The border stones of Kielder Forest still smelled of wet moss and iron, and under that, faint as a heartbeat through a wall, something else. I stopped at the third stone with my boot half in a puddle and let my wolf take the air. She came forward without my asking, ears flat, nose working. We had crossed forty borders in my life and never once had she done this. "Nessa." Mara's voice came from behind the hawthorn. "You stop at the stone, not before it. Get moving." I did not move. The scent had a shape to it, warm birch bark and cold river water, and when it reached the back of my throat it made my hands shake. My skin went tight. I felt the shift start somewhere under my ribs, the push of bone against bone, and I dropped to one knee in the mud with my palm flat against the stone and my jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached. Tilda crouched beside me, her red hair wet from the drizzle, and put her hand on my shoulder. "What is it? Is it a hunter?" "No." My voice came out rough. "I do not know." "You do not know." Mara stepped out of the hawthorn with her grey eyes narrow and her rifle slung low on her back. She was lean as a whip and had taught me to read ground sign before I could read letters. "Say it plainly, girl. What is on that wind?" I made myself breathe through my mouth. It did not help. The scent was in the moss now, in the stone, in my own wrists. My wolf turned in a circle and lay down, which she had never done in her life. "Something I have not smelled before," I said. "Something big." "Then we go around." Mara looked past me at the dark line of pines on the ridge. "Blackpine pays for the spring's location, not for a fight with whatever walks in there." I stood up. The shift retreated, sulking, and I wiped mud off my knee and pulled my braid free of my collar. "I go in tonight. You said the deal expires at the full moon and the full moon is in nine days." "Nine days is enough." "Nine days is enough for Fen to find another tracker." I picked up my pack. "I will be in and out before their muster. Nobody counts a stranger during a muster." Mara studied me the way she studied a track: for the thing that did not fit. "You are shaking." "I am cold." "You are a poor liar for a girl I raised to lie." I walked past her before she could say more. Tilda caught my sleeve and pressed something into my hand, a stub of chalk she used to mark trail trees, and I put it in my pocket because her face said she needed me to take it. Kielder Forest at dusk was all sound. Wood pigeons settling, a stream running under the roots, and somewhere far off the crack of a branch under a heavy foot. I kept to the deer paths and marked my turns with Tilda's chalk on the north side of the trunks where rain would not wash it. A tracker's habit. My wolf kept her head low and her ears forward and did not once complain about the wet. The ridge took an hour. When I came out of the pines the whole valley lay under me, and in it, grey and low and built of the same granite as the hill, the Kielder pack house. Smoke from two chimneys. A wall of fieldstone with a gate of iron bars. Lights in the lower windows. And at the edge of the valley, under the shadow of the far cliff, a line of silver in the grass that caught the last of the daylight like a dropped coin. The spring. I had heard Fen describe it in his careful, flat voice: water that forced a shift in any wolf who drank it, water that healed in hours what should take days. I had not believed half of it. Looking at that silver line, I believed more. I got out my chalk to mark the height of the ridge and dropped it. It rolled two feet and stopped against a boot. Not a boot I had heard arrive. The man was standing under the pine beside me with his hands loose at his sides, and the first thing I noticed was his hair, pale as frost and swept back from his forehead, and the second was his eyes, which were blue-grey and entirely calm. He was tall and built like someone who ran up hills for pleasure. He was also, by his scent, the thing that had nearly torn me apart at the border stone, and my wolf rolled over in my chest like a dog showing its belly. I did not run. Running from a wolf that size would have been stupid, and I had promised myself years ago that I would never be stupid in front of a pack Alpha. "Evening," I said. "I did not hear you." "No," he said. "You did not." His voice was low and clipped, the voice of a man who was used to being answered. "You are on my land." "I am on the ridge above your land. That is a difference where I come from." "Is it." He looked down at the chalk in the mud, then at the marks on my trees. "A tracker. What are you