2. Cain
Cain
I rode out at first light with flowers in my hand.
The gardener had cut them the afternoon before and set them in a jar of well-water on the long table in the kitchen wing.
I took them on my way out. The stems were brown at the edges.
The gardener kept those for the days no one was expected to come up the hill, and it was those days when I came up it.
The household had learned, in six years, not to talk about it.
The cemetery sat on the hill above the keep, two hundred feet up the grass, and the path I walked from the postern was the same path I walked for six years.
The wind off the river came at my left shoulder.
The keep lay below at my right — slate roofs, the long stretch of the curtain wall, and the smoke from the kitchen chimneys going straight up in the still morning air.
I ignored the keep. I built my face for this hill a long time ago, and my face was the only thing the household needed from me here.
Gregor came up the path behind me at the half-mark.
He was a year older than I was, broader through the chest, sandy hair cropped close at the sides, his beard going grey at the corners of the jaw. He stood at my right shoulder for all my years as Alpha. The role settled into him.
He wore the dark wool of Swiftwater's beta plainly. No chain. No rank-marks beyond what the pack required. He never needed the marks.
He came every year. I never asked him to come and I never asked him to stop, and asking either way would have been a sentence between us that didn't need saying.
He was the man at my right hand. He became so twelve years ago, when the seat passed to me and my father's body was still cooling in the chamber two corridors over from the great hall. Gregor stood at my shoulder through the naming ceremony and the first winter.
He stood there the night Savannah labored with our son in the upper chambers when the keep went very quiet around me as I waited for a sound. The man at my right hand was, in the only word I had for him, brother. I let the word sit.
He stopped a pace behind me at the grave and didn't speak.
I set the flowers down at the base of the marker. The stems went brown sideways against the stone. I straightened them. Then I straightened them again.
Savannah.
Today was the sixth anniversary of her death.
It was also the day my three-year-old son had been carried out of the keep by hands I had not found.
Into a country I had not yet ridden. And today was also, by the small private count in my own chest, my son's ninth birthday — though the ninth birthday belonged to a boy I hadn't seen in six years, and the count was something I kept in a chamber of myself I didn't open often.
I stood in the grass with the wind at my left and the keep at my right and didn't let my face move.
"Alpha."
"Beta."
We spoke the ceremonial sentences the household required of an Alpha at a wife's grave. He spoke the ones the beta was required to speak in answer. We had said the same sentences for five anniversaries, and they wore smooth between us like river stones in a long bed.
Then he said the new thing — the one he rode up the hill to say.
"The elders have asked me to carry a message, brother.
" He let the word brother sit between us.
Warm. The voice of a man speaking to family in a private hour.
"I told them I would carry it. I told them I wouldn't dress it. The elders have asked that you consider, this year, taking a new mate, naming a new heir. They say the pack needs the seat secured. They say… six years is too long.”
He paused. The wind off the river moved the brown stems against the stone. Then he spoke lower — the voice he kept for the brother and not for the beta.
"I'll say my own piece, while we're at it.
My sister has never been bound. Vera has lived in this keep her whole life.
She'd not need to be taught the work of an Alpha's mate — she's been doing the small pieces of it for a decade.
" A pause. "I won't press the matter, brother. I'd not have said it in any other ear."
I had heard the elders' message every year, with different variations and fewer levels of urgency. I had not heard the addendum about Vera in any of them. I answered both the same way.
"They know I already had a mate. She's dead and I only have one heir."
"Cain…" Soft. Careful. The voice he used at my wife's bedside on her last night, when he held my forearm in the corridor and told me he wasn't leaving the chamber until I did. "The child has been gone for six years."
"Six years," I repeated.
"The elders —"
"I know what the elders say. I've heard them say it. If the boy — Noah — is never found, the pack falls to you."
Saying my son’s name was enough. I answered Gregor as though stating a clause of pack-law he had stated four times before. He nodded — the careful nod of a beta who was being told what he already knew and didn't want.
"You won't carry it alone," I added. "You have Julius."
"Julius."
"Young. Wiser than his years. You know he's held this keep through every long absence I've taken.
He held it last spring when I rode west for three weeks for the Brackenhold treaty, and he held it the autumn before that when I went south.
You have my guarantee that he'll stand beside you if the seat ever falls to you. The pack will be steady."
"A fine young man," Gregor said smoothly and warmly. A beta agreeing with his Alpha about a third party in a corridor he had no reason to disagree about. "He is wise beyond his years, brother. The pack is fortunate to have him."
We stood for a moment in the grass. The wind moved in the long stems.
"There's been one other thing," he said.
He said it lower. Almost like an afterthought tucked at the end of a conversation in a private hour because the conversation was the safest place to tuck it. I turned my head a fraction. The wind shifted; the brown stems against the stone bent the other way.
"Whispers, Cain. In the lower ranks. Some of the older wolves.
" A small pause; the careful pause of a man who didn't want to overstate.
"Wolves who remember the old lore. Talk of meetings where they shouldn't be meeting. Quiet meetings. The kind of meeting called when the seat wasn’t holding the line. "
I didn't answer at first. I let the wind move the stems again.
The quiet wolf inside me didn't lift its head now either. It was trained by me; it trusted the man on my right shoulder. The word whispers from Gregor's mouth caused only a slight disturbance in my thoughts.
