the kind the undertaker up at Coldwater Landing turned out four at a time. No name on the lid. No carving. Just a shipping stamp burned into the wood, and a paper tag I had already turned over twice to make sure the ink hadn't run. Twenty pounds of silver ore, the tag said. Consigned to the Council receiving house at Iron Bay. That was a lie, of course. There was no ore in that box. There was a hundred and twelve pounds of smuggled tobacco, six bolts of mill cloth, and, if the manifest from my brother's old route held true, a sealed tin of letters some clerk in the capital would pay handsomely to get back. None of it was worth a man's life. All of it was worth more than mine, which was how I had come to be out here at this hour with the wind cutting through my coat and the ice groaning beneath my boots. The ferry was a wide, shallow scow, fifteen feet of oak and tar, built to ride low and take a load. She had no name painted on her bow, which suited her. I had bought her secondhand from a man in Duluth who had gone into the shipping business and was glad to be rid of anything that smelled of the water. She leaked a little at the seams when the ice pressed her, and she answered her pole like an old horse that knows the road home. I called her nothing at all, most days. Naming a thing makes it harder to lose. I drove the pole down through the slush at the edge of the channel, felt it bite, and walked it back hand over hand. The ferry slid forward. My breath came out in a white rope that the wind tore apart before it could rise. My wolf was awake in the back of my skull, the way he always was on the ice, and he did not like it. He had a long body and pale fur the color of my own hair, and he paced when he was uneasy. He was pacing now. The ice is thin past the point, I told him. We've crossed thinner. He did not answer me in words. He never did. He only pushed at my senses, sharpening them, and the world came in all at once, the cold iron smell of the water under the ice, the pine resin from the far shore, the faint sourness of the canvas tarp. And then something else. I stopped the pole. Stood still. The ferry kept drifting, and the ice groaned, and I turned my head to listen with a thing that was not quite my ears. A heartbeat. It was small and rapid and it was not mine. Mine was slow, the way it got when I worked. This one was fast, a bird's pulse in a box, and it was coming from under the canvas. I had loaded that coffin myself. I had helped the carpenter nail the lid down at the dock, and I had watched him set the last nail and wipe his hands on his apron. There had been nothing alive in that box when it went onto the ferry. I would have bet the boat on it. I would have bet my own hide. The wind changed. It came off the north shore, off the dark line of pines, and it carried a smell that made my wolf stop pacing and lift his head. Silver. Not the ore in the tag. Real silver, cold and bitter, the smell of a chain or a blade. Under it, faint but clear, was something warmer. Something like cedar smoke and clean skin and winter apples. The heart in the coffin beat faster. I set the pole down across the thwarts and walked back along the narrow deck, one hand on the gunwale. The tarp was frozen stiff and I had to work my fingers under the edge to get a grip. I peeled it back. The pine lid looked the same as it had when I loaded it, no crack, no gap, no sign that anyone had touched it. I put my ear to the wood. The heartbeat was there, close and quick, and I heard breathing, short and careful, the breathing of someone trying not to be heard and failing. I had a pry bar in the locker under the stern seat. I got it. I wedged the flat end under the edge of the lid and leaned my weight on it, and the nails gave one by one with a sound like small bones snapping. The lid lifted. Cold air rushed into the box, and with it came the full force of that smell, cedar and silver and apples, and my wolf made a low sound in the back of my mind that I had not heard from him in years. There was a woman inside the coffin. She was curled on her side in a nest of straw and shipping blankets, and her hands were bound in front of her with a chain that gleamed dull in the moonlight. Her hair was long and wavy and the color of a copper kettle, and it spilled across the straw and caught what little light there was. Her face was turned up toward the gap I had opened, and her eyes were green, a bright, clear green, and they were open and fixed on me. She had a soft face. Round cheeks. A small straight nose. Two deep dimples that showed even now, when her mouth was set in a hard line. