Chapter 2

Sienna answered for him.

"You really don't know?" Her hands had stopped over the tray. "Five years ago the rogues ran him into the Vein and brought the roof down on him. I went in after him. I carried him out. I came out of that shaft with silver in my blood and it has never left."

"And where were you? Out in the timber with a pack of strays. They brought you back two days later stinking of six different males, with their teeth all over your throat. You were seven months gone. You came back without her."

She was getting louder. "And you lie there talking to him like somebody owes you something."

Cassian took her wrist. "Enough. Don't work yourself up before you start."

She picked the blade back up.

Silver doesn't cut a wolf so much as burn through her. I felt the line open from the base of my throat down to the bottom of my breastbone. The smell came up into my face and there was nothing to do about any of it except keep my jaw shut.

Five years ago they took him in the old mine.

He had put half a mark on me the winter before that. Half a mark only runs one way. He couldn't feel me, but I could always feel him, and that night I felt him go down.

I got there first. He was under the fall at the mouth of the second shaft and the rogues were still in the workings behind it. I was seven months carrying and I couldn't have fought one of them, let alone six. So I dug him out with my hands, put him on Teo's back, and told Teo to run.

Then I went back in and pulled the shaft door shut behind me, so they would have something still moving to follow.

They kept me until morning. Rogues mark what they take.

I got out at first light. One of them put a silver round through my belly on the ridge road. That was where I lost her.

I woke up four days later in Vessa's back room. Cassian was in the chair by the door and hadn't let anyone near his own wounds yet.

He came over when he saw my eyes open. He got as far as the edge of the cot and stopped there.

I didn't understand it at the time. Rogue marks don't wash out. The scent sits under the skin and works its way up for months, and I had six of them in me.

He never asked what happened in that shaft. Not once, in five years. He put off finishing the mark, and then he put it off again, and after a while neither of us brought it up.

He never came close enough to smell me again.

The pain brought me back. My chest was open and held open, and then the drill started.

Sienna couldn't find the spot. She set the bit down on my breastbone and it slid. She tried again and it slid again. On the third try it caught. Bone dust came off in a fine spray and settled on my face and I couldn't turn my head away from it.

I made a sound. I hadn't meant to.

"Sienna. Stop."

Cassian's voice. For half a second I thought he had heard me.

Then he looked down. Biscuit was turning circles around his boots.

"He came looking for you," he said, and there was a smile in it.

The pressure came off my chest. Sienna put the drill down and went to the dog in her rite robes, blood to the elbow.

"I know. I know. Blame her, not me. She wouldn't lie still."

She took the bowl from the girl at the door and set it down on the stones. "You won't eat for anybody else, will you. Go on. All of it."

I lay there with my chest open and watched her feed a dog on the floor of the rite room.

Cassian turned around and saw my face.

"Your mouth's gone white."

He lifted the pot off the warmer and came over. "Drink."

For a moment I wasn't in the room. When I was carrying June he was up before first light every morning boiling marrow down for me, and he brought it to the bed himself, because he didn't trust anyone else to get it up the stairs still hot.

"That's Biscuit's," Sienna said. "Deer bone takes all day. She isn't worth it."

"She's running out," Cassian said. "If she goes before the chest is closed, the heart goes with her. I'm not letting four years end that way for you."

"He can miss one night. I'll make it up to him after."

Sienna picked the dog up and looked at me over its head. "Fine. Drink the dog's supper. You can thank me when you wake up."

He tipped the broth into my mouth and I swallowed because there was nothing else to do with it. Salt and marrow, still warm.

The drill started again. It went on a long time. When the hole was finally through, she put it down and picked up the saw.

Cassian wiped my forehead with his sleeve.

"Nearly done," he said. "Whatever you want afterward, you'll have it. A house of your own. Land on the north slope. A seat at the table when the pack eats. You choose."

Four years ago he changed overnight.

I told him what he used to be. That he ran the ridge with me every moonrise, even the winter he was fighting for the seat. That when one of the old guard called me a stray to my face, he broke the man's jaw over it. That I said once I liked the smell of juniper, and he put a whole row of it in along the east fence, and it was still standing.

He listened to all of it and smiled at me the way people smile at children.

"None of that happened the way you tell it," he said. "I marked you because you were the easiest wolf in this pack to keep quiet."

Then he sent me down to Vessa. He said my wolf was sick and Vessa should have a look at her.

Three nights later the Moon Goddess spoke to me for the first time.

The first thing they took was a kidney. Silver had already finished Sienna's.

The saw came down and the teeth bit into my breastbone.