tracking?" "Deer." "You are tracking deer with chalk marks that lead back to the Blackpine border." He said it without heat, the way a man might remark on rain. "Try again." My wolf wanted to step toward him. I put my heel down hard on that want and gave him my best smile, the one that had got me out of three pack prisons and one marriage offer. "I am a visiting tracker looking for work at the muster. My name is Nessa. I have no kin in Kielder and no quarrel with it." "You are lying about the name," he said. My smile did not move. "And you are the Alpha, since nobody else would dare to stand in the woods and insult a stranger." "I am Rhys." He stepped closer, and the mate scent came off him so strongly that my knees went weak and my skin prickled all over with the beginning of a shift. I dug my nails into my palm until it stopped. He tilted his head, and I saw him take a breath through his nose, and something crossed his face that I could not read. "You feel that." "I feel the cold." "You feel the bond, and so do I, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in my own forest." His jaw tightened. "Which is a problem, because you smell of rogues and pine smoke and another Alpha's territory." I opened my mouth to answer and found nothing in it. He turned his head toward the valley, and his whole body changed, shoulders squared, chin up, the way wolves do when they hear something the rest of us have not caught yet. Then I heard it too. A howl from the pack house, long and low, and a second one answering from the gate. Rhys looked back at me with those blue-grey eyes, and for a moment he was not an Alpha at all, only a man doing arithmetic he did not like. "You will come down to the pack house and you will tell me the truth there," he said. "Or you will run, and I will catch you before the gate, and the warriors will not be as gentle as I am." I picked up my pack. My wolf was already walking down the slope beside him, and I hated her for it. "One question first," I said. "How did you know I was lying about the name?" Rhys did not break stride. "Because there is no Nessa in any pack on this border. And because your mother used to say it exactly the way you do." I stopped dead on the path. He kept walking, and the wolves howled again, and the silver line of the spring glittered below us in the dark.

The pack house smelled of woodsmoke, wet wool and stew, and every wolf in it turned to look at me when Rhys pushed open the door. There were perhaps thirty of them in the long hall, seated at trestle tables or standing by the hearth, and the noise dropped away table by table as they caught my scent. I kept my chin level and my hands out of my pockets and counted the exits. The main door behind me. A side door near the kitchen with a muslin curtain across it. Two windows too high to be useful. "This is Nessa," Rhys said. "She says she is a tracker looking for muster work. She will stay until I know whether that is true." A woman at the hearth put down her ladle. She was old, white-haired and straight-backed, with a face like a dried apple and eyes that went over me the way a farmer's wife goes over a chicken before buying it. "Rogue blood," she said. "Yes," Rhys said. The warriors shifted at their benches. One of them, a broad-shouldered man with copper hair and an easy grin that did not reach his eyes, leaned back and folded his arms. "An Alpha brings a rogue into the hall and tells us she is a tracker. Is she going to sleep in the hall too, or have you a room in mind?" "Ivo," Rhys said, in a tone that could have frozen the stew. "She will have the small room at the end of the east passage. Put a guard on her door if it comforts you." "Your own door is at the end of the east passage," Ivo said. The hall went very quiet. Rhys turned his head and looked at Ivo for a long moment, and I watched the copper-haired warrior decide how far he wanted to push. He dropped his eyes first. "East passage," Rhys said. "Now, Nessa, you will eat, and then you will tell me what you know about deer." I was hungry enough that the stew nearly made me forget why I was there. I sat on the bench at the far end of the table with my pack between my boots and ate while the hall filled back up with talk. Nobody spoke to me. A young woman with a scar through one eyebrow brought me bread without being asked and did not stay to be thanked. The door at the far end of the hall opened and a man came in with snow melting in his champagne blond hair. He was neatly combed and clean-booted, and he crossed the hall with the walk of someone who had never once had to argue for a seat. Light blue eyes, long dark lashes, a jaw that looked carved