The inn at the border crossing smelled of wet wool and pine smoke, and she was the only thing in it that did not smell of the road. I noticed that first, before I noticed the color of her eyes or the way she held her cup with both hands as though it might escape. Her hair was silver white, cut short at the jaw, and it caught the lamplight in a way that made the room feel smaller. "You have been watching me for an hour," she said without looking up. "Two hours," I said. "You came in with the rain and you haven't stopped shivering since." She looked up then. Amber eyes, steady and wary, and a mouth that had learned to hold its tongue. "The rain is cold. I am not." I sat down across from her because she had not told me not to. The innkeeper had already given up on us both, and the room above the taproom was cheap and close. I told myself I was being careful. A wolf alone at a border inn in the last weeks of the year was either honest or in trouble, and I had made my living deciding which. "My name is Konrad," I said. "I know." She set her cup down. "Everyone on this road knows the enforcer of the Schwarzwald Rudel. You have a face they describe." "And your name?" She considered the question the way a wolf considers a strange scent. "Liesel. That is all you need for now." The fire had burned low and the taproom emptied around us. She was tired; I could see it in the way she kept blinking, the way her shoulders had lost their careful set. I offered her the room above, and I told myself I meant it kindly. She looked at me for a long moment, and then she laughed, a low sound with nothing cruel in it. "Your face does not lie as well as you think it does," she said. I could have gone to my own room. I did not. She climbed the stairs ahead of me and I followed, and on the landing she turned and put one hand flat against my chest and I felt the heat of her palm through the wool of my coat. The rain had stopped outside. Somewhere below, the innkeeper bolted the door and dragged a bench against it. She tasted of the bitter tea she had been drinking. Her hands were cold and then they were not, and my coat ended up on the floorboards and her tunic followed it. I remember the small sounds she made, the way she pressed her mouth to my shoulder to keep quiet, the way her fingers found the old burn on my ribs and did not flinch from it. Lamplight moved over her skin, silver hair against the pale pillow, and when her back arched she gripped the headboard and I felt the whole of her trembling with the effort of staying silent. I woke once in the dark. She was sitting up beside me with the blanket around her shoulders, staring at the window. "Sleep," I said. She did not answer. I pulled her down beside me and she settled against my chest with her ear over my heart, and I fell asleep counting her breaths. The innkeeper's boy woke me before dawn with a fist on the door and a voice gone high. He kept saying the same words over and over, and none of them made sense until I had pulled on my trousers and opened the door. The Alpha is dead. The Alpha is dead in the meadow. I left Liesel sleeping. That is one thing I have carried since, and it was not guilt, not then, because I had no reason to think she was anything but a woman on the road. I pulled my coat on in the corridor, took the stairs two at a time, and went out into the grey. The meadow lies east of the inn, where the road bends toward the pine woods. The rain had stopped hours before, but the grass was still soaked, and the mist hung at knee height and did not move. I smelled him before I saw him. Blood, and wet earth, and something underneath both that I did not want to name. Alpha Reinhard lay on his side in the tall grass, one arm folded under him, his grey coat torn open at the chest. He had been a large man in life and he looked small now, smaller than a man should look. I crouched beside him and put two fingers to his throat and held them there until my own heartbeat had counted twenty. Nothing. The wound was beneath his ribs, one clean thrust, and there was not enough blood on the grass for a wound like that. Someone had known what they were doing. Then my wolf lifted its head inside me and sniffed, and the whole meadow changed shape. Her scent. Her scent was on him. Liesel's scent, the one I had breathed against my own sheets an hour before. I stood up so fast that my vision went white at the edges. I went down on one knee again and put my face close to the body and drew it in, slowly, like a man sniffing a cup of wine he suspects. Warm skin and the bitter tea and the rain in her hair. It sat on his collar, on his chest, on the palm of his open hand. "No," I said aloud. "No." The mist moved, and I heard the pack before I saw it. Six wolves came out of the pines in a loose half circle, all of them in human form, Dietrich at their head with his black hair plastered to his forehead and his coat buttoned wrong. He stopped at the edge of the grass and put his hand over his mouth, and his