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen on that lake, and I had seen the northern lights over it more times than I could count. I did not move. She did not move. The ice under the ferry shifted with a long, grinding sigh, and the boat rocked, and her chain rattled against the side of the coffin. "You're not the man who put me in here," she said. Her voice was low and rough with cold, and she spoke like someone who had been rehearsing the words for an hour and had finally decided to use them. "No," I said. "I'm the man who's supposed to deliver the box." "To Iron Bay." "To Iron Bay." She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, something in her face had changed. It was not fear. I had seen fear on the ice before, and it looked different. This was something colder and more patient. "You need to turn this boat around," she said. "Take me back to the north shore and let me out at the first landing. Do that, and I will tell the Council that the ferryman was not involved." The Council. The word sat between us in the cold air like a dropped stone. I looked at the chain on her wrists. It was a fine, flat-linked chain, and it had a shine to it that ordinary iron does not have. Silver. Real silver, the kind that burns a wolf's skin, the kind that slows the healing and makes the blood run thin. There was a small charred mark on the underside of her left wrist where the chain had rested too long against the skin. "You're a wolf," I said. "You know what I am." She lifted her chin. "You can smell it on me. Just as I can smell the pack on you. Northshore, by the pine and the wet stone. The ferryman with the blond hair and the dead brother. Ewan." She said my name the way a clerk reads a charge. "You've got the advantage of me," I said. "I have your name, your boat, and your route. That is not an advantage. That is a file." She sat up slowly, working her bound hands under her, and the chain dragged across the straw. "The Council sent me to this shore to find a man smuggling silver ore under a false manifest. I found him. I was making my report at the landing when someone put a needle in my neck and a lid on my head. So you will understand why I am not inclined to trust the man who was paid to carry me." I crouched down beside the coffin so I could see her better. The wind pushed at my coat. Out on the lake, far off, the ice gave another long groan, and the sound of it ran under the boat like a fingernail on a table. "Who paid you to say that?" I said. Her green eyes narrowed. "Excuse me?" "The Council doesn't send enforcers to a frozen shore in January over a box of tobacco. They send a letter, and a clerk, and a fine. They don't send a woman in a silver chain. So either you're lying about who you are, or the Council has taken an interest in my little boat that I can't explain." I leaned my elbows on my knees. "Which is it?" She was quiet for a moment. I watched her think, and I could see the calculation move behind her eyes the way the ice moved under the boat, slow and heavy and hard to stop. "My name is Maren," she said at last. "I am a silver warden of the Council, and I was sent to this shore to execute a smuggler. Not to arrest him. The order was signed and sealed before I left the capital." The lake seemed to go very quiet around us. I could hear the blood in my own ears. "And you were going to do it," I said. "I was going to do my duty." Her voice did not waver. "Until someone decided to bury me alive in the cargo I was sent to inspect. So now my duty is somewhat less clear than it was this morning." She held up her chained wrists. The silver had left red lines in her skin, and the skin around them was pale and cold. "The key is in the pocket of my coat. That is, if the coat is still in this box." I found the coat folded under the straw, a dark wool thing with a heavy collar and a pocket sewn inside the lining. The key was in the pocket, small and iron, and it was cold enough to bite my fingers. I unlocked the chain and pulled it free, and she made a sound that was almost a gasp as the silver left her skin. The red lines stayed. She rubbed at her wrists with both hands, and her fingers shook, and she did not try to hide it. "Thank you," she said. "I haven't decided anything yet." I dropped the chain into the bottom of the boat. It clinked against the wood. "You said you were sent to execute me. That's a hard thing to hear on a cold night." "It should be." She looked up at me, and her green eyes were steady. "But the man who was sent to kill you is not the man who is sitting in this box. I am cold, I am tired, and someone in my own Council tried to bury me. I would like to know who. I suspect you would like to know why." The wind came off the north shore again, and this time it carried something under the pine and the cold water. It carried her scent, close now, cedar and clean skin and apples, and my wolf stood up in the back of my mind and pressed against my ribs and would not be moved. My hand was on the edge of the coffin. Her hand was on the straw beside it, an inch from mine. I did not reach for her. She did not reach for me. The cold between us had a shape to it, and the