The heather was wet when I fell into it. My wolf noticed the cold before I did, the cold of wet stone and old moss, which meant water close by, and shelter, and a place to put Ronan down before my arms gave out. He was a dead weight across my shoulders, breathing ragged in my ear. Seventeen years old and thin as a fence post, and heavier than he had any right to be. "Almost there," I whispered. "You hear me?" He made a sound that might have been my name. The pines thickened as the ground climbed, and the moon came out long enough for me to see the ridge ahead. A cairn stood at the top, grey stones stacked about as tall as a man, and past it the heather dropped toward a dark line of water. Then the wind shifted and I smelled them. Wolves, a pack, and a strong one, their scent mixed with woodsmoke from somewhere below. My wolf went rigid behind my ribs. I had run from Council enforcers for three years and I knew the smell of a hunting party. This was settled territory, a border, and I had walked into it with my brother on my back and blood drying down my arm. "Ronan. Hold on to me." His hand closed weakly on my collar, and I started forward. If I stopped, I would not get up. I had learned that about myself on the road from Ashfall, when the only thing that kept me moving was that my legs did not know how to stop. A wolf stepped out from behind the cairn. He was not enormous the way the old warriors of Ashfall had been, but he moved like he had been waiting all evening for something exactly like me. His fur was pale gold in the moonlight, and his eyes were a bright gold-brown that fixed on me and did not move. I set Ronan down. There was no point running with him in my arms, and I had spent three years learning the arithmetic of hopeless fights. Better to stand and let the wolf decide. "Please," I said. "He is hurt. He is seventeen. Whatever your pack law says about rogues, he has done nothing. We need one night." The wolf's ears flattened. Then the air bent the way it does when a shift begins, and he came up onto two legs and became a man. He was tall and lean through the shoulders, with the build of a shepherd who walked hills all day rather than a warrior trained in a yard. His hair was pale golden blond, short and curling with sweat, and his eyes were the same gold-brown. There was a knife in his hand, and the blade caught the moon and showed the white gleam silver always gives. I knew silver when I saw it. My whole body knew it. "You crossed the border," he said. His voice was calm and strangely formal, like a man reading from a page. "There is a law in this pack. Rogues are executed where they stand. I do not make the law. I only carry it." "I know what the law is. I also know you have not used that knife, and I have been standing here a full minute talking to you. So either you are slow, or you are curious. Which is it?" Something moved in his face. Not a smile. Almost. Behind me, Ronan groaned and tried to push himself off the grass. The man's eyes dropped to him, to the thin wrists and the shirt hanging off him, then back to me, and I watched him take a breath. Then his whole body went still. He stood there with the silver knife in his hand and his chest stopped moving, and his eyes widened as the wind carried my scent up the ridge. I watched him breathe it in and saw what it did to him. I felt it at the same moment. A pull in my chest, low and hot and unwanted, like a hook had gone through the meat of me and someone on the other end had given it a tug. My wolf surged forward with a sound that was not quite a growl. Every cold calculation that had kept me alive for three years told me to run from this man. The knife shook in his grip. "No," he said, and it was not to me. His hand tightened until the knuckles went pale. "No, this is not. I cannot." "You cannot what?" My voice cracked. "Kill me? Then put the knife away before you cut yourself, because your hand is shaking and I would hate for a great Cairn warrior to die of a scratched thumb." He looked at me properly then, and the pull between us tightened until it was hard to breathe. His eyes were gold and full of something I did not want to name, and I knew, with a certainty that made me want to be sick, that he felt exactly what I felt. "The knife is silver," he said slowly. "I have carried it since I was fourteen and never failed to use it when the law required." "Then use it." "I cannot." "Why not?" He did not answer. He was still staring at me, and then, very deliberately, he crouched and laid the silver knife flat on the wet stone of the cairn. He stood back up with his hands open at his sides. Because I am your mate, I thought. The words arrived whole and terrible. And you know it, and I know it, and neither of us can say it out loud. "My name is Finn," he said. "Son of Angus, Alpha of the Cairn Pack. What is your name?" I should have lied. I had a dozen lies ready. Instead I said, "Elara," and heard how bare it sounded. "Elara." He said it carefully, as if learning the shape of it. Then he looked down at Ronan, and his jaw tightened. "Your brother cannot stay on this ridge. There are patrols out, and if my father's warriors find you before I do, they will not stop to ask questions, and I will not be able to stop them." "And you? What will you do?" He bent and picked up the knife, and I flinched