shoulders shook, and every wolf behind him watched him do it. "Konrad," he said. His voice came out ragged. "Oh, Konrad. What happened here?" I stood up. My knees were not steady. "I found him like this." "Did you." Dietrich came forward, and the others spread out to either side of me without being told. "Who was with you at the inn last night, Konrad? The innkeeper's boy came running all the way to the pack house. He said a woman. He said she had silver hair." My wolf wanted to surge. I held it down with both hands, the way I had been taught, and I felt the nails of my own grip biting into something. "I was at the inn," I said. "I was not with the Alpha." "I know you were at the inn." Dietrich looked down at Reinhard and then back at me, and his dark eyes were wet and his face was gentle. "The question is where the woman went when you left her. Because whoever did this was not human, Konrad. Look at him. A human blade would not have gone in like that." The mist was thinner now, and the sun had come up behind the pines, and I could see the whole meadow clearly. Reinhard's blood had soaked into the grass in a small dark circle, and the rain had stopped, and there was not a single mark of a struggle. The boy's voice came from the road, thin and frightened. "The lady is gone," he called. "The lady's room is empty, and the window is open, and there is water on the floor." Dietrich put his hand on my shoulder, and his grip was kind, and his scent was the scent of my Alpha's son, and his eyes did not leave mine. "Konrad," he said quietly. "Tell me about the woman."

Dietrich's hand stayed on my shoulder while the six wolves around us waited, and I could smell every one of them. Anger from the tall one on my left, something sour and eager from the short one behind me, and from Dietrich himself a scent so clean and steady that my wolf did not trust it for a moment. Grief has a smell. I have knelt beside widows and orphans in this territory and I know what grief smells like, and Dietrich smelled of nothing at all. "Her name was Liesel," I said. "She said she was a healer on the road. She took a room above the taproom and I took it with her." The tall wolf made a noise in his throat. Dietrich raised one hand and the noise stopped. "You were with her all night." "I was. She was asleep when I left the room. The boy knocked, and I came out here, and I have not seen her since." Dietrich nodded slowly. His black hair had dried into flat strands across his forehead and he kept pushing them back, and his coat was still buttoned wrong, and I found myself staring at that buttoned-wrong coat more than at the body. "Then we have a problem," he said. "The pack will want a name, and the only name we have is hers." "The pack will want the truth," I said. "The pack will want a body on the grass and someone to answer for it. You know the law as well as I do, Konrad. You have carried it out often enough." He was right, which was the worst thing about it. I had been enforcer for nine years. I had dragged wolves to the border stone and read out their sentences. I had never once stood on this side of the question, and the grass under my boots felt colder than it should. I knelt again. It was not a thing I decided to do. My knees went down and my hands went into the wet grass beside Reinhard's body, and I told myself I was looking at the wound for the pack's sake, for the report I would have to give. The wound was beneath his ribs, one thrust, and the edges were clean and dark, and I put my fingers near it without touching. Then I saw the glint at his collar. A small thing, silver, half caught under the fold of his coat. I pinched it out between two fingers and turned it over in the grey light. A wolf's tooth, cast in silver, no longer than my thumbnail, with a hole bored through the root of it where a cord had once passed. My wolf went still. It is hard to explain what that feels like, an animal inside your chest that has been pacing and growling all morning and then simply stops. I held the tooth in my palm and it was cold, and it carried a smell. Silver always smells of itself, that hard metallic sting that werewolves learn to fear young. Beneath the sting was something else, something faint and warm, and I knew it at once. I had breathed that smell against a pillow a few hours before. Liesel. I closed my fist around the tooth and did not move for a moment. "Konrad." Dietrich's voice came from behind me, patient and soft. "What have you got there?" I turned my head. He was standing over me with the mist behind him and the sun on his face, and his brown eyes were fixed on my closed hand. "Grass," I said. "And blood. I am looking at the wound." "Show me what you picked up." I opened my hand. The tooth lay in my palm, and Dietrich leaned down and looked at it, and his eyebrows drew together. "A token," he said. "The mining clans use silver tokens. If this is one of theirs, then we are not looking at a rogue at all. We are looking at the Bosbach wolves sending