13. Cain
Cain
I wrote it like an illegal letter in the dark before the first light.
Two lines, no salutation, in the private code I used with Julius for three years.
Watch anyone in G's circle moving without orders. Confirm what you have been hearing about the western border. Send a word the moment you have proof.
I didn't name what I wanted Julius to confirm. I didn’t write his name. I folded the letter once along the grain, sealed it with the private seal I carried against my chest, and called for the rider before the sky at the top of the woods to the east began to turn.
I stood at the gate and watched him go down the path to the road.
Marion’s “accident” at the river was two days ago.
The wolf inside me roared at the bank. The wolf was very still — and it was the wrong kind of stillness.
The man inside me told the wolf for the last forty-eight hours that the question remained a question without an answer. The wolf wasn't agreeing.
I went back inside.
I sat on the couch in the front room until the kitchen lamp came on under Marion's hand at first light, and then I rose and put the kettle on the trivet.
She didn't ask me why I was up so early.
Later in the day, I walked with her.
I walked with her to the herb bed in the morning and to the woodpile at midday and to anywhere around the cottage.
She didn't protest when I picked up the wooden bucket without being told, or when I picked up the spade and finished the work she started at the rosemary line.
She let her shoulders, on those walks, very slightly come down.
The wolf in me read the woods like it was the Swiftwater council table. By the second afternoon, it was counting shadows at the edge of the clearing. I didn't tell Marion. The wolf counted. I failed to watch a house once.
Later that night, we had supper.
Noah was at the kitchen table with the lore book open beside his bowl. He called me sir for four weeks — the word a boy used when he was being polite to a man whose place at his table he hadn't yet decided.
He looked up at me across the boards.
"Father, would you pass the salt?"
Marion's hand on her spoon stopped.
He spoke in the same level voice he used to ask his mother, weeks ago, what he was. He didn't dress the word nor ask anyone's permission. He said it instantly.
I didn't let my face move. The face I wore at that moment at her kitchen table was the same face I wore the night Noah was born and they laid him against the inside of my arm.
I picked up the small clay dish with the salt and held it across the table. He took it.
"Thank you, Father."
He tipped the dish over his stew and set it down on the boards between us with both hands, and the small dark face above the bowl went red. The red went up his neck, into his cheeks and as far as his hairline, and he didn't look up from his bowl.
I didn't dwell on the red. I took a mouthful of stew. I chewed and swallowed.
"That's too much salt, Noah," I said.
"Mommy puts that much," he replied.
"Your mommy is wrong."
The sound he made into his bowl wasn't a laugh — he hadn't yet decided I was allowed to be wrong about his mother in front of him. Marion at her end of the table set her spoon down in a silence that wasn’t really silence. I avoided looking at her.
Noah did. He looked at his mother, then back at me.
"Mommy isn't wrong," he countered.
"She is about salt."
"She made the stew!"
"The stew is good. The salt is too much. Both can be true."
He thought about that for a moment. Then he tipped his head down and ate the next mouthful slowly, like he was checking the salt for himself.
He looked up at the second mouthful. His hand on his spoon was very steady.
"Father." Steadier than the first time. "What is it like to shift?"
I set my spoon down.
"The heat comes up through the bone, Noah. The wolf comes up through the man."
He waited.
"How many wolves do you know?"
"More than I can count."
"More than a hundred?"
"More than a hundred."
"More than five hundred?"
He was leaning forward over the bowl, both elbows on the table, his eyes the eyes of a wolf who waited a long time to ask another wolf anything at all.
"More than five hundred, Noah. Less than a thousand."
"Has anyone you know not gotten through the first shift?"
The kitchen behind me went very still. Marion's spoon stopped again. I didn't look at her.
"Once. When I was a boy, I knew a fellow wolf. His body wasn't ready. His pack hadn't taught him breathing like mine did. He’s gone now." I paused. "Your mommy has been teaching you breathing for six months without knowing she was. You'll get through it."
He nodded. He took the answer, and the tight line across his shoulders loosened.
"Father?"
"Yes, Noah?"
"Will you be there? When I… shift?"
I held his gaze.
"Yes."
He went back to his stew, and Marion's hand on the spoon — which stopped at Father and didn't, through any of the answers, move — came up off the boards. She lifted the kettle off the trivet and crossed to the basin.
The kitchen breathed.
I ate my stew. The salt was on it. The word he said on the kitchen boards stayed in the air around the three of us.
I sat on the back step with him after.
The dusk came on long and late, the way it did at the end of summer. Noah sat beside me on the step, the lore book open across his knees, his finger on a passage he wasn't reading.
"Father, what does a wolf eat?"
"What a man eats. More of it."
He thought about that. "Mommy said wolves eat deer."
"Mommy is right. Wolves also eat bread."
"Bread isn't deer."
"Neither am I, most days."
A laugh came out of him.
"Father, does the wolf know your name?"
I took a long breath. "The wolf knows the name your mother gives you. It knows the name you give yourself the first time you stand at a council table and say it out loud." I looked at him. "It chooses the one you live by."
"Which one did your wolf choose?"
I didn't answer at once. "My mother and father called me Cain on the third day of my birth. I was given the title Alpha at twenty-four in the council hall at Swiftwater. I have always been Cain to those closest to me."
He thought for a short while. Then he leaned the smallest fraction against the long line of my thigh on the step.
"What does the wolf call me?"
I paused until the answer came up clean — the wolf in me had been calling him by it for two months without my permission.
"Cub."
He didn't speak again. He settled his shoulder against my thigh and sat in the answer for a while.
I felt her at the kitchen window behind us before I turned. Marion was at the basin with the kettle in her hand. She didn't put it on the trivet. She was watching the two of us on the back step.
