The room smelled of him before I opened my eyes. Pine resin, woodsmoke, and the warmth that was Konrad's skin after a long night. My cheek rested against his shoulder blade, and his breathing came slow and even, the deep rhythm of a wolf who had finally stopped running. I should have left before dawn. I had told myself that three times in the dark, and three times I stayed. His back was bare under my hand. I traced the ridge of muscle along his spine without meaning to, and he stirred but did not wake. There was a small scar near his hip, old and pale. I knew the shape of it now. I had known it for six hours. Eight years ago he had told me I was nothing to him. The memory sat in my chest like a swallowed stone, and still I had come here last night when he found me in the rain outside the coroner's office, still I had let him pull me through the door of the old mill cottage, still I had said nothing when his mouth found mine. My father's funeral had been that afternoon. My hand slid up Konrad's shoulder. My fingers brushed the spot where his neck met his collarbone, and the world went white. Cold rain. The smell of wet earth. A voice I knew, low and furious, saying words I could not catch. Then the pain, a bright tearing in the chest, and a thought rising through it like a bubble from deep water. She did this. Your mother knows. I jerked my hand back and sat up. The quilt fell to my waist. My own breath came hard and fast, and I pressed the heel of my palm against my sternum to stop the shaking there. The gift does not wait for permission. That is what Greta told me when I was fourteen and first touched a dead rabbit in the forest. It comes when it comes, girl, and it is not polite. Konrad rolled onto his back and blinked up at me. His dark golden blond hair had come loose from its slicked-back order and stuck up in tufts, and his golden hazel eyes found mine in the grey light. Then he smiled. The gap between his front teeth showed, and for a heartbeat he looked like the boy I had grown up beside. "What time is it?" he asked. "Early." My voice came out rough. I was already reaching for my dress on the floor. "I have to go." He sat up. The quilt fell away from him and I made myself look at the window instead, at the rain running down the glass in long wavering lines. "Ilse." "Don't." I found my dress and pulled it over my head. "Whatever you are going to say, don't." His bare feet made no sound on the boards. He stopped a few steps away and did not touch me. "You know what last night was," he said. "I know exactly what it was." I sat on the edge of the bed to pull on my stockings. My hands were steady. I had spent eight years learning how to keep my hands steady around this man. "It was grief. Yours and mine. Two people in the rain." He was quiet long enough that I looked up. His jaw was set, and his gaze had gone flat and careful, the way it did when he was about to say something he believed was kind. "The bond is not a promise," he said. "You know that better than anyone. We can feel it and still live our lives." "You told me that eight years ago as well. I remember. You were very clear." His hand came up and touched his jaw. I had never told him that I had noticed the gesture, or what it meant. He lied with his hand. "The pack cannot know about this," he said. I laughed. It came out flat and short. "The pack can smell you on me, Konrad. Half the wolves in that house can smell you from the porch." "Then we do not walk in together." "No. We certainly do not." He moved then, and his hand caught my wrist before I could reach the door. The contact went through me like a struck bell. His scent closed around me, and my wolf turned over in my chest and pressed toward him with a hunger I had spent eight years starving. "Listen to me," he said. "My father is dead. Someone in this pack killed him, and the whole forest is going to look at me and see the wolf who wanted his seat. I need you clear. If the mate bond muddies your judgment, we both burn." My wrist was warm under his fingers. I could feel his pulse there, or perhaps it was my own. "My judgment has never been clear where you are concerned," I said. "You saw to that." He let go. His hand went back to his jaw. Then he said it, in the soft voice he used for hard things. "Last night meant nothing. Do not make it into more than it was." I had heard him say a version of this before. In the pack house courtyard, with the whole pack watching, when I was twenty-one and still believed that fate was a thing that protected people. He had said, in that same soft voice, I do not want you, and the world had folded itself up small around me. I put my hand on the door latch and did not