for a statue. He stopped at the table where Rhys sat and bent to speak into his ear. Rhys listened. Then he said, loudly enough for me to hear, "No. She stays." The blond man straightened, and his gaze found me across the hall, and he smiled. It was a smooth, pleasant smile that made the stew sit cold in my stomach. "Doran," he said, coming over and sitting down across from me without asking. "Gamma of Kielder, since we are introducing strangers at dinner. Rhys tells me you are a tracker." "I am." "From where?" "Here and there. My family moves with the season." "Rogues," Doran said. "Yes, I caught that." He picked up my bread and broke a piece off it and ate it. "Do you know what a Gamma does in a pack, Nessa from here and there?" "Keeps the warriors in line. Holds the border when the Alpha is elsewhere." "Also he asks the questions the Alpha is too polite to ask." Doran leaned back. "The autumn muster brings six packs to our border. Six Alphas, all of them with an opinion on Kielder and its water. If a tracker with rogue scent in her hair walks among them and learns things she should not, who do you think the Council will blame? The rogue, or the Alpha who let her in?" "Neither," I said. "The Council will blame the Gamma who did not search her pack." Doran's smile changed at one corner. He took another piece of my bread. "He is testing you," the young woman with the scar said later, in the passage outside the kitchen. Her name was Bette and she carried a pail of peelings in each hand. "Doran tests everyone. Do not let him see you sweat and he will leave you be." "You are not afraid of him." "I am afraid of him every day," Bette said, and went through the kitchen door with her pails. The small room at the end of the east passage had a bed, a stool, a washbasin with a chip out of the rim, and a window that looked out on the ridge and the dark pines. I set my pack on the stool and stood at the window and listened. Below, in the yard, wolves were talking, and one voice rose above the rest and was not angry. Rhys was out there with them. I could pick his voice out of thirty. My wolf pressed against my ribs, wanting to go down, wanting to stand near him, and I put both hands flat on the cold glass and told her no. The door opened behind me. Rhys came in without knocking, shut the door and stood against it with his arms folded. The room was small enough that the mate scent filled it in three breaths. "You said my mother used to say my name that way," I said. "At the ridge. What did you mean by it?" He studied me. "I meant it as a test. You answered it before you thought." "I do not know your mother." "You know her name, though. You flinched when I said it." Rhys pushed off the door and walked to the window, and I had to step aside to give him room, and there was nowhere in that little room to step aside to. "Her name was Alys. She came to Kielder twenty-four years ago with a child at her breast and left the child in the snow at our gate, and my father raised it as his own. The child died at three years old. We buried her under the rowan tree." "I am sorry." "Are you." He looked at me with those blue-grey eyes and did not blink. "The muster starts in two days. Until then you are my guest and you will stay where I can see you. At the muster you will stand at my table and answer every question the Alphas put to you. If your answers hold, you may leave Kielder with your skin and a wage. If they do not hold, you will answer to me first and the Council second, and I will not save you from either." My heart was going fast, but my voice was steady. "That is a generous offer for a rogue." "It is not generous," Rhys said. "It is the only way I can keep you close without breaking my own law." He said it flatly, as if he were reading a number off a ledger, and then he looked away from me, at the window, at the pines. "My wolf does not want you to leave this forest. I do not trust my wolf where you are concerned." "I do not trust mine either," I said. That made him turn back. We stood there in the dark little room with the washbasin between us and the mate scent thick as smoke, and I heard his breathing change, and I knew that he heard mine. Then someone knocked hard on the door, three times, and a man's voice called through it, "Alpha. There is a rogue at the gate. He is asking for the woman." Rhys was out of the room before I could move. I followed him down the passage and out into the yard with my heart in my throat, and there, at the iron gate under the lantern, with his hood back and his grey eyes bright in the cold, stood a man I had known all my life. Mara had sent our best scout after me. And he was not alone.