before I could help it. But he only slid it into the sheath at his belt, and then he lifted Ronan off the ground as easily as a bag of fleece. "There is a bothy on the south slope," Finn said. "Old, but the roof holds. You will wait there tonight, and I will bring bread, and in the morning we decide what to tell my father." "You would hide a rogue from your own pack." "I would hide you," he said, quiet and certain, and the pull in my chest ached. "Do not make me regret it." He started down the slope with my brother in his arms, and I followed because there was nothing else I could do. At the bottom of the ridge, where the heather gave way to pines, he stopped and turned his head. "One more thing. The full moon is in nine days. Whatever you are running from will find you before then. I would like to know what it is before it arrives at my border." I opened my mouth to lie. What came out was, "There is a man named Torin. He is coming, and he will not stop at the cairn stones. He will not stop at anything." Finn's face changed. It was small, a tightening around his eyes, but I saw it. "Torin," he repeated, and then, almost to himself, "the enforcer." "You know him?" "I know of him. Everyone knows of him. He has been hunting one rogue for three years, and the Council has never once asked him to stop." He looked at me for a long moment. "Elara. What did you do to make an enforcer of the Council of Alphas hunt you for three years?" The wind came off the loch and pulled at my hair, and somewhere down in the glen a dog barked twice and fell silent. I looked at the man holding my brother, at the silver knife at his belt, and I made the only choice left to me. "I survived," I said.

The bothy sat halfway down the south slope, half sunk into the hillside. Finn pushed the door open with his shoulder, and the smell that came out was sheep and wet ash and a hundred years of smoke soaked into the walls. "Inside," he said. "Quickly." I ducked through the low doorway after him. There was one room, a hearth at the far end with a few cold turfs beside it, a wooden bench along the wall, and a pile of old straw in the corner. Finn laid Ronan down on the straw and stepped back, and I saw him look at his own hands, at the blood drying there that was not his. "Whose blood is that?" he asked. "Mine, mostly. Some of it is his." I knelt and pulled Ronan's shirt up. The wound along his ribs had stopped bleeding, but the edges were angry and dark, and when I pressed the skin around it he did not stir. Finn crouched on the other side of him. "How long has he been like this?" "Two days. He took a blade meant for me." I said it flatly, because there was no way to say it that did not make me want to break something. "He is a late bloomer. His first shift should have come a year ago. Every day it does not come, he gets weaker." "He needs a healer." "He needs to not be found by enforcers." I looked up at him. "You said you would bring bread. Bring it, and then leave us alone until morning." Finn did not move. He was watching me with those gold-brown eyes, and in the dim light of the bothy his face was harder to read than it had been on the ridge. He was young, I realized. Younger than I had first thought, though not by much. "You are bleeding too," he said. "Your arm." "It will close." "That is not the same as healing clean." He stood and crossed to the door. "I will bring bread, and water, and something for the wound. Do not go anywhere." "Where would I go?" He paused in the doorway, one hand on the frame. "I do not know. That is what worries me." Then the door closed, and I was alone with the smell of old smoke and my brother's shallow breathing. I sat back against the wall and let my head fall against the stone. My wolf was still pacing, still pulling toward the door he had gone out of. I told her to be quiet. She did not listen. He came back before the moon had moved a hand's width. The door opened and he stepped in with a cloth bag over one shoulder and a clay jug in his other hand, and he set them both down on the bench without a word. "Bread, cheese, water. There is a salve in the bag. Maeve makes it, the pack healer. It will help the boy's ribs." He straightened. "I will take the first watch outside. If anyone comes up the slope, I will hear them." "You are not going to ask me anything else tonight?" "No." He said it simply. "I have had enough of tonight." He went out, and the door clicked shut, and I heard his footsteps move away and then stop. I fed Ronan what I could get into him, which was not much, and put the salve on his ribs, and then I ate a piece of bread standing at the bench because I could not remember the last time I had eaten anything that had not been stolen. It tasted of salt and woodsmoke. When I was done I went to the door and opened it. Finn was sitting on a flat stone a few paces from the bothy, his back to me, his shape dark against the pale line of the loch below. He did not turn around. "You should be resting," he said. "I have rested enough. Move over." He turned his head at that, and I saw the surprise on his face before he masked it. Then he shifted along the stone, and I sat down beside him, close enough that the heat of his shoulder reached me through my torn sleeve. For a while neither of us said anything. The moon was high, silver and cold, and the heather