The tide chart for the night of October the third said the water would peak at eleven forty and fall back clean by one in the morning. I had copied it out myself that afternoon, the lamp hissing at my elbow, my father's cough coming through the floorboards from his bed above. The numbers were good. The numbers were always good. So when the harbor began to breathe wrong at midnight, I was already on the wharf with my coat buttoned to my chin, telling myself I had come down for air. The Bay of Fundy does not have tides the way other places have tides. It has a hand that lifts the whole harbor by its collar and sets it down again, and if you know the hand, you know the night. I had read the water since I was six years old, sitting on my mother's lap in the pilot boat with her hand over mine on the tiller. The water says where the rocks are, she told me. The water says where a ship went down. All you have to do is listen. That night the water said something new. It came in against the pilings at a rhythm I had never charted, three short slaps and then a long drag, like a wolf testing a fence. The fog lay on the harbor in a thick white fleece, and the foghorn at the point sounded twice and stopped, which it never did. My wolf came awake in my chest and turned her ears, and I felt her nose lift to test the air. Salt. Diesel. Kelp. And under those, faint as a stain on a handkerchief, a smell I had not met in the harbor before. Wet iron, and something green and bitter. I went along the wharf at a run, my boots ringing on the planks. The lamp over the fish house threw a yellow circle onto the water, and past the edge of the circle, out where the bar should have been smooth and harmless, the sea was churning. Something long and pale rolled in the surf and slid back. The bell at the harbor mouth began to toll, pulled by no hand I could see. I did not stop to think. I pulled the rope from the cleat, dropped the skiff into the water, and was rowing before the fog closed over the wharf behind me. The current took the bow and turned it toward the bar, and I let it, because I could hear the wreck now, the deep grinding groan of a hull being worked over rocks like a tooth in a jaw. The schooner was on her side. Two masts down in the surf, the sails wrapped around the rigging like wet laundry, and her name washed away under a scum of foam and splintered wood. She was not a Tidal boat. No pack marks on her bow, no green stripe of ours along her rail. Rogue, my wolf said, and her hackles lifted. I heard a voice in the water. Not a call for help. A curse, low and even, the way a man swears when he is too cold and too tired to shout about it. I shipped the oars and leaned over the gunwale with the lantern out. A hand came out of the foam and caught the edge of the boat, and then a head, then shoulders. The man hauled himself up the side of the skiff with the last strength left in his arms, and he rolled into the bottom of it and lay there on his back, breathing. He had platinum blond hair, short and flattened to his skull with seawater, and when he opened his eyes they were light brown, the color of strong tea held up to a lamp. Water ran off his jaw. His coat was torn across the shoulder and there was salt crusted white on the seams of it. He looked at me for a moment without any surprise at all, which told me more about him than the wreck had. "You picked a bad night to be out rowing," he said. "Tide reader." My hand was still on the lantern. I had not told him what I was, and no one in Tidal Bay had to say the word out loud when I was in the boat. "How do you know what I am?" "I know a pilot boat when I see one." He pushed himself up on one elbow. "And no one else would come out onto the bar in this fog for a strange ship. The pack up there would let a rogue drown and call it law." "Maybe I should have." "You still can." He said it without any heat, as if it were simply one of the options available to me. The current shoved the skiff against the wreck, and the wreck shifted, and the sea around us rang with the sound of iron and wood finding each other. I grabbed the stern line and got the boat turned, and I rowed us back toward the harbor mouth with my teeth set, because the tide was already falling under me and the bar was not done taking things tonight. He lay still and let me row. Now and then the lantern light found his face, and I saw that his eyelashes were long and dark, and that there was a half smile on him that had nothing to do with being rescued. It was the smile of a man taking stock. "You are going to want to know what was on my ship," he said. "I know what was on your ship." The bitter smell had followed us off the wreck. I had taken a deep breath of it when I leaned over the side, and my wolf had sneezed and shaken herself, and I