1
Ilinca
The trick to carving a ward too weak to matter is that your hands have to believe it's the strongest thing you've ever made.
I'd learned that the hard way, the first winter after Katra died, when a merchant paid me double for a House-ward and I gave him something so thin a determined draft could've walked through it.
He came back three days later missing half his cellar stock and I gave him his coin back and never made that mistake again.
Not because I couldn't carve better. Because I could, and that was the problem.
Dawn light came sideways through the shutter slats of my room above the dye-shop, striping the workbench in gray and gold, and I sat with a block of ash wood between my knees and my smallest knife in my hand, cutting a luck-mark for a spice trader's new cart axle.
Small. Plain. The kind of ward that wouldn't turn a single head in the Sorrowmarket if a wolf walked past close enough to smell the cedar oil I'd sealed it with.
I could have carved it strong enough to survive a mountain fire. I carved it strong enough to survive a bad pothole instead, and told myself that was wisdom and not cowardice, the way I told myself that most mornings.
The scar under my collarbone pulled tight when I leaned forward, the way it always did in cold weather, six years old and still not done complaining about it. I didn't look at it anymore. Some mornings that was a small victory in itself.
Through the gap in the shutters I could see the black ridgeline where the mountains started properly, snow still holding on the highest peaks even this late in the season, the wolf kingdom's territory beginning somewhere past that tree line in a way no sign or fence ever bothered to mark.
I'd never crossed it. Six years in a town built on the border between two worlds, and I'd made a small, careful life entirely on the human side of an invisible line, close enough to smell the pines on a north wind and never once curious enough — or brave enough, if I was honest with the parts of myself that still bothered with honesty before the sun was fully up — to find out what waited on the other side of it.
By the time the market bell rang, I had four wards finished, wrapped in oilcloth, and my hood up before I'd even reached the bottom of the stairs.
The Sorrowmarket woke up loud and stayed that way until dusk, which was one of the things I liked about it.
Nobody noticed one more hooded trader among the tanners and the grain-sellers and the wolves who came down from the highlands to buy salt they could've made themselves if they weren't too proud to boil seawater like the rest of us.
Human stalls and wolf stalls ran together at the crossroads with no clear line between them, the way the whole town did, built into the pass because neither side had ever managed to keep the other out of it for long.
"You're late," Dobrin said, not looking up from the fish he was gutting two stalls down. He'd taken over his uncle's stand the year I arrived, and in six years he'd never once managed to smell like anything other than the river. "Thought maybe the wolves got you."
"The wolves couldn't afford me." I set my table up in the shade of his awning, same as every morning, and started laying out the wards where the light would catch the grain of the wood without catching too much else. "You look like you slept in that apron."
"I slept in the apron because a very pretty messenger from the Larkhollow pack came through yesterday asking directions to the inn, and I was not about to smell like fish when I walked her there."
"Did it work?"
"She's staying till Thursday." He grinned, wide and unbothered, and went back to the fish. Dobrin had never once in his life let a scale of doubt land on him, which was either the most enviable thing about him or the most exhausting, depending on the week.
I was still deciding which, three wards into the morning's sales, when the wind shifted and brought the wolfsbane cart down the east road.
I felt it before I placed the smell — a tightening low in my chest, quick and involuntary, my hand going still around the ward I was wrapping for old Marta the weaver.
The cart rolled past at the pace carts always did, stacked with cut bundles bound for the apothecaries who used the stuff for everything from fevers to preserving meat nobody should have been eating that old, and it was nothing.
It was nothing, every single time, and every single time some old animal part of me flinched anyway, the way a hand flinches from a stove it burned itself on years ago and has never quite forgiven.
Not real. Not that night. A cart. Just a cart.
I made myself finish wrapping Marta's ward before I let my hands shake.
"You went somewhere," Dobrin said quietly, when the cart had passed and the market noise closed back over the gap it left.
"I went nowhere. I'm standing right here." I handed Marta her ward and took her coin and didn't meet Dobrin's eyes, because he was the one person in this town who knew enough of the truth to worry properly about the rest of it, and I didn't have the patience this morning to be worried over.
He let it go. That was the other thing I liked about Dobrin — he knew exactly how far to push and never went one inch past it.
A woman came by near highsun, wolf by the faint gold ring in her eyes and the copper court-token strung at her throat, marking her a tradesman's wife from one of the smaller packs.
She wanted a protection charm for a cub not yet old enough to shift, something to keep him from wandering into a badger's den the way his older brother apparently had, twice, in as many weeks.
I carved that one properly. Nobody had ever gotten hurt because a child's safety-ward held too well, and there was no ledger anywhere keeping count of the ones I let run at full strength against the ones I didn't. Only me.
"You've got good hands," she said, turning the little wooden charm over to admire the grain of the carving, the neat, closed loop of the warding line. "Wardsmith trained?"
"Self-taught, mostly." That was true enough, the way most of what I told strangers was true enough without being the whole of it. Katra had taught me until I was twelve. Six years of teaching myself in a room above a dye-shop had taught me considerably more, out of necessity if not out of choice.
"You should charge more for work like this."
"I charge exactly what work like this is worth to the person buying it," I said, and she laughed, and paid me two silvers instead of the one I'd asked for, and told me to stitch the charm into the boy's collar where he couldn't tug it loose, and went on her way with the kind of unhurried, ordinary contentment I sometimes watched from behind my counter the way another woman might watch weather she couldn't afford.
Pretty. Distant. Not built for people like me.
Not every wolf who came through the Sorrowmarket thought a hooded trader owed them anything.
I tried to remember that, on the days the market made it easy to forget.