look back. "Lock the door after me," I said. "You always did like to do things properly." The rain had stopped, and the forest dripped. Wet pine needles released their smell into the cold air, and the path down to the pack house was slick with mud. I walked it quickly, my boots sinking and pulling, and I kept my hands in my pockets like a woman carrying something breakable. The pack house had been a sawmill once, before the war. Its long grey front faced the road, and the two great doors of the drying shed had been painted green forty years ago and never repainted since. Smoke came from the kitchen chimney. Someone was already up. Marta stood on the porch with a cup in her hands. Her platinum blonde hair was loose and wavy over the shoulders of her grey wool coat, and her emerald eyes went from my face to my dress to my boots in the time it takes a person to blink. She was the Beta. She saw everything twice as fast as anyone else. "You are up early," she said. "Or late." "Early. I had a body to see to." "Anselm's body." She said the name carefully. "You saw to it yesterday." The cup in her hands steamed. Her lips pressed together, full and pale against her fair skin, and then she smiled the bright perfect smile that made new wolves trust her instantly and made me want to check my pockets. "Are you coming in? Greta has porridge on, and Rolf is already making speeches at the table about the state of the pack. I think he has been rehearsing." "In a moment." She watched me climb the porch steps. At the door she set her cup on the rail and turned, and her voice dropped lower than her usual crispness. "Ilse. If you are going to keep walking out of that cottage at dawn, you should know that Rolf is not the only one watching. There are strangers in the forest. Humans, from the town. They have been asking about the missing logger again." She picked up her cup and went inside before I could answer. I stood on the porch with the wet cold coming through my boots, and I thought about my father's last thought, and the way my mother's hands had been cold at the funeral, and the way she had asked me afterwards whether the coroner had examined the body properly. The door behind me opened again. Marta's voice, bright enough to carry into the yard. "The Alpha wants everyone in the hall, Ilse. He says there is something he needs to say, and he wants the whole pack to hear it at once." I turned and walked into the house, and my hands were steady, and the dead man in the rain was still talking to me.

The hall of the pack house still had the old sawmill beams overhead, black with a century of smoke, and the long trestle tables where the pack ate together had been pushed against the walls to make room. Every wolf in the Schwarzwald pack was in that room. I counted faces as I came in: Greta by the kitchen door with a cloth in her hands, Rolf at the front with his iron-grey beard jutting, the young warriors along the back wall, the older women on the benches. Sixty wolves, maybe more, and every one of them turned to look at me. I took a place near the back, beside the notice board with its curling lists of timber quotas and the roster for the charcoal kilns. My hands stayed in my pockets. Konrad stood at the head of the hall on the old millstone they used for the Alpha's seat. He had washed and dressed, and his dark golden blond hair was slicked back again, and his golden tan looked grey in the hall light. He did not look at me once. "You all know my father is dead," he said. His voice carried without effort. "You know he was found in the clearing three nights ago, and you know the coroner has examined him. What you do not know is that rumors have been spreading since the funeral. Someone in this pack has been telling the younger wolves that Anselm was murdered. That his own son did it." The room went still. Someone near the front shifted their feet on the boards. Konrad's jaw worked. His hand came up and touched it, and then dropped. "I have heard the stories," he said. "I have heard them from my own warriors. And I have traced them back." He looked at me then, and his golden hazel eyes were flat and cold, and I understood that whatever he had said to me in the cottage at dawn had been a kindness compared to this. "Ilse." The name went through the hall like wind through a wheat field. Heads turned. Greta's cloth stopped moving. "You examined my father," Konrad said. "You were at his grave in the rain that night, before anyone else. You have been telling the pack that he was murdered. I want to hear it from your mouth." I pulled my hands out of my pockets. My fingers were cold. "I have told no one he was murdered," I said. "I have told no one