knew the green bite of it. I had smelled it in the healer's cabinet three years ago when my father first began to cough. "You had wolfsbane aboard." The half smile did not move. "What is your name?" I said. "Roan." "I have heard that name." My hands were steady on the oars. That surprised me. "The Council of Alphas has a price on it." "I have heard that too." He turned his head and looked at the dark water slipping past us. "The price goes up every year. It is flattering, in its way." We came out of the fog onto the back side of the wharf, and I tied up in the black water between the fish house and the old boathouse, where the lamp does not reach. He climbed out onto the ladder and stood dripping on the planks, taller than I expected and not shaking. The harbor smells reached him all at once. I watched him lift his head and take them in, one slow breath, and I watched him go still. "What is it?" I said. He did not answer me. He turned his head toward the pack house on the hill, and the windows where the lamps burned in my father's rooms, and his face changed. Whatever he had come to Tidal Bay for, it was up there. I stepped back. "You need to go. Before the patrol comes down the hill. If they find you here with me they will ask me questions I don't have answers for." He looked at me, and he nodded, and he did not move. "One thing first." He reached inside his coat, and my wolf surged up hard enough to make my hands curl, but he only brought out a small flat tin, beaten and dented, sealed with wax. He held it out to me. "You read the water. Read the tide chart you made for tonight and tell me why my ship went onto a bar that should have been deep." "I made that chart. It was right." "Then someone moved the channel." He put the tin into my hand, and his fingers brushed my wrist, and the touch went up my arm and into my chest and set off something behind my ribs like a struck match. I felt my wolf come to her feet and turn her whole body toward him. His hand closed over mine for half a heartbeat, and his eyes went wide, and I knew he felt it too. He pulled back first. He was quick about it. He turned and went down the ladder into the dark between the buildings, and the fog closed over him, and I stood on the wharf with the tin in my hand and my heart going like a bird in a box. The harbor water slapped the pilings. Three short, one long. I looked down at the tin. The wax seal was pressed with a mark I had seen a hundred times, stamped into every crate that came through the dockmaster's office. It was the mark of my father's own pack.

I did not sleep that night. I sat on the floor of the boathouse with my back against the hull of the old dinghy and the tin in my lap, and I listened to the harbor breathe until the fog thinned and the sky over the point went grey. The seal was still whole. I had turned it over a hundred times, and the mark of the Tidal pack came up the same way every time, the crescent and the three waves stamped deep into the wax. Every crate that left the dockmaster's office wore that mark. My father's mark. Yusuf pressed it himself with the brass stamp he kept in his desk drawer. Someone had shipped wolfsbane out of Tidal Bay under my father's name. I knew exactly what the Council would do with that if they found out, and I knew what Cal would do with it, and neither of those things was going to happen while my father was still breathing. I heard the ladder creak an hour before dawn. I was up and at the door with the boat hook in my hand before I had decided anything, and Roan came through it with his coat over his arm and his hair still wet and his boots making a wet sound on the boards. He stopped when he saw the hook. "You slept with that in your hand?" he said. "I slept with it near me." I set it down against the wall. "You came back." "I had nowhere else to go." He hung his coat on the nail by the door and looked around the boathouse. The old dinghy, the coils of rope, the shelves of tar and paint. "This is yours?" "It was my mother's. She kept her charts in here." I did not know why I told him that. I had not told anyone that in years. He nodded slowly, as if I had given him something he had been looking for. Then he turned and put his hand out flat toward the little iron stove in the corner. "Do you mind?" I minded a great deal. I sat on the bench by the window and watched him build a fire in my mother's stove with the kindling I had stacked there in the spring, and I told myself that the moment he was warm I would send him up the hill to the Council myself. He crouched in front of the fire with his hands out, and the light came up over his face, and I looked at him properly for the first time. His hair was drying in pale streaks. His eyes were the color of tea, with a ring of darker brown around the iris. The