around us had gone the colour of old iron. Somewhere down in the glen a bird called once and went quiet. "How did you come by that wound?" Finn asked at last. "Which one?" "The one on your arm that you are hiding from me." I looked down at my sleeve, at the dark patch spreading through it. I had forgotten I was bleeding. That was the trouble with running for three years. You learned to ignore your own body when it complained. "A knife. Not silver, or I would not be sitting here." I flexed the arm and felt the pull of it. "Three men found us crossing the low road two nights ago. They were not enforcers. They were just men who thought a rogue girl and a sick boy would make easy sport." "And what happened to the three men?" "Two of them ran." I looked out at the loch. "The third one is on the low road still. He will not be getting up." Finn was quiet for a long moment. "You killed him." "He gave me no other choice. I am not sorry." I turned to look at him. "If that changes what you think of me, then it changes it. I would rather you know now than find out later and decide I lied to you." The moonlight caught his eyes and made them bright. His pale golden hair had fallen forward over his brow, and he pushed it back with one hand. "It does not change what I think of you," he said. "It changes what I think of the road you have been walking." I did not know what to do with that. It was the first kind thing anyone had said to me in three years that did not come with a price attached, and I found I could not look at him anymore, so I looked at the loch instead. "You should go back to your pack house," I said. "If your father finds you gone, there will be questions." "There are already questions. My father will ask them in the morning whether I am there or not." He paused. "What is your brother's name?" "Ronan." "Ronan." He said it the way he had said mine, carefully. "And your pack. Ashfall. I have heard the name before, in the Council's reports. Three years ago there was a fire." The word hit me somewhere under the ribs. I kept my face still. I had learned to keep my face still. "There was a fire," I agreed. "Elara." He turned toward me on the stone, and his knee brushed mine, and neither of us moved away. "I am going to ask you something, and I want you to think before you answer. Why is an enforcer of the Council of Alphas hunting you? Not a wolf who lost her pack. Not a rogue who crossed a border. You. By name. For three years." The wind came up off the loch and pulled at my hair, and my wolf pushed forward hard, wanting to tell him. Wanting, for the first time in three years, to put the weight down. I opened my mouth. And then I heard it. A howl rose from the ridge above us, long and low and carrying. Then a second howl answered it, and a third, and the sound moved along the ridge line like a wave breaking. Finn was on his feet before I was. His hand went to the knife at his belt, and his face in the moonlight had gone completely still. "That is not my pack," he said quietly. "Those are not Cairn wolves." I stood up beside him and turned toward the ridge. The howls were closer now. Somewhere on the dark slope above the cairn stones, shapes were moving through the heather. "Get inside," Finn said. "Get inside and do not open that door." "Finn." "Elara, please." But I had already seen what he had not. The lead shape on the ridge was silver grey and ran with a long, unhurried stride, and I knew that stride. I had been running from it for three years. "He is here," I said. "Torin is here."

The howls faded as quickly as they had come, rolling back along the ridge until the night went quiet again, and that quiet was worse than the noise. Finn stood beside me with his hand on the knife and did not move for a long count of breaths. "Those were border calls," he said at last. "Someone is testing how far they can come." "Torin does not test. He measures." I turned to the bothy door. "I need to get Ronan out of here before they find the south slope." "And go where? The passes are watched and the low road is full of men who want your brother dead." He caught my wrist before I could reach the door, and the touch went through me like heat through cold water. "You came to my border for shelter. Let me give you shelter." I looked down at his hand. "Your law says rogues are executed. You said it yourself on the ridge." "My law says rogues are executed by the Alpha or by his second. It says nothing about a woman who has not been tried, and nothing at all about a sick boy." His grip loosened but he did not let go. "I will bring you before my father as a supplicant asking for hospitality under the old law. The Cairn Pack has kept that law for two hundred years, and he has never once refused a supplicant." I laughed, and it came out ugly. "You think he will welcome me?" "I think he will hear you. That is all I am promising." Behind us, Ronan coughed, a wet sound that ended in a gasp, and I turned away from Finn and went back inside. My brother's face was grey, and when I put my hand to his forehead it was hot enough to make me curse under my breath. "Fine," I said. "But if your father orders me killed, I am taking at least two of your warriors with me." "That is fair." I looked up, and he was almost smiling. Almost. The pack house sat above the loch, a long building of grey stone with