shape was a held breath. Then her head came up. She turned toward the north shore, and her whole body went still. "Someone is coming," she said. I heard it a moment later. Not a heartbeat this time. A howl, low and long, rolling out from the pine line and across the ice, and then another howl answering it from the south, and a third from the east, until the frozen lake was ringed with voices. The Council's hounds. They had found the scent of the coffin, or they had found the scent of the woman in it, and they were closing from three sides. Maren looked at me, and for the first time since I opened the lid, her face was not calm. "Ferryman," she said. "If they take me back, I will not be buried in a box next time. I will be buried in a hole, and your name will be on the charge sheet beside mine. So I am asking you plainly. Do we run, or do we fight?" I looked at the chain in the bottom of the boat, and the coffin with its lid hanging open, and the woman with the copper hair rising out of the straw like something the ice had given back to me. The howls came again, closer. I picked up my pole.

I poled for the north shore because the south channel was open water and the east channel was where the howls were thickest. The north shore meant the pine line and the old logging road and a mile of woods I knew better than any wolf in the pack, and it meant I could put the boat between the ice and the rocks and hope the hounds lost the scent in the slush. Maren rode in the bow with the pry bar in her hands and the chain coiled at her feet like a dead snake. She had put her coat on and pulled the collar up around her ears, and she watched the shore the whole way with her green eyes narrowed against the wind. "Left of the big pine," she said. "There's a gap in the rocks." "I know the gap." "Then take it faster." The ferry scraped bottom. I jumped out into knee deep water and hauled on the bow line, and the cold went through my boots and up my legs and settled in my bones. Maren jumped out beside me and pushed from the stern, and her boots found the rocks without slipping once, which told me she had done this kind of work before. We dragged the scow into the gap and tied it to a birch and stood there in the dark with our breath coming hard. The howls had stopped. That was worse than the howls. "Up the bank," I said. "There's a hunter's blind about two hundred yards in. Old, but it has a roof." She followed me without a word. The snow was knee deep in the hollows and crusted on the ridges, and every step we took made a noise like breaking glass. My wolf pushed at my senses and I let him, and the woods came in around me, the smell of frozen moss and old woodsmoke, the scratch of a hare moving under a root somewhere to our left, the wet iron smell of the lake behind us. And her. Cedar and clean skin and apples, close behind me, and my wolf would not stop turning toward it. The blind was a lean to of poles and pine boughs built against a boulder, and the snow had drifted over the front of it so that it looked like a badger's den. I kicked the drift apart and pulled the boughs back, and we crawled inside and sat with our backs against the rock. The wind went around us instead of through us. It was the first time in an hour I had been out of it, and my hands started to shake now that they had nothing to do. Maren pulled a tin matchbox from her coat and struck one and held it up. The flame lit her face from below, her round cheeks and her small nose and the two deep dimples that showed even when she was not smiling, and her green eyes looked at me across the little light. "You're shivering," she said. "I'm cold." "You're afraid." She shook the match out and the dark came back. "I can smell it on you. You're afraid of the hounds, and you're afraid of me, and you're afraid of whatever it is the Council wants with that box." "I'm afraid of a lot of things," I said. "Mostly that I'll be dead by morning and my sister will have to sell the boat to bury me." "Your sister." "Isla. She's twenty four and she thinks she runs the pack, and she is going to be very angry with me when she finds out what I did tonight." Maren was quiet for a moment. I heard her shift against the rock and the rustle of her coat. "Tell me about the order," I said. "All of it. Not the part you practiced on the ice." She did not answer right away. When she did, her voice had changed. It was flatter and more careful, the voice of a woman reading from a page she had memorized. "The order came down from the Council chamber in the capital three weeks ago. It named a smuggler on the north shore of Lake Superior who was moving silver ore under false manifests, and it named the route and the dock and the boat. I was assigned as warden because I have family in this territory and the Council thought I would be... motivated." "Motivated." "My father is in the Council's prison at Iron Bay. He