half smile had gone. Without it his face was harder and older than it had looked in the water. "You are staring," he said, without turning around. "You are sitting in my boathouse." "Fair." He stood and brushed off his knees. "Let me see the tin." "No." "It is my tin." "It carries my father's mark. That makes it mine until I say otherwise." I kept my voice flat. "You said someone moved the channel. How would you know that? You are not from this harbor. You could not read this water with a map and a lamp." He was quiet for a moment. Then he crossed the floor and sat down on the bench beside me, close enough that I could smell the salt on him and the woodsmoke from the stove and, under both, something warmer that my wolf leaned toward before I pulled her back. "Three years ago a schooner came into the Bay of Fundy with a cargo of wolfsbane," he said. "She was not mine. She belonged to an Alpha I never met. He was bringing the crates to a buyer in this harbor, and he believed the channel was deep because a tide reader in Tidal Bay had charted it for him." "That is a lie. No one in my pack would chart a rogue into the bar." "Your pack did not do it. The chart came from your dockmaster's office, and it was signed by a reader who was not you." He watched my face. "I know because the Alpha on that ship was my father. His name was Ewan, and he drowned when the hull opened on the rocks three miles from this wharf. I was nineteen. I pulled eleven men out of that water, and then I went looking for the wolf who sent him there." My mouth had gone dry. "You are Ewan's son." "You knew his name." "Everyone in Tidal Bay knows his name. The pack calls it the winter of the wolf who could not read a chart." I heard how ugly it sounded in my own voice. "My father said he was a smuggler who tried a channel too narrow for his hull. There was a hearing. The Council ruled it an accident." "The Council ruled it what your dockmaster told them to rule." His voice had not risen, and that was worse than shouting. "My father was not a smuggler. He was carrying medicine to a pack that had been poisoned, and he carried it in crates marked with wolfsbane to keep the wrong wolves off it. Someone in this harbor wanted him on those rocks, and the chart in his cabin was the knife." I got up from the bench. The stove was too hot, and the boathouse was too small, and the smell of him was everywhere in it now. "You are telling me this so I will help you." "I am telling you this so you know what the tin is worth." He did not get up. "I have been looking for that chart for three years. You have been standing on it." "I am not giving you anything." He looked up at me then, and something passed over his face that I could not name. He stood, slowly, and took one step toward me. "Then tell me why you came out onto the bar last night," he said. "The tide was wrong and you knew it, and you went anyway." I opened my mouth to answer him and nothing came out. He reached out and put his hand on my arm, above the elbow, his fingers light. The floor went out from under me. Not the way a floor gives way under weight. The way a floor gives way under a wave. It came up my arm and into my chest and filled every corner of me with heat, and my wolf rose up in me so hard I heard her howl behind my eyes, and his eyes went wide and dark and I knew he was feeling it too, because his hand tightened on my arm and did not let go. I could smell him properly now, the way a wolf smells her mate. Sea salt and cedar and a thread of something sweet under it, like the inside of a barrel. The air between us had gone warm. I pulled my arm free and stepped back into the shelf of paint tins and knocked three of them onto the floor. "No," I said. He stood exactly where he was. His chest was moving too fast, and his hand was still open where he had been holding me, and his face had the look of a man who had been struck by something he could not see coming. "No," I said again. "You are a rogue. You are a smuggler, and the Council has a price on your head, and you are standing in my dead mother's boathouse. Whatever that was, I want none of it." He closed his hand. "You think I do?" "You had better not." We stood there in the small hot room with the fire ticking and the paint tins on the floor between us, and I heard the first gulls of the morning come in from the point, and I was shaking and my hands would not stop. Then someone knocked on the boathouse door. Three slow knocks, the way a wolf knocks when he knows he is welcome. Through the small window beside the door I saw the chestnut brown of Cal's hair caught by the harbour light, and the broad line of his shoulders, and the sea green of his eyes looking straight in at me. "Nell," he called, mild as milk. "Your father is asking where you were all night."