smoke coming from two chimneys. Finn carried Ronan up the slope himself, refusing my help, and I walked beside him counting the windows. Six on the lower floor. Four on the upper. Two doors at the front and one at the side. The yard was full of people. I counted eleven, and every one of them turned to look at us when the gate opened. Then the door of the pack house opened, and a man came out, and the yard went quiet. He was older, broad through the chest and grey at the temples, with hair that had once been the same pale gold as Finn's and lines around his mouth that looked carved rather than worn. His eyes were brown, and they went from Finn to Ronan to me in the space of a heartbeat. "Finn," he said. His voice was calm, the calm of a man who had learned long ago that shouting got him nothing. "What have you brought to my door?" "Supplicants, Father." Finn set Ronan down on the bench by the door. "A woman and her brother, asking for hospitality under the old law." The Alpha came down the steps. He was in his shirtsleeves, and there was flour on his hands, and that small detail undid me more than any show of power could have. He had been baking when the howls came. "Supplicants," he repeated. "You found a rogue on the border with her brother and you brought her to my hall." "Yes." "Did you think to ask her what she did to earn the rope?" "She has done nothing that I know of." Finn's voice did not waver. "She came to us hurt, with a wounded child, and she asked for one night. Any wolf who comes to the stones with empty hands and a request is owed bread and a hearing before judgment." The Alpha looked at me then. His eyes moved over the blood on my sleeve and the state of my boots and the way I stood with my weight on the balls of my feet, ready to move, and I knew he was reading me the way a shepherd reads weather. "What is your name?" "Elara." "Elara of what pack?" I said nothing, and the silence went on long enough that the yard began to stir. "Father," Finn said. "The boy will die if he is not seen by a healer tonight. Whatever else we decide, let Maeve look at him first." The Alpha studied his son for a long moment. Then he turned his head and called back toward the house. "Maeve! Get out here!" A woman came down the steps, small and bent and older than anyone in the yard, with a knitted shawl and grey hair braided down her back. She went to Ronan and put two fingers under his jaw. "Fever's high. First shift, is it?" She looked at me. "Late bloomer?" "Yes." "Then he needs to be inside by a fire." She looked up at the Alpha. "He comes inside, Angus. I will not have a child die on the doorstep while we argue about laws." Angus exhaled slowly. "He comes inside. She waits in the yard until I have decided what to do with her." That was when I saw her. She was standing by the woodpile with her arms folded, quiet as a shadow. Champagne blonde hair in soft layers falling past her shoulders, sea green eyes that caught the torchlight, and a crooked half-smile that did not reach them. The Beta, I guessed, from the way the other wolves kept glancing at her for direction. "Father," she said, and her voice was warm and easy. "The boy is clearly no threat. The woman, though. She has been standing in your yard for two minutes and she has not once stopped looking at the gate." "Thank you, Isla," Angus said. "I had noticed." Isla's crooked smile turned on me. "She is a pretty thing. Pale hair and those blue eyes. I wonder if it was her face that made Finn decide not to use the knife." The yard went very still. "I used no knife," Finn said evenly, "because the law did not require one." "Of course." Isla unfolded her arms and walked toward us, and I saw her look at him properly, at his face, at the way he stood. Her expression did not change, but something behind her eyes narrowed. "You smell of the bothy. The one on the south slope. How long were you out there with her before you brought her in?" Finn did not answer. And Isla laughed, a light, careless sound that made my skin crawl. "The old law says we owe a supplicant bread and a hearing. It says nothing about her leaving this yard afterward. I will make sure the hall is ready, Angus." She turned away, and I watched her go, and my wolf watched with me. That woman knew exactly what she had just seen, and she would use it. "Elara." Angus stepped forward, and his voice was low enough that only I could hear it. "You will tell me the truth before the night is over. All of it. Because whatever my son thinks he has saved tonight, I have seen what a rogue can bring to a pack, and I will not let it happen to mine." Then he turned and went into the hall, and Finn came to stand beside me. "He knows something," I said. "About me. Or about the ones chasing me." Finn looked down at me, and in the torchlight his gold-brown eyes were steady. "My father knows many things he does not say. He has been like this since the winter my mother died." He paused. "He will not kill you in the hall, but he will test you, and if you fail, no law on earth will save you." "And if I pass?" "Then we will have a different problem." He turned toward the door. "Isla is already telling the pack that I did not draw my blade. By morning, they will all want to know why." I followed him in, and my wolf followed me, and I counted the exits as I crossed the threshold.