was the Silver Warden before me. He signed a confession eight years ago, and the Council has kept him in a cell ever since. The order came with a note attached. If I completed the assignment, his case would be reviewed." "So they bought you with your father." "They did not need to buy me." Her voice went hard. "I am a warden. I do what the Council tells me to do, and I do it well, and I do not need a bribe to do my duty. The note was a courtesy. Nothing more." The wind pushed at the pine boughs over our heads. I thought about the chain in the bottom of the boat, and the red lines on her wrists, and the way she had said the word duty twice in one breath. "Then why didn't you do it?" I said. "You had the coffin. You had the silver. You could have put that chain around my throat and been done with it before I ever opened the lid." She was silent for so long that I thought she would not answer. "Because when I put my hand on the lid," she said, "I felt something. I thought it was the cold. I thought it was my nerves. I lay down in that box to wait for you, and the moment you put your hand on the wood, I felt it through the whole coffin. A pull. Like a rope tied to my ribs." My wolf stood up in the back of my mind. He did not pace. He stood still, and he listened. "You know what it is," she said. "Don't you." I did know. Every wolf in the territory knew the stories, and the Northshore pack told them around the fire at the pack house when the ice was thick and the nights were long. A bond that finds two wolves and ties them together. A scent that gets into your blood. A touch that changes the shape of the world. My father had told me about it once, before he was executed, and he had told it like a warning and not a blessing. "The mate bond," I said. "It's not possible." Maren's voice was low and fast. "I am a warden of the Council. I have taken oaths. The Council does not permit its wardens to take mates outside the capital packs. There are rules, there are dispensations, there is a whole office of clerks who decide who is allowed to bond with whom, and none of them would ever approve a ferryman on the north shore with a false manifest and a dead brother and a boat that leaks." "You've looked into my file." "I memorized your file." She said it without apology. "I memorized every file on that route. It is what a warden does." I leaned my head back against the rock. The cold of it came through my hair and into my skull, and it helped. "Then tell me how it works," I said. "The bond. What did the Council teach you?" She shifted again, and I heard her hands move in her lap, and then she spoke in that careful, reading voice. "The bond is a bond of wolves and not of people. It wakes when two wolves touch, skin to skin, or when they are close enough for long enough. It grows with contact and it starves without it. It lets mates feel each other across distance and speak without words, though the speaking comes later, after the mark. It cannot be faked and it cannot be broken except by the Council's ritual, which is done only in the most extreme cases and requires the consent of the Alpha and the Council together." "And if one of them rejects it?" "The rejecting wolf pays a price. The bond tears, and the tearing leaves a wound that does not heal clean. Some wolves lose their shift. Some lose their minds. The Council keeps records of eleven cases and none of the eleven lived past the second year." I thought about my father again. He had never told me that part. "What about the other one?" I said. "The wolf who gets rejected. What happens to them?" "The bond does not care about fairness," Maren said. "The rejected wolf feels the tear as well. They simply do not pay the same price." The wind changed and the boughs over our heads rattled. Somewhere out on the ice a fox screamed, and I heard it for what it was and nothing more. "Give me your hand," I said. "Why?" "Because I want to know if you're telling the truth, and because I want to know what happens when we touch." "I told you what happens. The bond wakes." "Then let's see it wake." She did not move for a long moment. I heard her breath go in and out, slow and deliberate, the way a person breathes when they are trying to be calm. Then her hand found mine in the dark. Her fingers were cold and her palm was warm, and the moment her skin met mine the blind filled with a light that had no source. It was not a glow and it was not a spark. It was a warmth that started in my hand and ran up my arm and into my chest and settled behind my ribs like a coal taken from a fire, and my wolf threw back his head and howled in the back of my mind, and I heard her wolf answer him. Maren made a sound I had never heard a woman make. It was not a gasp. It was lower than that, and it came from somewhere under her ribs, and her hand closed hard around mine and did not let go. I saw things. I saw a green field in