I woke with smoke in my nose and my wolf already on his feet inside me. He does that before I do. He was up and growling at the inside of my ribs while I was still fumbling for the edge of the bed, still half in a dream about my father's boat and the winter he did not come back from it. The smell was the thing that got me moving. Cold smoke, the sharp kind, pine and lamp oil burned together. Not the chimney smoke that hangs over the harbor on a still night. This was thin and mean and it came from the direction of the sea. Runa would say I should have rung the bell first and asked questions after. Runa says that about most things. I pulled on my trousers and the old wool sweater that still smelled of last week's cod run, and I went out barefoot onto the boards of the warehouse gallery. The harbor lay below me in the flat grey light of a June night that never gets properly dark, the boats knocking together, the stockfish racks standing like rows of thin men along the shore. Everything was quiet. The water was quiet. The only thing wrong was the smell, and the single yellow eye of the lighthouse out on the sea rock, burning steady where it should not have been burning at all. Nobody lights that lamp but me. I took the path down to the boathouse at a run, and my wolf ran with me, and neither of us said a word to the other because there was nothing to say. The rowboat was where I left it. I put my back into the oars and I crossed two hundred yards of black water with my eyes fixed on that yellow light, and the whole way I told myself it was a wick that had caught from the stove, or a reflection, or some nonsense of my own tired head. The door at the base of the tower was open. That is the thing I remember most clearly from that night, more than anything that came after. The door was open, and the iron had been forced with something, and the sea wind was pushing the smell of smoke out through the gap. I went up the stairs two at a time. One hundred and twelve steps, I could walk them blind and backward, and I climbed them with the stone cold under my feet and my heart going like a hammer. The lamp room door stood ajar. She was standing at the lamp with a match in her hand, and the wick was already smoking, a thin curl of it rising into the glass, and she was watching it burn as if she had all the time in the world. I did not think. I crossed the room and caught her wrist and pulled her hand away from the lamp, and the match dropped to the iron floor and went out. That was the moment. My fingers closed on her skin, and her skin was warm and salt-damp from the sea air, and the smell of her came up through the smoke and hit me in the chest like a fist. My wolf stopped growling. He went quiet in a way he had never gone quiet before, and then he made a sound I had never heard him make, low and long, and the word came with it. Mate. I let go of her wrist as if it had burned me. She was young, younger than me by a year or two, with a braid of pale golden hair falling over one shoulder, coming loose at the end. Her eyes were amber, and they were not afraid. That was the second thing I noticed. I had a wolf's temper in me and my hand on her arm and a burning lamp behind us, and this woman looked at me with amber eyes and no fear at all, and her mouth was set in a line like someone waiting for a bus. "You are the keeper," she said. "I am the Alpha of this rock," I said. "And you are standing in my lamp room with a match. Give me one reason I should not throw you off the gallery." She looked at the lamp, then at me, and her face did something strange and small, a flinch she covered up quickly. "You should not have let the wick run dry," she said. "The oil feed is clogged. Look at it. It has been clogged for days. Anyone could have seen it." I looked. The feed was clogged. I had meant to clear it that morning and I had not, because the cod run had come in and I had spent the day on the docks with the rest of the pack, hauling fish until my arms ached. "That is not an answer to my question," I said. She wiped her hands on her coat. It was a good coat, grey wool, too good for a woman who had washed up on my rock, and her boots were good too. There was salt crusted on her cuffs and a canvas bag slung across her body that she kept one hand on, even now. "I came to put out the light," she said. "You came to put it out." I laughed, and it came out ugly. "You came to my island in the middle of the night to put out my lamp. Do you know what that lamp is?" "I know what it is," she said. "I know exactly what it is." We stood there, the two of us, with the smoke thinning and the great glass lens turning slowly between us, throwing its yellow beam out over the water and back again, and I could feel her through my own skin, a pull in my chest that had nothing to do with the wolf and everything to do with him at the same time. It was like standing too close to a fire. It was like the first warm day after a winter that had gone on too long. "I should lock you up," I said. "You should," she said. "You probably will." "What is your name?" She hesitated. Only a moment, but I saw it, and my wolf saw it too, and he stirred uneasily. "Ingrid," she said. "Ingrid," I repeated, and the name sat strangely on my tongue. "Well, Ingrid. You have picked a bad night for a swim. My boat is at the bottom of the stairs. You can explain yourself to my Beta in the morning, and if she does not like your story, she will be the one who decides what happens to you." "And you?" she said. "What do you decide?" I looked at her amber eyes and her loose braid and the hand she still had on her bag, and I made myself say the sensible thing, the Alpha thing, the thing my father would have said. "I decide whether you ever see the mainland again." She nodded slowly, as if I had confirmed something she already suspected. Then she looked past me, out through the glass, and her face changed. "Your boat is gone," she said. I turned. Below us, on the black water, there was nothing where my rowboat had been. Nothing but a smear of white foam and a few broken planks drifting toward the rocks. The current does not take a tied boat. The current has never taken a tied boat. Behind me, Ingrid said, very quietly, "I did not come alone, Alpha. And I think the people who brought me are still on your rock."