anything. I examined the body as I examine every body in this pack, and I filed my report, and I went home." "You were at the grave." "I was at the grave because he was my Alpha and I had known him since I was a child. I brought him a branch of pine, as is our custom, and I put it in the earth. That is all." Someone in the front row made a noise. Rolf's voice came out of it, thick and pleased. "The coroner is the one who told my nephew that Anselm's heart was torn out. My nephew told his wife. His wife told the kitchen. Now the whole pack thinks our Alpha is a kinslayer." "I told no one that." My voice stayed level. I had spent years learning how to keep my voice level in rooms full of wolves who did not like me. "Your nephew came to my office and asked what I had found, and I told him the examination was not finished. Whatever he heard after that, he invented." Rolf's ruddy face went darker. "You call my nephew a liar?" "I call him a young wolf with an imagination. There is a difference." A few of the warriors laughed, quickly stifled. Rolf's iron-grey beard lifted as he turned toward the Alpha. "You see how she speaks to an elder, Konrad. And you let her." Konrad did not answer him. His eyes were on me still, and I saw something move behind the flatness there, something that looked almost like doubt. It lasted a moment and then was gone. "Ilse," he said. "You will hand over your notes on the examination to the Council when they arrive. Every page. Every observation. If my father died of a bad heart, then say so in front of the pack and put the rumors to rest." My mouth went dry. The notes were in my office, in the drawer I had locked the night before, and on the last page I had written three words in my own hand: cause unclear, investigate. If I handed those notes to the Council, the pack would tear itself apart. If I lied, I would be lying to the Council of Alphas, and my gift would burn in me like a coal for the rest of my life. "I will hand over my notes," I said, "when the Council asks for them properly, and not before. Pack law says the coroner's report goes to the Alpha first, and the Alpha reads it alone. You have not asked me for it. You have asked me to defend myself in front of the whole hall, and I have done that." The silence in the room changed. I could feel it change, the way the air changes before a storm. Konrad's hand went to his jaw again. Then Marta stepped forward from the front row. She had put on her Beta's coat, grey wool with the pack's small silver pin at the collar, and her platinum blonde hair was braided back now, severe and neat, and her emerald eyes were bright and hard. She looked at the pack, and then at me, and she smiled her bright perfect smile. "The Alpha did not accuse the coroner of lying," she said. Her voice was crisp and carried. "He asked her to say plainly what she found, and she has not said it. She has given us law and procedure and a story about a branch of pine. I have known Ilse since we were girls. She has always been clever with words." "That is not an answer," I said. "It is the only answer you have given us." Marta turned to the hall. "The Alpha is grieving his father. He has asked one plain thing of the wolf who examined the body. If she has nothing to hide, she can give him her notes tonight, and the pack can sleep." A murmur went round the room. I watched the older women nod, and the warriors along the back wall shift their weight, and Greta by the kitchen door look at me with something in her sharp eyes I could not read. Konrad raised his hand, and the murmur stopped. "Tonight," he said. "My study. Bring the notes." He stepped down from the millstone and walked toward the door of the hall, and the pack parted for him. At the threshold he stopped, and he spoke without turning his head. "And Ilse. If I find that you have lied to this hall, I will not protect you." The door closed behind him. The hall broke into a hundred quiet conversations at once, and Rolf was already talking to his nephew with his hand on the young wolf's shoulder, and Marta was watching me from the front row with her smile still in place. Greta came past me on her way back to the kitchen, and she touched my sleeve, briefly, with her floury fingers. "Tonight," she said, very quietly. "Before you go to that study, come to me. There is something I have been meaning to tell you about your mother, and I think you had better hear it before the Alpha does." She went through the kitchen door and let it swing shut behind her. I stood alone by the notice board with my hands cold and my heart going hard, and the whole pack moved around me like water around a stone, and not one of them would meet my eye.