I didn't turn to her. We sat in the dusk like that until the woods to the east went dark.
* * *
The rider came back late.
I went out to the gate with the lamp in my hand.
He handed me a sealed leather packet without dismounting and didn't speak — a courtesy of a man who rode a long way and didn't intend to be remembered for the ride or the arrival.
I sent him to the stable at the south end of the clearing where Mila was kept for the better part of two months.
I carried the packet to the porch. I sat down on the top step where I sat with Marion two nights ago, set the lamp on the boards beside me, and broke the seal.
Two pages. Julius's precise hand. I knew it across a hundred dispatches — steady through summer campaigns, steady through winter sieges, steady through the worst reports a man could send an Alpha. The hand was steady now.
Rumors of G cutting quiet deals with rogue packs at the western border, my Alpha.
Three confirmed sightings in the last six weeks.
The men involved are men we have known by name for years.
These rogue packs have been spreading anti-human rhetoric throughout our lands.
They were not riding under his banner. They were riding with his coin.
I do not yet have written proof. I am working to bring it.
I read it three times. The word I was looking for wasn't in the report. Julius was twenty-four. He was a cheerful and dutiful young man, but he was honest, and he had never written me a sentence he didn't have the room in his bones to write.
I folded the packet. I sat with it on the step for a long beat.
Gregor was always a brother to me. I stood beside him at council tables and at my wife's grave, six years of it.
I sent him into rooms in my name and trusted what came back out of them, and weeks ago at the cemetery, I told him, with the brown stems of late summer flowers between us, that the seat would fall to him if the boy was never found.
He took the seat-talk casually, like the warm and unhurried voice of a man receiving a thing he didn't ask for.
I didn't, on the porch step at the end of the dusk, name what the packet meant.
I folded it away. I didn't show it to Marion. I didn't have proof. I had a rumor.
Rumor was what Savannah brought me too.
I wrote the answer by the lamplight on the step.
Find the proof. I will wait for it. Do not move further without me.
I sealed it, carried it to the stable, and put it in the rider's hand. He went back down the road before the moon cleared the line of the canopy.
The cottage was quiet when I came back through the gate.
The kitchen lamp was still on. The workroom lamp at the south end of the cottage was on too — the high lamp Marion kept on a hook above the workbench when she was working on a peddler's order at the end of the day.
It was off for most of two days. The number of lights caught my eye before I came halfway up the path.
I crossed the dooryard, went up the porch step and through the kitchen to the workroom door, and stopped at the doorway.
Marion was at the workbench.
The green vials in their row, the labels in her own handwriting, the linen-wrapped bundles she used for a peddler's order — except this row was not a peddler's row.
It had the cooling tincture Noah took on bad nights, the strengthening draught she made for herself when the winter was long, the small bottle of dried mugwort she carried in her satchel when she walked the path to the southern village.
A household packed and ready to leave.
She didn't look up. She’d known I was at the doorway since I came up the path.
I stood at the doorframe. I put my hand against the wood and didn't take a step into the room.
She spoke without turning, in the level voice she used at the gate with peddlers the first week of my being there and at the porch with me on the afternoon of the knock. "Whatever this is, Cain, I can't lose him. Don't make me lose him."
The packet pressed against my ribs.
"I'm not here to take him from you." I kept my hands open at my sides.
She lifted her head. Her eyes in the lamplight were very dark, and the thin red line above her left eyebrow was still raw.
"Then say what you are here for." She turned the rest of the way to face me.
I think it's older than any sickness, Cain. I think it's the people here. The wolves. I think there are wolves in this house who would rather I were not yours.
I was hearing Savannah in the doorway now.
My chest did the thing it did six years ago at the window. It refused.
She set the vial in her hand down on the bench with the click of glass against wood, and she turned. She crossed the workroom slowly and stopped two paces from the doorway, her hands flat at her sides. The lamp behind her threw the line of her braid into shadow.
"Cain. Look at me," she said.
I looked at her.
"What was in the packet?"
I didn't answer.
"I saw a packet. A rider came to the gate after dark. I saw the lamp on the porch step from the kitchen window. You sat on the porch for the better part of an hour. You went back to the stable. Then you came back through the gate. What was in the packet?"
"A report," I finally said.
"From who?"
"One of my hands at Swiftwater."
"What was the report about?"
I didn't answer.
"Cain." She took a half-step closer. "Was the hand at my back a hand from Swiftwater?”
The wolf in me made a sound that didn't come out of my throat.
I closed my mouth. I opened it. I had Gregor's name, the rumor, the river, and the hand that pushed her back, and the morning Savannah said something inside this keep is wrong.
I had the lore book on the side table and the kettle and the well and my son saying Father across a kitchen table — and I didn't yet have the room in me to put all of those things in a sentence with one name at the end.
"I don't know."
It came out lower than I meant it to.
"You don't know? Or you don't know yet?"
"I don't know yet."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I'm waiting for proof."
"From the man at Swiftwater?"
"From the man at Swiftwater."
"And when the proof comes?"
I didn't answer.
She nodded once. What I gave her next was not an answer.
"Everything is going to be all right, Marion. You won't lose him."
She looked at me. Her face in the lamplight didn't move.
"You don't know that. There's something out there, Cain."
"I'm not leaving, Marion."
"That isn't an answer."
"It's the only one I have."
She held my gaze for a long while.
"Then go to bed, Cain."
I turned, and went back to the front room. I sat down on the couch in the dark with Julius's packet folded into the inside pocket of my cloak, and I didn't move for a long time.
The lamp at her workbench stayed on. Two doors apart in the same cottage. Neither of us on the side of the door we were on three weeks ago.
I couldn't say what I was here for.
Not yet.