"How long has it been going on?"
"Not long. A few days, maybe weeks? I would have come to you sooner, but I wanted to be sure I was hearing it and not making a thing of nothing."
"And you're sure now?"
"I'm sure enough that I'm telling you. I'm not sure enough to give you names. I will look into it myself, brother. I will set them right. Whatever they are, they're a small thing — they will be a small thing while I look at them, and then they will not be a thing at all."
I nodded.
"Set them right," I said. "Then come and tell me."
"I will."
We turned to ride down. The horses were tied at the gate of the cemetery wall, and the sun was a hand higher than it was when we came up the path. Gregor walked at my left shoulder back down the grass. At the gate, he set his hand on his horse and looked at me across the saddle.
"You'll ride straight back to the keep?" he asked.
"I have a small matter to attend to in the woods near the Brackenhold border. I'll be home by dusk,” I replied.
"I'll ride with you."
"No. This is a personal matter."
He looked at me. He never pushed on the anniversary — had learned long ago not to — and it was one of the courtesies that built the warmth of the word brother between us over the long stretch of twelve years.
"Alone, then."
"Alone."
He nodded, and swung up. He turned his horse back along the lower path toward the keep. I swung up after him and turned mine the other way, west.
* * *
I'd ridden this track twice a year for six years and I never looked at the trees, and I wasn't looking at them now.
The track ran along the high ground at the edge of the neutral woods between Swiftwater and Brackenhold.
The trees were summer oak and beech, and other than that I didn’t know anything else about it because I didn't look at any of it.
The grass at the verge moved. The wind off the river fell away behind me as the track turned south.
The horse stopped.
The horse never stopped. Her name was Mila; she was eleven years old and I'd ridden her since she was three.
She knew the western track better than I occasionally did, and she'd never once in eight years stopped on it of her own accord.
She stopped now. She put her head up. Her ears went forward toward the south, into the trees.
I sat in the saddle with the rein gone slack in my hand and didn't ask her to move.
The wind came through the trees, over the track, and across my body, and the wolf inside me lifted its head.
I sat very still in the saddle. Mila still hadn't moved. The forest at the edge of the road was empty. The wind moved once more in the leaves above me and then went still, and I breathed. My body knew something my mind did not allow.
The first scent on the wind was a scent I hadn't smelled in six years.
It was a scent I'd refused to smell for more than half a decade — the warm specific scent of my own son, the scent of the small body I'd carried out of the upper chambers the night he was born, held against the inside of my arm, and felt go quiet there.
The wolf in me knew it like it was my own.
The man in me did not, in this moment, let himself know it.
The man in me made the long flat practical sentence: children's scents are similar at that age, the wind has come a long way, you have been carrying this hill in your body for six anniversaries and you are imagining a thing you have wanted for six years.
The man in me made the sentence. The wolf didn't take the sentence.
And underneath the first scent was a second.
The second scent was a scent I'd never smelled before in my life.
In thirty-six years I had smelled a great many things — the six packs, every keep I'd ridden into, my own hall, my wife on the morning she was buried, and I thought I knew the catalog of scents that my wolf was capable of recognizing. I didn’t know this one.
The wolf in me knew it. The wolf in me knew it before the wind finished crossing my body, and I traced the scent toward the south, into the trees, where it was thickest.
The rein went all the way slack.
I sat in the saddle and didn't move or speak, and Mila stood under me with her head up, and the wind moved once more and stopped, and I said — aloud, in the empty forest, to no one — the only sentence my body would let me say.
"My son is here."
Mila took the side track at my knee.
I did not ask her. I let the rein lie. She turned south off the western track of her own accord, and the trail through the neutral woods opened out in front of her.
I rode without asking her to go faster or slower, and the man in me did the long flat work of not believing what the wolf in me already believed.
I repeated sentences in my head as I rode.
Children's scents are similar. The wind has come a long way. The second scent is the scent of whoever is keeping the boy, if the boy is being kept, which the boy may not be. The wolf has been quiet for six years but the wolf wants what it wants. The wolf has wanted this for six years.
The man in me made the sentences. The wolf in me kept walking the horse south.
The trail opened out into a clearing. A small cottage stood against the far edge of the clearing with a herb garden along the south wall and a single chimney showing thin pale smoke against the late summer sky. The cottage had a wooden gate at the path and a door with a brass latch.
The wolf in me went still at the sight of the door as I approached it with my horse.
I stopped Mila at the gate.
I dismounted. I looped the rein around the post in the careful knot. The second scent was thickest near the door.
I walked the short path.
At the door I made myself raise my hand and knock — the wood was old, the latch clean, the smoke thin and steady above the chimney, the cottage giving nothing back. No one came. I knocked again.
The footsteps that answered didn't hurry. They crossed a kitchen floor, paused a foot inside the wood, and the latch turned.
The door opened after my third knock.
The woman behind it looked at me.
I didn't look at the woman. The wolf in me pulled my eye past her shoulder, into the kitchen behind her, and I followed it. I looked at the small body half-hidden in the folds of her skirt. I looked at the dark hair on the small head. The boy’s face turned up at me, one hand fisted in her apron.
The wolf in me made a sound that I didn't have a name for, and the man in me whispered the only word left to me.
"Noah?"