I did not turn my back on her again. The lamp came first. That is the law of this rock, and I have kept it since I was nineteen years old and my father's boots were still warm. I cleared the clogged feed with a wire from my pocket, wiped the soot off the glass, and stood there until the flame burned clean and yellow and the beam swung out over the water the way it was meant to. Ingrid watched me the whole time from the corner where I had told her to stand, and she did not move, and she did not say a word. Then I took her by the arm and walked her down a hundred and twelve steps to the keeper's room at the base of the tower, the small stone cell where my father used to sleep when the weather was too foul to row home. There was a cot in it, a chair, a table with a candle stub, and a door with a good iron lock. "You are leaving me here," she said. "I am leaving you here." "With the rogues on the rock. On the other side of that door." "You said they brought you," I said. "So they can come and fetch you." Her jaw tightened. "Alpha. If I stay in this room, I am no use to anyone. You need to know what they are doing out there." "I need to know what you are doing in here," I said, and shut the door, and turned the key. She did not shout. I stood there for a while with my hand flat on the wood, waiting for the shouting, and it never came. That was worse, somehow. A woman who screams is a woman I understand. This one just went quiet. I went back up the stairs and out onto the gallery and stood in the wind with my hands on the rail, and I looked down at the black water where my boat had been. The planks were gone now. The foam had spread out and faded. Somewhere out there, past the skerries, a pair of oars was floating away from me, and I had no way off this rock until the tide turned and the pack came looking. My wolf had not settled. He was pacing inside my chest, and every few minutes he would stop and turn toward the tower and press, hard, like a dog against a door. Go down. Go down to her. She tried to put out the lamp. She is warm. She is ours. I told him to shut up. He did not. I have heard what the bond does to wolves. Every wolf has heard the stories. My father told me about a pair in the south who found each other at a market and could not be more than ten paces apart for a month, and how the male went half mad when she was called away to her aunt's. I used to think those were stories for children, the way the old ones dress up the plain business of finding a wife. I do not think that anymore. She is not a wife. She is a woman who came to my island with a match. And she is ours. I slept badly, sitting up against the wall of the lamp room with my back to the glass and my coat over my knees. I dreamed of her braid, which is a stupid thing to dream about. I woke three times in the night, and each time the sound that had woken me was my own wolf howling inside my skull, a long low cry that never reached my throat. The fourth time, near morning, I gave up. I went down the stairs at first light with a cup of water and half a loaf of the hard bread from my own cupboard, because whatever she had come to do, I was not going to starve her. The key turned. The door swung open. The keeper's room was empty. The cot was made. The chair was pushed back under the table, neat as you like. The candle stub was burned down to nothing. And the little window at the back of the room, the one that looked out onto the sea rock, was open, the iron latch bent back with something narrow and strong. There was a scratch on the sill where the tool had caught. I stood in the doorway with the bread in my hand, and my wolf did not howl. He went very still, and very cold, and I felt him point himself at the open window like a nose to the wind. I crossed the room in three strides and looked out. The rock fell away below in slabs of wet stone. She could have broken her neck. She could have drowned. She had done neither. She was down on the flat shelf of stone at the water's edge, forty feet below and a hundred yards along the shore, sitting with her knees drawn up and her braid over her shoulder, looking out at the sea. Her coat was soaked and her boots were beside her and her canvas bag was in her lap. Her boat, if she had ever had one, was in pieces against the rocks, stove in and scattered, and the oars had washed up in the kelp. I climbed down the outside stair. She did not turn around, though she must have heard me. "You opened a locked window with a fish knife," I said. "I am not a fish," she said. "You are a liar." "I have not lied to you yet." She turned her head then, and