summer and a house with a red door and a man with grey hair reading a letter at a table. I saw a silver chain and a cell and a face I did not know. I saw a lake at dawn with the ice breaking up and a boat I did not recognize, and I saw a child with copper hair and green eyes running along a dock. Then it was over. The warmth receded, the coal banked itself, and I was sitting in a hunter's blind with a warden's hand in mine and the snow coming through the boughs over our heads. "That was not a flicker," Maren said. Her voice was unsteady. "That was the whole thing. That was the bond waking all the way up." "I know." "That is not possible." She pulled her hand back and pressed it against her chest. "That is not possible. The bond takes weeks. It takes months. It takes a proper courtship and a proper ceremony and a dispensation from the office of clerks, and it does not happen in a hunter's blind in the middle of the night with a smuggler who smells like fish." "I don't smell like fish," I said. "I smell like tar and cold iron. There's a difference." She laughed. It was a short, surprised sound, and it stopped almost before it started, but it was a laugh, and it changed the air in the blind. Then the howls came back. They were close this time, and they were not the same howls. These were sharper and more urgent, and they were coming up the bank from the water, from the gap in the rocks where we had left the ferry. Maren's head came up. "They found the boat." "They found the chain." I pushed myself to my feet and pulled the boughs back and looked out into the trees. The moon was behind the clouds and the snow was coming down in a slow, steady fall, and through it I could see shapes moving between the trunks. Four of them. Maybe five. They were not running. They were walking in a line, and the line was coming straight toward the blind. Maren came up beside me with the pry bar in her hand. "Your pack," she said. "Will they help us?" "If they know what's good for them, they'll stay in their beds." "That is not an answer." "It's the only one I've got." The lead shape stopped at the edge of the trees and lifted its head, and the wind brought me its scent, and my wolf knew it before I did. Gunnar. The Northshore Beta. Brown fur and a heavy shoulder and the smell of pine smoke and the pack house kitchen, and behind him three more wolves I knew by name. Gunnar shifted first. He came up out of the snow on two legs with his coat already in his hand, a stocky man with a brown beard and a broad face, and he pulled the coat on and stood there in the falling snow with his breath steaming. "Ewan," he said. "You have got about ten seconds to tell me why the Council's hounds are on our shore and why there is a Council chain in your boat and why there is a strange woman standing in a hunter's blind with my Beta's scent all over her." I stepped out from the boughs. The snow came down between us. "Gunnar," I said. "This is Maren. She's a silver warden. Someone tried to bury her alive in my coffin tonight, and the hounds are not here for her. They're here for the box. If they get that box, the pack is finished, and I mean finished, because the box is not full of tobacco and I think you already know that." Gunnar's face did not change. He looked at Maren for a long moment, and then he looked at me. "The Alpha is dead," he said. "They found him in his bed an hour ago. Ostrander has called the pack to the house, and he is saying you did it." The snow kept falling. Somewhere behind me Maren's chain shifted in the bottom of the boat, and the hounds howled again, closer now, and I stood in the middle of it with my hands empty and my wolf silent and the whole north shore coming apart under my feet.

Gunnar's wolves spread out along the bank and took the ferry's bow line. I did not argue. The Council hounds were on the ice and the Alpha was dead in his bed, and the only road out of that hollow was the logging trail that ran behind my dock, and the logging trail was Gunnar's ground as much as mine. We went single file through the pines. Gunnar led, coat open, snow up to his thighs, and I came behind him with Maren between me and the wolves. She did not stumble. She did not ask where we were going. She walked with her chin down and her hands loose at her sides, and twice I saw her turn her head to the wind the way a wolf does when it is counting what is out there in the dark. The dock shed stood at the end of a short timber pier, a low building of tarred planks with a stovepipe and a padlock. I kept a lamp inside and a cot and a shelf of rope and a chest of tools, and under the floorboards, in a hollow I had cut myself with a chisel, I kept the things that mattered. I got the door open and got Maren inside and shut it behind us. Gunnar stood in the doorway with the snow blowing past his shoulders. "I'll take the wolves and put a line on the trail," he said. "If