The scout at the gate was called Erik, and he had a long face and a chipped front tooth and he had taught me to set a snare when I was nine. "Nessa," he said, as if we had met by accident in a market. "Mara sent me to see that you got in all right." "You can see that I did." I stood in the lantern light with Rhys at my shoulder and the warriors of Kielder spread along the wall behind me, and I kept my voice easy. "Go back and tell her I am working. She knows the terms." Erik looked past me at Rhys and did not lower his eyes fast enough. "The Alpha knows what you are?" "The Alpha knows what I smell like," Rhys said. "Which is more than you will know if you do not take your hand off my gate." Erik took his hand off the gate. He looked at me once more, and there was a question in it, and I shook my head a quarter of an inch. He went back into the dark, and the warriors on the wall watched him until the pines swallowed him. Rhys did not say a word to me in the yard. He walked back into the pack house and I followed because there was nothing else to do, and he went into a room off the main hall that I had not seen, a study with a cold hearth and a table piled with papers and a lamp that smoked. "Sit," he said. I sat. He took the chair across from me and turned the lamp up and looked at me across the table for a while without speaking. The mate scent in that closed room was worse than in the passage. It sat on my tongue. "Erik of the rogues," Rhys said at last. "He knows you well enough to come to my gate for you. So you are not a lone tracker. You belong to a family, and the family has business with Kielder. What business?" "Deer," I said. He did not laugh. "You are going to sit in that chair and lie to me until the muster, and then you will lie to six Alphas, and one of them will be better at reading you than I am, and then I will have to hang a rogue at my own gate to keep the peace. That is what happens if you keep saying deer." "Then perhaps you should let me go now and save us both the trouble." "No," Rhys said, and the word came out before he could stop it. He heard it himself. His fingers tightened on the edge of the table. "No. My wolf will not let you go, and I have learned to listen to him even when I do not like what he says. So we will do this the hard way. I will ask, and you will answer, and every time you lie I will know, because I can smell a lie on you now. That is what the bond does. It has made you a very poor liar to me." I had not known that. My stomach dropped, and I made myself shrug. "Then ask." "Where were you born?" "North of here. A camp in the Cheviots. My mother died when I was small." "Her name." "Does it matter? She is dead." "It matters to me." I looked at the lamp. "Alys." The name sat in the room like a stone dropped into still water. Rhys did not move. His face stayed exactly as it was, and his voice when it came was quiet. "You are lying." "I am not." "You are." He leaned forward. "Your heart went faster. I heard it. Say the name again." I said it again, and my heart went faster again, and I hated him for hearing it. "I do not know what you want from me. I gave you the name I was given." "You were given a name by a rogue woman who took you in. That is not the same thing as your mother's name, and you know it." Rhys pushed his chair back and walked to the window with his hands behind his back. "Alys came to Kielder with a child. She left the child at the gate and went north and nobody saw her again. My father would not speak of her, and Elspeth will not, and now a rogue tracker with her voice walks into my forest and claims to be hunting deer." "I am not her child." "I did not say you were. I said you have her voice." He turned around. "Where did you learn to track?" "From the woman who raised me." "Her name." "Mara." The truth came out before I could dress it up, and I saw him notice. "Mara." He tasted the name. "The rogue who trades in pack secrets. I have heard of her. The Council has a paper on her somewhere, and if Aldric finds it, your visit here becomes a great deal more complicated." "Then do not tell Aldric." Rhys crossed the room and stopped in front of my chair, and I had to look up at him. The lamplight came in from the side and made his pale hair shine like frost on a roof. I could see the pulse in his throat and the small scar on his knuckle where a wolf had bitten him, and I could smell him, birch and river water, and my wolf rose in me and pressed her whole weight against my ribs. "You are afraid," he said. "Not of me. Of something behind me. What is behind me, Nessa?" "Nothing." "You are lying again." His voice had gone low. "Your heart is going like a hare's. I can hear it, and I can smell it on you, and I am standing close enough to hear it because I cannot make myself stand further away. Do you understand what that means?" I stood up. There was no room to stand up in, but I did it anyway, and my shoulder brushed his chest and neither of us stepped back. The lamp smoked between us. I could feel the heat off him through his shirt, and my hands had gone cold and my face had gone hot, and I heard him take a breath that was not a steady one. "It means the bond is doing what bonds do," I said. "It does not mean I am going to tell you my business." "It means I am going to keep you alive long enough to find out what your business is." His eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up. "And it means that if you lie to me again tonight I will know it, and I will not be as patient about it as I have been." I should have stepped away. I had a hundred good reasons to step away, and Mara's voice in my head telling me what happened to trackers who got tangled with Alphas, and instead I stayed where I was and let him look at me. Then the door opened and Doran came in without knocking, and his light blue eyes went from Rhys to me and back again, and his smooth face did something ugly at the corners. "Forgive me," he said. "I did not mean to interrupt the interrogation. The healer wants the rogue at the spring at first light. She says the water has something to say to her." Rhys stepped back from me, and the cold came in where he had been. "Elspeth said that?" he asked. "Those were her words." Doran smiled at me. "The water has something to say to the rogue. I would very much like to hear it."