us a message." "That is one reading," I said. "What other reading is there?" I did not answer. I put the tooth in my coat pocket and stood up, and I brushed the grass from my knees, and I looked down at my Alpha's face. He had been a hard man, Reinhard, hard in the way that stone is hard, and he had never once told me a kind word that I could remember. He had made me enforcer when I was twenty nine and had never explained why. I owed him a debt I had never been able to name, and now I was standing over him in a meadow with his killer's scent in my nose and a silver tooth in my pocket and a Beta at my back asking me questions. "Cover him," I said. "We carry him back to the pack house. The law says the body goes to the stone before the sun sets." The tall wolf and the short one came forward with a blanket from the inn. I watched them wrap Reinhard in it and lift him, and I walked behind them up the road toward the pines, and Dietrich walked beside me with his hands behind his back. "The woman," he said as we walked. "If you are right and she is innocent, then she has nothing to fear from the pack. Bring her to the stone and let her speak." "I do not know where she is." "That is a pity." He stepped over a fallen branch and did not look at me. "Because if you do not find her, the pack will decide you were her accomplice. I will not be able to stop them. I am only the Beta." The road curved, and the pack house came into view above the pines, grey stone and a steep black roof with the smoke already rising from its chimneys. Wolves were gathering in the yard. I could see them from the ridge, a dozen and more, and the wind brought me their voices. Dietrich stopped on the road and turned to face me. His eyes were dry now. The wetness I had seen in the meadow was gone, and in its place was something calm and careful, and he put his hand on my arm. "One more thing," he said. "The Council will send someone to look into this. When they come, they will ask who was the last wolf to see the Alpha alive. And they will ask who found the body. Try not to be both, Konrad. It saves a great deal of explaining." He walked on ahead of me, up the road, into the yard where the pack was waiting, and his voice rose warm and grieving as he told them what had happened. I stopped at the edge of the pines and took the tooth out of my pocket. The silver was warming now, and the smell on it was faint enough that a wolf who did not know it would never have caught it. I brought it to my nose and breathed in, and my wolf rose up behind my ribs and threw itself against them, howling. My mate. My fated mate had held this tooth against my Alpha's throat. The wind changed, and the fine hairs on my arms lifted. Somewhere out in the pines, far past the border, a wolf was running, and the sound of it carried to me clear and small and heading away from the pack house, and every instinct in my body turned toward that sound like a compass needle to the north. I put the tooth back in my pocket and started walking toward the trees, and behind me Dietrich's voice called my name twice, and I did not turn around.

I got as far as the first line of pines before I stopped. The running wolf was three miles out by then, maybe four, and the pack yard behind me was full of voices. If I went after her now, I would be a wolf who ran from his Alpha's body toward the scent of the woman he had spent the night with. Even I could hear how that sounded. So I turned back. It took more out of me than the long walk from the meadow had. The yard was crowded by the time I came through the gate. Someone had put a trestle table out and laid Reinhard on it, still wrapped in the inn's grey blanket, and the pack had gathered around it in a ring. When one of them dies the others come to stand in the cold and say nothing. I found a place at the back and stayed there. Dietrich stood at the head of the table with his coat finally buttoned right. He had washed his face and combed his hair back, and every wolf who came near him he received with a word and a touch on the arm. I watched him for a quarter of an hour. He knew every name. He knew which ones to embrace and which ones to leave alone with a nod, and when old Henrik's widow came up the path he went out to meet her before she reached the gate. My wolf would not settle. I turned it over while I stood there and could not find a single thing wrong with his behavior. That was the trouble. Grief makes wolves clumsy. It makes them forget names and drop cups and say the wrong thing to the wrong person. Dietrich did not forget one name. Marta found me before the sun was over the roof. She came out of the pack house with a basin and a cloth and her blonde hair tied back, and she put the basin down on the low wall beside me and took hold of my hand. "You are bleeding," she said. I looked down. There was blood under my fingernails and a long scratch on my wrist that I had not noticed. "It is Reinhard's." "I know whose it is. Sit down." I sat on the wall