the hounds come this way I'll send word by Tamsin. She's got a reason to be out at this hour and nobody counts her." "Tamsin counts everything," I said. "That's why she's useful." Gunnar looked past me at Maren, who had taken off her coat and was standing by the stove with her back to the wall. "She stays in here. She does not go near the pack house. Ostrander has called a gathering for dawn and he has already told the pack that you put a needle in the Alpha's neck and then ran for the border. He has the Council's ear and half the warriors, and he is saying he will have you dragged out of whatever hole you are hiding in." "And you believe him?" Gunnar's broad face did not move. "I believe the Alpha is dead and you were not at the house and there is a Council chain in your boat. I believe you have been running cargo under a false manifest for five years and I have looked the other way because your brother was my friend. What I believe about the rest of it will keep until dawn." He left. The door thumped shut. His wolves went up the trail and their paws made soft, steady sounds in the new snow, and then the shed was quiet except for the stove ticking as it heated and the lake working at the pilings under the floor. I lit the lamp. Maren had found a rag and was wiping the snow off her boots. Her hair had come loose from behind her ears and hung around her face in damp copper ropes. "Sit down," I said. "You're white as the snow outside." "I am cold. I told you." She sat on the edge of the cot anyway, and her hands went to the stove and she held them there. The red lines from the silver chain had faded to pink. Her healing had taken the worst of it, then. "Your father," I said. "The one in the Council prison. What's his name?" She looked up at me. "Why do you want to know?" "Because you're going to tell me who put a needle in your neck, and I'm going to need names." "Roderick." She said it the way a person sets down something heavy. "His name is Roderick. He was the Silver Warden for nineteen years and he was good at it. He knew every ore road in the territory and every clerk who signed for a shipment. Eight years ago a Council audit found forged manifests in his office and a silver chain in his desk, and he signed a confession and they put him in Iron Bay. I was nineteen. I have visited him twice a year since." "What did he confess to?" "Smuggling silver out of the Council's mines. Selling it to rogue packs. Undermining the Council's authority." She turned her hands over in front of the stove. "He told me once that he signed the confession to keep me out of it. That was the only explanation he ever gave me. He said the Council wanted someone to hang the crime on and he was the closest neck." I went to the shelf and took down the tin cup and poured her a measure of the coffee I had made that morning and kept in a stone bottle. It was cold and bitter, and she drank it without complaint. "Tell me about the coffin," I said. "Not the order. The coffin. How did you get into it?" "I was at the landing at Coldwater. I had finished my report and I was waiting for the mail sled to take me back to the capital. A man in a Council coat came up to me and asked me to step into the receiving shed to sign a manifest. I remember the coat and the smell of the shed. I remember a hand on the back of my neck and a sting. Then I woke up in the dark with straw in my mouth." "Did you see his face?" "I saw his coat. Council grey with the silver braid on the cuff. That is all." "Then it could be any clerk in the territory." "It could." She set the cup down on the floor and looked at me. "But a clerk does not have a silver chain that fits a warden's wrists. A clerk does not have the keys to a receiving shed. Whoever put me in that box had access to the Council's own stores. That narrows it." I thought about Ostrander. Silver haired, grey eyed, with a voice like warm honey and a hand that had been in every pie on the north shore for thirty years. He had been at the pack house when I left for the crossing. He had watched me load the coffin. He had asked me twice about the weight of it. "You have a face," Maren said. "I have a lot of faces. Which one?" "The one that means you have thought of something and you are deciding whether to tell me." I turned away and opened the small door of the stove and put a stick of birch in on the coals. The bark caught and the flame came up yellow. "There's a Councilman," I said. "Ostrander. He runs the silver trade out of the receiving house at Iron Bay. He came to the pack house three days ago and he asked me about a coffin on my route and I told him it was ore and he smiled at me like I had told him a joke he already knew." "And you think he put me in it." "I think he put something in it. Whether it was you is a question I don't have the answer to." Maren stood up. She crossed the shed in three steps and stopped in front of