The coroner's office stood behind the timber yard, a low stone building with a slate roof and a door that never quite shut in wet weather. I had worked there for nine years. It smelled of carbolic soap, cold stone and the faint sweetness of the herbs Greta sent down to keep the flies off the dead. Anselm lay on the slate table under a linen sheet. I had not finished with him. I had told the pack I had filed my report, and that was true in the way that a half written page is a report. I had examined his hands and his feet and the wound in his chest, and I had written cause unclear, investigate on the last page, and then I had gone home and stood in my kitchen with my hands shaking until Konrad came to my door. Now the pack was waiting for me to bring notes to the Alpha's study, and I had an hour before that, and I meant to use it. I pulled the sheet down to his waist. Anselm had been sixty two. He had deep brown hair going grey at the temples, and his amber eyes were closed now, and his face had settled into something quieter than the face I remembered from the pack house. He had been a hard Alpha and a fair one. He had taught me to gut a deer when I was eight and told me I had steady hands, and I had believed him for years. There was a wound under his left collarbone, narrow and deep, and another below it, and a third near the ribs. Three piercings, each one about the width of a thumb, each one dark with dried blood. I had measured them twice. They were too narrow for a wolf's fangs and too clean for a fall. I put my hand flat on his chest, above the wounds, on the cold skin. I did not have to do this. That is the thing people never understand about the gift. It is not a door that opens when you knock. It is a door that opens whenever you lean on it, and sometimes when you are merely standing near. Cold rain. Wet earth. The voice I had heard before, low and furious, and this time I caught words. You will not do this to the pack. Then the pain came, a bright tearing in the chest, and behind it a hand. I felt it on my wrist, and it was cold. Not the cold of the grave, not yet. The cold of a person who has been standing in the rain for a long time, a person whose hands never warmed. And under that, a second thought, thin and far away, the way a voice sounds through a wall. Not him. Not the boy. I came back to myself with my palm still flat on Anselm's chest and my knees aching from standing so long in one place. The office was cold. The window over the table showed grey sky and the tops of the pines. Not the boy. I said it out loud, to hear it in the room. Konrad had not killed his father. The dead man had said so, in the only way a dead man can. And someone with cold hands had been there at the end, close enough to touch him. I sat down on the stool by the table and wrote it all out in my small careful hand. Not him. Not the boy. A hand on the wrist, cold. A voice, a woman's voice, saying you will not do this to the pack. I did not write down whose voice I thought it was. I was not ready to write that. The door banged open, and Konrad came in with his coat still on. He stopped when he saw the body uncovered. His golden hazel eyes went to his father's face and stayed there, and his mouth went tight, and for a moment he looked like a boy of ten. Then he looked at me. "I told you to bring the notes to my study," he said. "You told me tonight. It is not tonight yet." He came further into the room and stood on the other side of the table, and his hand found his jaw. "Greta says you have been in here since the hall broke up. What did you find?" "Nothing I can put in a report." "That is not an answer." I looked at the sheet in my hand and then at him. "I put my hand on your father's chest. I heard him. He said, not him, not the boy. He was telling me you did not do it." Konrad's hand dropped from his jaw. His face did not change much, but his shoulders came down an inch, and he put one hand on the edge of the slate table to steady himself. "He said that," he said. "Those words." "Those words. And before that, a hand on his wrist, cold. And a woman's voice saying he would not do this to the pack. That is all. I do not know what it means." "Cold hands." Konrad said it slowly, as if tasting the words. "In the rain. Everyone's hands are cold in the rain." "Not like that. It was the cold of someone who had been out in it a long while, who came in from it already cold and never warmed." He looked at his father again, and his jaw worked, and then he said the thing I had been afraid he would say. "Who in this pack has hands like that?" "Many people. Old wolves. Wolves who work the kilns. Wolves who walk the forest at night." "Ilse." "I am not going to say a name to you on the strength of a dead man's half finished thought. I need more. I need to know what your father was doing in that clearing in the rain, and who he was meeting, and why he was carrying no weapon." Konrad straightened. "He was carrying no weapon because he was meeting someone he trusted." "Yes." The word sat between us on the table, with his father's body between us as well. He took a breath. "Tonight, then. My study, with the notes. I will tell the pack that the examination found no proof of murder, and that I am asking the Council to send their own examiner. That buys us time." "And if the Council's examiner asks me what I heard?" "Then you tell him exactly what you told me." He looked at me then, and his golden eyes were steady and hard. "I accused you in front of the whole pack this morning. I was wrong to do it, and I will say so in front of the whole pack tonight. I do not like being made a fool of, and I do not trust easily, but my father has spoken for you, and that is enough for me." I did not thank him. I was not ready for that either. He turned to go, and at the door he stopped with his hand on the frame. "One more thing," he said. "Greta came to me an hour ago. She says there is a stranger in the forest who has been asking the charcoal burners about the night my father died. A man with black hair and a camera. She says he is human." The door swung shut behind him. I stood alone in the cold office with Anselm on the table and my notes in my hand, and I thought about cold hands and a woman's voice, and then I thought about the fact that the only wolf in this pack who had asked me, in front of the whole hall, to hand over my notes tonight was the same wolf whose boots had been muddy on the kiln path. I folded the notes and put them in my pocket, and then I went to find Marta.