It was the envoys and their like who made the news, the way a storm made more noise in memory than a hundred ordinary calm mornings ever did.
The envoy arrived at midmorning, and I knew what he was before he'd crossed half the market, the way you know a storm is coming before the first drop hits you.
Wolf-built, dressed too well for a trade errand, moving through the crowd like the crowd owed him the space it gave him — which, to be fair, most of it did, human and wolf alike stepping back without seeming to notice they'd done it.
He stopped at my table and picked up the ward I'd finished for the miller's granary without asking, turning it over in fingers that had never once done a day's work.
"This the best you've got?"
"It's the best you're going to get for what you're offering.
" I held out my hand, palm up, for the ward back.
He didn't give it to me. "Six coppers doesn't buy a granary-strength seal.
It buys you the ward I just watched you insult, and you can put it back on my table or you can pay for it.
Those are the two options currently available to you. "
Something in his face shifted, surprise sliding fast into something colder. "Do you know who I serve?"
"I know you serve someone important enough that he sent you instead of coming himself, and important enough that you thought that meant you didn't have to be polite to a wardsmith in a market town.
" I kept my voice easy, the same voice I used for haggling over fish or flour, because letting him see that my pulse had picked up would have been the same as losing.
"It doesn't. You're still standing in my stall.
You're still going to pay six coppers, or nine if the miller wants it done properly, and you're still going to put my work down before you drop it, because if you break it before you've bought it, that's twelve. "
He turned the ward over once more, testing its edge with his thumbnail as though he expected market-craft to crumble under a wolf's touch. "Six coppers is generous for something this small."
"Six coppers is generous for something this well made, and you know it, or you wouldn't still be holding it instead of walking away." I held his eyes and didn't blink first. "You can insult my prices or you can insult my craft, but you don't get to do both and keep the ward for free."
For one long second I genuinely didn't know which way it was going to go — whether he'd throw the coin at my feet to prove a point or throw something worse — and then, behind him, Dobrin set his gutting knife down on the counter with a deliberate, unhurried clack that said, without a single word, I am right here and I am watching.
The envoy set the ward down. Carefully, in the end, which told me he'd heard the twelve coppers part more clearly than the rest.
"Nine, then," he said, like it had been his idea, and counted the coins out with the exact irritation of a man who'd expected easier prey and found himself, instead, in front of the one trader in the Sorrowmarket who'd never once lowered her eyes for a wolf's rank.
"Pleasure doing business," I said, and meant not one word of it, and he knew that too, from the look he gave me on his way out.
Dobrin was laughing before the envoy was out of earshot. "You are going to get yourself killed one of these days."
"I'm going to get myself nine coppers most days, and occasionally I'm going to have to be terrifying about it. Small price."
"Someday it's going to be someone who doesn't have anywhere better to be than teaching you a lesson.
" He said it lightly, but there was a thread under it that wasn't light at all, the same thread that ran under most things Dobrin said to me when he thought I wasn't paying close enough attention. "You know that."
I did know that. I'd known it since I was twelve years old and learned exactly what it looked like when someone with more power than patience decided a lesson was owed.
I didn't say that. I never said that, not even to Dobrin, not even on the nights he sat with me on the roof of the dye-shop and didn't ask why I still checked the room before I slept in it.
"Nine coppers," I said instead, and dropped them into the pouch at my belt, and went back to work.
The notice went up on the market post sometime after the midday bell, and I didn't see it myself until Dobrin's cousin ran past shouting about it to anyone who'd listen — something about border wolves and registration and the Council wanting every rogue trader in the Sorrowmarket accounted for by the week's end, on account of trouble further north.
I caught the shape of it more than the words, the way you catch weather before it arrives, and felt that same old cold drop low in my stomach that the wolfsbane cart had left there that morning.
Six years I'd made myself small enough not to be worth counting. Six years of plain wards and quiet coin and a hood that stayed up even in the heat of the afternoon.
Accounted for.
I didn't like the sound of it. I liked even less the second thing the cousin shouted, half-drowned under the market noise, about a royal convoy expected through within the week — supplies, she said, and a prince who apparently didn't trust anyone else to see the northern road with his own eyes.
Dobrin found me still standing at the post an hour later, arms crossed, reading words that hadn't changed no matter how many times I read them.
"It's probably nothing," he said, in the voice he used when he didn't believe a word of what he was saying and wanted me to believe it anyway. "Border trouble. Council likes to look busy when the north gets nervous."
"Accounted for," I said again, out loud this time, testing the shape of it. "That's not a word for looking busy. That's a word for a list somewhere with names on it."
"You don't have to give them your real one."
"I've been giving this market a real enough name for six years, Dobrin. If someone with a Council seal stands in front of me and asks, I don't know how long convincing holds up against official."
He didn't have an answer for that, which was rare enough that it worried me more than the notice had.
I folded my arms tighter against the wind coming down off the pass and told myself, one more time, that a prince's convoy and a Council notice and a wolfsbane cart on an ordinary Tuesday had nothing to do with each other. Nothing to do with me.
I went back to my carving. Small. Plain. The kind of ward nobody would ever look at twice.
I was, as it turned out, about to be spectacularly wrong.
Katra used to say a wardsmith who lied to her own hands would eventually cut the wrong line on the ward that mattered most, at the worst possible moment.
I hadn't understood what she meant by that until years after she wasn't there to explain it further.
I understood it a little better every year I spent making myself smaller than my own two hands actually knew how to be.
I wrapped my tools in their oilcloth roll as the market thinned toward evening and told my hands, one more time, that small was safe, and safe was enough, and went home to a room above a dye-shop that had never once, in six years, felt entirely like the word home was supposed to feel.