me, and she was close enough that I could see the green of her eyes had gone darker, the way a wolf's eyes go when the animal is near the surface. "You are not telling me everything either," she said. "The box was not full of tobacco. I smelled the pine and the pitch and the rope, and under it I smelled paper. A lot of paper. Old paper, the way a library smells. So tell me, ferryman, what is in the coffin?" "Letters." "Whose letters?" "My brother's." That stopped her. She stood there in the lamplight with her mouth open, and her dimples showed, and then her face closed up like a door. "You have a brother." "I had a brother. His name was Rhys. He was two years older than me and he was the best ferryman on this shore and he died on the ice four years ago in a storm off the point. He was carrying a load of mail for the Council and the ice opened under him and they found the boat three days later and they found his coat and his pole but they never found him." "And the letters?" "Rhys kept a ledger. Every load he carried, every man who paid him, every clerk who signed for a crate. He wrote it all down. He used to say a ferryman who keeps a ledger never gets cheated twice." I picked up the poker and turned the birch over. "When he died I went through his things and I found the ledger under his mattress and I read it and I found some things in it that did not match what the Council told us about his last crossing. So I kept it. I cut a hole in the floor and I put it in a tin box and I never showed it to another living soul until tonight." Maren's green eyes did not leave my face. "Show me," she said. "Why should I?" "Because someone buried me in a box and someone put a needle in my neck and someone killed your Alpha in his bed and blamed you for it. Because I have a bond to you now that I did not ask for and cannot afford, and I would like to know whether the man on the other end of it is honest or a liar." She held out her hand. "Show me the ledger." I could have refused. I should have. A man in my position learns early that the only thing worth keeping is the thing nobody else knows about. But she stood there with her hand out and the stove glow on her copper hair and her green eyes steady, and my wolf had already decided for me, and I hated him for it. I got down on my knees and pulled back the loose board and took out the tin box. It was a cracker tin, red once, now mostly rust, and the lid had a picture of a sailing ship on it. I set it on the cot and opened it and took out the ledger. It was a fat book with a cracked leather cover and a ribbon marker. Rhys had written in it with a stub of pencil in a small, neat hand, and the pages were foxed along the edges from four years of cold and damp. Maren sat down on the cot and opened it. She turned the pages one by one, and her finger moved down the columns, and I watched her read. Then she stopped. Her hand went still on the page. "What is it?" I said. "Your brother's last crossing." She looked up at me and her face had gone pale again, and not from cold. "The load he was carrying for the Council. It was not mail. It was a sealed crate with a Council stamp and a code. I know that code. It is the code the Silver Wardens use for ore shipments." I stared at her. "The Council told the pack he was carrying mail," I said. "The Council told you wrong." She turned another page and stopped again. "Ewan. The man who signed for that crate. His name is on this page." "Who?" She looked up at me and her green eyes were very still. "Ostrander." The stove ticked. The lake worked at the pilings. I stood there in the lamplight with my brother's handwriting under Maren's finger and the name of the man who had killed my Alpha and buried a warden alive sitting on the page like a stain. Then someone knocked on the shed door. Three slow knocks and a pause and two quick ones. Tamsin's knock. Maren closed the ledger. I put it back in the tin box and the tin box back under the floor and the board back over it, and I had the padlock in my hand when the door opened without me touching it. Tamsin stood in the snow with her blonde hair coming loose from her hood and her blue eyes wide and her breath going in and out in short white puffs. She had her apron on under her coat, which meant she had run from the tavern without stopping. "Ewan," she said. "You need to come. The hounds have gone up to the pack house and Ostrander is standing on the porch with the Alpha's blood on his shirt and he is telling the whole pack that he found it in your shed. He's got a silver chain and a needle and he is saying the Alpha's death is proof that you are a rogue and a traitor and a murderer." She stopped. She looked past me at Maren, who had come up behind me with the tin cup still in her hand. Then Tamsin's face changed. Her mouth opened and she pointed. "And who," she said, "is the woman with the Council brand on her wrist?"