Chapter 1
My daughter's wolf has never woken. Until her first shift, one dose a season is all that keeps it alive. And I brew that dose myself and send it to the supply hall under the healers' guild seal.
This season, my husband's mistress took it from us at the supply hall and fed it to her own daughter in front of forty wolves. Then she pressed my girl's palm onto a silver bar, to prove we were the thieves.
"Save your tears for my man," she said. "Captain Roark Fenn."
That's my husband's name.
Neither of them knows what I did in the war. By moonrise, the whole pack will.
My daughter Nell's last two doses never arrived. Lost in delivery, the hall told me — both times. So this season I brought her in to collect it myself.
We never made it past the counter.
The clerk checked the seal against his register, nodded, and set the vial down. Before I could reach it, a hand came past my shoulder and picked it up.
A woman stood behind us with two men at her back and my daughter's medicine in her fist. I'd never seen her before. Half the hall clearly had — people were already turning our way.
"So this is the thief," she said.
"That vial is registered to my daughter. Put it down."
"Registered." She held it up to the light. "This dose has come through Captain Fenn's allocation every quarter for two years. Now it turns up under some stray brat's name? You copied the seal. You changed the register. And you picked the wrong family to steal from."
"Check the book," I told the clerk. "Nell Orin. Paid and sealed, every season since she was born."
The clerk looked at the book. Then he looked at the woman, and stopped looking at the book.
She tapped a pendant at her throat, a wax seal set in glass. "I wear the real one, sweetheart. Ask anyone in this hall who kept their pups dosed through the last shortage."
The crowd was thick around us now. Somebody said, "That's Sabine Mott. Her charity carried half this street through the shortage. She gives medicine away for free — what would she want with yours?"
"Forged seals are why doses run short in the first place," a man said. "People like this."
Sabine. I filed the name.
"Fine," I said. "Call the guild office. They can match the seal in front of everyone. Ten minutes."
"Why wait ten minutes?" She smiled. "There's a faster way. Healer blood doesn't fear silver. Put the girl's hand on the bar — if she's clean, she walks."
"She's six. Silver burns any pup, clean or not—"
"Then she burns like a thief."
Her men moved before I did. One took Nell by the wrist. When I lunged, the other two put me on the stone floor.
Somebody fetched the silver bar from the scales.
I heard it more than saw it. A hiss, then a smell like a struck match, then my daughter screaming.
They let her go and she folded up on the floor next to me, holding her hand against her chest.
"Mama. It doesn't hurt." She was shaking all over. "Look. It doesn't hurt."
Her palm was burned through the middle, black at the edges. A clean pup scars over from silver in a day. A weak-blooded one doesn't heal at all.
The little girl came over then — Sabine's, red coat, seven at most. She bent down over Nell.
"Mama says thieves' hands smell like smoke after." She reached out. "Hold still. Let me smell."
"Touch her and I'll break your fingers," I said.
Gasps all around, like I was the animal here.
Sabine pulled the cork from the vial and put it in the girl's hands. "Drink it here, baby. Slow. Let them all watch where it belongs."
The girl drank my daughter's dose down to the last drop while two men held me on the floor.
Nell watched it go. Then I saw something I'd only ever seen in the dying.
The gold went out of her eyes.
Not all at once. Like a lamp running out of oil. Her lips went gray. Her good hand, when it found mine, was cold.
Her wolf had waited six years to wake up. Now it was letting go.
"Listen to me." My voice didn't sound like mine. "That dose was the only thing holding her wolf. She has hours. Give me the counter stock and a burner and I can hold her — or by tomorrow you're all standing over a dead pup. Every one of you."
The clerk leaned over the counter, sweating. "Ma'am, that's Captain Fenn's lady you're shouting at. If I were you, I'd put my knees on the floor and keep my hands where she can see them."
"Knees, yes," Sabine said. "That part comes next."
I got an arm loose and grabbed for the counter stock myself. Her slap caught me across the mouth before my fingers touched a single vial.
She crouched down to my level, close enough that I could see the seal at her throat. Close enough to see it was fake.
"You want to cry to someone?" she said. "Cry to my man. Captain Roark Fenn. See whose side this pack takes."
That's my husband's name.