Cal knocked again, and I heard the door handle turn. Roan moved before I did. He crossed the boathouse in two strides, got behind the shelf of paint tins, and pulled the canvas tarp off the old dinghy and over himself in one motion. It was quiet and quick and it told me he had done this many times. I got to the door and opened it a crack. Cal stood on the boards with the harbor behind him and a tin pail in his hand, and the morning light made a warm gold of his skin. He was smiling the way he always smiled, easy and patient, as if he had all day and all night to wait for me. "You are up early," I said. "I have been up since two." He held out the pail. "Hester sent this down for your father. She said he would not take it from her hand." The pail was warm through the handle. Oatmeal, by the smell of it. I took it and set it on the bench behind me and did not invite him in. Cal looked past me into the boathouse. "You were down here all night." "I was." "Your father asked for you twice." That went into me like a hook. "Is he worse?" "He is the same as he was last night." Cal's eyes came back to me. "Nell, there is something on the bar this morning. A schooner went onto the rocks sometime before midnight. The patrol found her at first light and there is no crew aboard her and no name on her bow." My hand was still on the door. "A rogue." "Most likely." He said the word the way the pack said it, flat and finished, like a nail already hammered down. "I am taking a boat out at nine to look her over. I want you with me." "Why me?" "Because you are the tide reader, and I want to know how a ship came onto a bar that you charted as deep water." He said it kindly. That was Cal. He could put a question through a man's ribs and make it sound like a favor. "If someone in this harbor is moving the channel, I would rather learn it from you than from the Council." I nodded and said I would come, and he went back up the hill with his hands in his pockets, and I closed the door and leaned against it. Roan came out from under the tarp. "You are going to look at my ship," he said. "I am going to look at a wreck." I took the pail off the bench and put it into his hands. "Eat that. Do not light the stove again, and do not open the door for anyone. I will be back before noon." He looked down at the oatmeal and then at me. "The crate in the surf," he said. "If you go aboard her, you will find it. It is lashed to the second mast and it is marked with the same seal as the tin." "I know what it is marked with." "That is not what I am telling you." He set the pail down. "I am telling you that there were eleven crates on that ship when I left Blackwater, and six of them carried medicine and five of them carried wolfsbane, and I do not know which one is lashed to that mast. If the patrol opens the wrong one in front of Cal, I will be hanging by the afternoon and so will you." The Bay of Fundy was flat as a coin by nine o'clock, and the fog had gone out to sea. Cal rowed and I sat in the bow with my hand on the gunwale and watched the water for the color that means a wreck is under it. The bar showed green and broken past the second buoy, and the schooner lay in it with her masts down and her hull half eaten by the rocks, and her stern sitting up out of the surf. Two patrol boats were already there. I saw the pack's green stripe on their bows and the wolves standing along the rails. The crate was where Roan said it would be. It had broken free of the mast sometime in the night and washed up into the rocks below the schooner's stern, and it was riding the surf like a barrel, turning over and over in the white water. "There," I said, and pointed. "That is not hers. That is a rogue crate that came off in the wreck." Cal turned his head. "How do you know it is not hers?" I did not have an answer that was not a lie, so I said the first true thing I could think of, which was that the schooner was a Blackwater boat and Blackwater crates are not built with that lid. Cal looked at me for a moment too long. "Bring it in," he said to the patrol. Two wolves went over the side and swam the crate back to the boat, and they hauled it over the gunwale and set it down at my feet. It was the size of a tea chest, and it was bound with iron, and the lid was nailed down hard. On the side, stamped deep into the wood, was a mark I had seen a hundred times in the dockmaster's office. Cal saw it at the same moment I did. His face did not change. That was the thing about Cal. Nothing ever changed his face. "That is the pack mark," he said. "It is." "Nell." He crouched beside the crate and put his hand flat on the lid. "Why would a rogue ship be carrying a Tidal crate?" "I do not know." He looked up at me, and his eyes were the green of the harbor on a clear day, and they were as steady as a held breath. "Open it." I had a hammer in my hand before I had decided to take it. I put the claw under the lid and worked the nails up one by one, and the wood gave with a splintering sound that went through the boat, and then the lid came free and I lifted it off and the smell came out. I had smelled it once before, in Hester's cabinet, when I was thirteen and my father had brought me up the hill to watch her grind herbs for the pack. Wet iron. Something green and bitter underneath, like a leaf left to rot in a jar. Wolfsbane. The crate was full to the top with it. Roots and leaves and powdery grey seed heads packed into paper twists, forty or fifty of them, tied with string. The boat went quiet enough that I could hear the surf on the rocks. Cal reached in and picked up one of the twists. He held it up and turned it in the light, and then he looked at me. "This is a hanging matter," he said. His voice was very calm. "A rogue brings wolfsbane into a pack harbor under our own mark, and the Council will come down on this pack like a wall. Your father is too sick to answer for it. That leaves me." "I know what it leaves." "Do you." He put the twist back into the crate and closed his hand around the edge of the lid. "Then tell me, Nell, since you were the one who read the tide wrong last night and the one who went out onto the bar alone, and the one who has been down in that boathouse all night with the door shut." I did not say anything. He stood up and looked down at me with the sun on his brown hair and that patient smile not quite gone from his mouth. "If you know who the rogue is, you need to say it now. This is the last hour where the pack gets to decide what to do with him before the Council does." I looked down at the wolfsbane in the crate. There was a paper twist near the top with a string tied around it in a knot I knew, because my mother had tied knots that way, and the paper had a date written on it in pencil, and the date was three years ago, in the winter my father first began to cough.