the morning light caught her amber eyes and made them look almost gold, and there was a purple bruise coming up along her forearm where she had caught it on the sill. "I left things out. There is a difference. I told you they brought me. I told you I came to put out the light. I did not tell you I did not want to." I sat down on the stone beside her because there was nowhere else to sit and because my wolf was pushing me toward her so hard that my ribs hurt. "You cannot leave," I said. "There is no boat but mine, and mine is gone. The tide is out. The nearest island is six miles of cold water. So the two of us are stuck on this rock until my pack comes out to check on their Alpha, and I would rather they did not find a Council seal in a stranger's bag." She flinched. Just a small one. I would have missed it if I had not been watching her. "I told you not to be clever," she said. "I have never once managed it." We sat there. The tide was sucking out over the rocks, and the gulls were fighting over something in the weed, and the light in the east was turning pink. "Will you tell me the truth?" I said. "One true thing, before my Beta rows out here and decides it for you." Ingrid was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "I have been on this rock four days, Alpha. I have been living in the old boat shed on the north shore, and I have been watching your lamp every night. Last night was the first night I had the courage to climb those stairs. And I want you to understand that when I stood in that lamp room with a match in my hand, I was not sure I could do it." "You should have stayed unsure." "Perhaps." She looked at me. "But the men who brought me are not rogues. They are worse than rogues. And when they find out I am still here, they will not come to fetch me. They will come to burn the whole rock, and you and your sixty wolves will be the ones who pay for my courage." I was still turning that over when the wind changed and brought me a scent off the water. My wolf lifted his head and growled. Three boats were coming round the northern headland. Not pack boats. Not fishing boats. Long grey boats with men in them, and a flag I did not know, and in the prow of the first one a tall old man stood with a white glove on his hand.

The three grey boats came round the headland slow, the way a man walks into a room he already owns. I counted eight men in the first boat, six in the second, and I could not see the third for the glare off the water. They were not rogues. Rogues come in twos and threes and they come at night and they run when they see a wolf on the rocks. These men rowed in daylight with their oars in perfect time and their heads up. The tall old man in the prow had a white glove on his right hand, and even at that distance I could see the glove was spotless. I got up off the stone. My wolf was on his feet with me, hackles up, and he wanted to shift, and I held him where he was because a wolf on an open shelf of rock with the sea behind him is a dead wolf. Ingrid had not moved. She was still sitting with her knees drawn up, watching the boats, and her face had gone the colour of wet chalk. "You know them," I said. "I know the glove," she said. "Then tell me what I am looking at, and tell me quick, because they are two hundred yards out and closing." She got to her feet and pulled her boots on, one and then the other, and she did not hurry, and that scared me more than the boats did. "That is Councilor Halvard. He sits on the Council of Alphas, and he has sat on it for thirty years, and he does not come to a pack's territory himself unless he has already decided what is going to happen there." "And what has he decided about my rock?" "He has decided it is not yours." I looked at her. She looked back at me, and there was something in her amber eyes I could not name, some ugly thing she was carrying and had been carrying for a long time. "You came with him," I said. "I came in his ship. I came ashore in his boat. I came up your stairs with his orders in my mouth and his match in my hand." Her voice was flat. "And I am telling you now, before he lands, that I did not know he was bringing men." "That is a fine distinction." "It is the only one I have got." The first boat ground against the rocks. Two of the men jumped out and held it, and the tall old man stepped down onto the shelf with his gloved hand held up, and behind him six more men came off the boats with rifles slung across their backs and their eyes on the cliffs, and I stood between them and my tower with my hands loose at my sides. "Alpha Eirik," the old man said. His