and let her work. Her hands were quick and sure, and she talked while she did it, which was Marta's way. "The whole house is in an uproar," she said. "Tobias wants to send a war party to the Bosbach border tonight. You should hear the yard when they say the mining clans did it." "Nobody is going anywhere until the Council sends someone." "That is what I told them." She wrapped the cloth around my wrist and tied it. "The whisper in the kitchen is different. Half the pack is saying a rogue did it. The other half is saying the rogue was not alone." Her blue eyes came up to mine and stayed there. "Did you kill him, Konrad?" The question came out of her so plainly that for a moment I could not answer. "No," I said. "I did not kill him." "Then find who did before the pack finds a wolf to hang. There is talk about the woman at the inn. There is talk that she was seen leaving the border road with a hood over her head." "Who is doing the talking?" "Tobias. And Tobias heard it from Dietrich." I looked across the yard. Dietrich stood by the table with his hand on Reinhard's shoulder and his head bowed, and a group of wolves had gathered behind him in a line that looked a great deal like a queue waiting to speak to the Alpha. Marta followed my eyes and then picked up her basin. "Be careful who you tell things to," she said, and went back into the house. The pack house has a room off the kitchen where the enforcer keeps his things. A cot, a table, a chest with a lock on it. I went in and shut the door and put the silver tooth on the table in the light from the small window. Seen properly, it was a fine piece of work. The silver was old and worn smooth at the edges, and the tooth itself had been cast from a real one, some ancestor's fang. The cord had been broken rather than untied. I turned it over and found a mark on the back of it, three small strokes cut into the metal in a row. Three strokes. I had seen that mark before, on the iron collar of a rogue wolf I had brought to the stone six years ago. The rogue had been a woman, and she had said nothing all the way up the road, and when I had asked her what the collar meant she had told me to ask my Alpha. I had never asked. It had not seemed like my business. I sat down on the cot and put my head in my hands. There was a proper way to do this. I should carry the tooth to the pack, tell them what I smelled on it, and let the law run. That is what an enforcer does. Reinhard had taught me himself, standing in this same room, that the law does not care who it hurts. He had said it without a trace of shame, as if it were a virtue. And the law would take one look at my face and ask me how I knew the scent. I would have to say I knew it from my own bed. Someone knocked. I swept the tooth into my pocket and opened the door, and Dietrich stood there with his cup in his hand and his black hair neat, and behind him the hallway was empty. "May I come in?" he said. I stepped back. He came in and looked around the small room, and then he sat down on the chair by the table without being asked, the way he sat down everywhere. "You left the yard this morning," he said. "I called after you." "I had to walk. I needed the air." "Of course. It has been a hard morning for you." He set his cup on the table and folded his hands. "Konrad, I have been thinking about what happens next, and I want to say this before the rest of them get their teeth into it. You are the best enforcer this pack has had in a hundred years. That is not flattery. It is the reason I am sitting in your room instead of sending someone else." "Say what you came to say." "The pack meets tonight at the stone. I will stand up in front of them and say that Reinhard trusted you above every wolf in this territory, and that the investigation belongs to you and no one else." He watched me. "That is a great deal of weight to put on a wolf who was out wandering the pines at dawn instead of doing his duty." "I was not wandering." "I am glad to hear it." He stood up and took his cup and paused at the door. "Tonight, then. Bring me a name. Any name that will hold up under the law. If you bring me nothing, the pack will decide for you, and they will not be gentle about it." He went out and pulled the door shut behind him. I heard his boots go down the hallway toward the kitchen, and then I heard him greet someone by name and laugh. I waited until the house was quiet, and then I took my coat and went out the back, across the yard, past the chicken house, into the pines. The scent of her was faint as a breath on cold glass, and it led north and east, away from the border road, toward the old hunting trails. I followed it until the light went, and then I stopped and stood still in the dark and listened. Nothing. No wolf running, no birds, no wind even. Then, very close, no more than twenty paces off among the trunks, a twig snapped under a foot and a voice I knew said my name. I turned toward it, and a hand came out of the darkness and closed around my wrist.