voice was soft and pleasant, the voice of a man who has never had to raise it. "I have heard a great deal about you. Your father was well thought of in his day." "My father is dead," I said. "Yes. I was sorry to hear it." He looked past me at the lighthouse, and his pale grey eyes went up and down the whitewashed stone the way a man sizes up a horse he means to buy. "I am Councilor Halvard. I have come about your charter." "The charter is not a thing the Council inspects." "Everything is a thing the Council inspects, Alpha, when a complaint has been laid." He smiled. It was a mild, patient smile, and it did not reach his eyes. "Your lamp was dark for eleven hours in April. Did you know that? A fishing boat from Værøy ran aground on the skerries because of it. The skipper survived. The Council took note." My stomach dropped. I remembered April. I had been out with the cod run and Runa had been minding the lamp and the feed had clogged, and I had told her I would see to it, and I had not. "Eleven hours is a clerical matter," I said. "Eleven hours is a border matter." Halvard turned his gloved hand over, palm up, as if he were offering me something. "The charter of the Saltfjell pack is a living document, kept in that lamp room and read aloud at the full moon. If the document has been altered, or if the lamp has not been kept as the charter requires, the Council may challenge the pack's claim to this territory. I am here to open that challenge. There will be a hearing." "There will be a hearing," I said, "when the Council can prove a fault." "Ah." Halvard's mild eyes moved past me and settled on Ingrid, who was standing very still beside the rocks with her canvas bag against her hip. "And who is this?" I had one moment to decide. My wolf was screaming at me and my head was cold and clear and I could feel the whole pack's future balanced on the next thing out of my mouth. "She is a shipwrecked woman," I said. "Her boat came apart on the north shore four nights ago. She has been in my keeper's room since dawn." Halvard looked at Ingrid for a long, quiet while. She looked back at him, and I watched her chin lift and her shoulders go back. "A shipwrecked woman," he said. "How fortunate for her that you were home." He turned away, and the men behind him turned with him, and he walked along the shelf toward the tower stairs. "I will take the lamp room, Alpha. My men will take the pack house. The hearing will be in three days, at the harbor, and you will bring the charter and the lamp register and your warden's oath. Until then, I would advise you to keep your wolves quiet." He stopped on the bottom step and looked back at me. "And Alpha? If this woman is a shipwreck, then she will not mind being questioned about her ship. I shall want to speak with her before the hearing." The white glove tapped once against the iron rail. "I always want to speak with the survivors." They went up the stairs, boots ringing on the iron, and the three grey boats sat off the rock like hounds at a door. I turned on Ingrid. I did not shout. I have never been a shouter, whatever my wolves say about my temper. I walked up close to her and I kept my voice low enough that the men on the stairs would not hear it. "You said your boat was smashed. You said you came in his boat. You gave me two stories and neither of them fits the other." "The boat story was for them," she said. "The truth was for you." "The truth was for me." I laughed once. "You came to my lamp with a match, you bent a window latch, you have a Council seal in your bag, and now the Councilor who brought you here is standing in my lamp room. Tell me again how you are on my side." Ingrid's face did not change, but her hand came up and closed around the strap of her bag, and I saw her knuckles go white. "You want me to go," she said quietly. "Then row me ashore yourself, Alpha. Take me to Værøy, put me on the pier, and tell them I am a liar and a stranger. It will be one less problem on your rock, and you will never have to wonder what I am." I stared at her. "You think I am offering you a bargain," I said. "I think you are a man with sixty wolves and three days and no boat," she said. "And I think I am the only person on this island who knows what Halvard does to packs that cannot prove their charters. So yes. Row me ashore, or keep me here and let me help you. But choose now, before he comes back down those stairs." Above us, in the lamp room, something glass knocked against stone and did not break. Then a man's voice came down the stairwell, mild and clear, and it said, "Alpha? Your lamp has gone out again."