8. Cain
Cain
I settled into a position in the cottage that wasn’t mine to hold.
I'd been sleeping on the front-room couch for three weeks with my sword on the floor beside it and the kitchen door three paces from my head.
I hadn't asked her for anything she hadn't already given me, or told her about the conspiracies within my own pack.
I did a great many things in three weeks at this cottage, and none of them were being Alpha.
The cottage was the quietest house I'd stood inside in twelve years.
I stood in the kitchen with one hand on the doorframe and let myself register the quiet.
It wasn't the quiet of my own keep. My own keep was quiet as a stone hall when the household was told not to speak above the Alpha's grief — a quiet held by a hundred mouths in a hundred rooms, a quiet I had been the cause of for six years and the master of for twelve.
This quiet was held by one woman at a workbench, one boy in a back room, one kettle off on a cold trivet, and the small sound of a lamp burning low.
It was a quiet house because the people in it had stopped expecting anything to break it.
And I had not.
In twelve years of being an Alpha, learning how to not break it was new.
Noah was at the kitchen table in his sleep-shirt with the lore book open in front of him.
The book was a leather-bound copy I'd pulled off the shelf at the Stoneveil council post one summer when I was twenty and waiting on a treaty to be signed.
The boy turned the pages like Marion did — slow, careful, the edge of one finger along the bottom corner.
The boy looked at me across the boards. He looked at his mother at the workbench.
He looked back at me. He'd been working out a sentence for a week.
I watched him work it out without yet knowing what the sentence was.
Until finally, he asked for it.
"Did she love me?" Noah asked.
I waited. He was nine and it was a question that carried the baggage of six years of pain.
"My real mother. Did she love me?"
I sat down on the bench across from him.
I took a long beat. I'd been a husband for five years and a father for three and a widower for six, and I didn’t know, in any of those six years, whether Savannah had sent the boy away because she knew she was dying or because she tried to tell me something for months that I refused to hear.
The two were not the same. The first was a mother's last clean act. The second was a wife's last warning to a husband who didn't listen to her. I built six years inside the first and refused, in any of the long quiet hours of those years, to walk inside the second.
I gave the boy the truest answer I had.
"She loved you enough to give her life for yours."
I didn't yet know how true it was.
Noah didn't speak for a long time. He sat across from me with the lore book open under his hands and the small dark head bowed over the page. He didn't ask the next question fast, and he didn't cry. He hadn't cried once in the three weeks I'd been in this kitchen.
Then he asked.
"What was her name?"
"Savannah."
He turned the name over once in his mouth, and he didn't say it aloud.
"Was she like Mommy?"
I had to think about that one. I thought about it longer than the boy was used to my thinking. He waited.
"She was human, like Mommy. She was brave, like Mommy. She loved books, like Mommy. She was not as good with herbs."
"Was she a good cook?"
"Worse than Mommy."
The smallest sound came out of the boy at that — I registered it as a chuckle. At the workbench behind him Marion's hands paused on the pestle for one beat, then moved again.
"Did she know me?" Noah asked. "Before?"
"For three years. She held you the night you were born, gave you your name. She fed you, taught you your first words, and walked you across the upper chambers when you wouldn't sleep. She knew you, Noah. Better than anyone."
He bowed his head over the lore book again. He turned the page without reading it.
"Did she leave me on purpose?"
The question landed flat between us. I felt it land. I kept my hands on the bench and kept my voice level.
"She didn't leave you. She kept you. Kept you the only way she knew how to keep you safe, and it cost her everything she had."
He nodded once. He didn't ask the question that was sitting underneath the four he asked — and where were you — and I didn't make him ask it. I sat with the question between us on the kitchen bench instead.
Then he leaned across the bench, slowly, and put his head against my side.
He didn't put his arms around me.
He just put his head there and breathed, and his hair was against the inside of my sleeve.
I didn't move.
I sat with my son's head against my side for a long beat and didn't put my hand on his hair, and I hadn't, in six years, earned the right to do it again on the strength of one careful answer to four careful questions at a kitchen bench.
The hand was at my side. The boy's head was at my side.
The wolf in me, which had been quiet since the kettle the night before, lifted its head once at the weight of him and lay back down.
Marion at the workbench looked at us once and looked away.
She didn't let her face move — only her hands, setting the pestle down, lifting it again, as if keeping them busy was the only way to keep everything else still.
I carried Noah to bed an hour later. He was already half asleep with his head against my side.
I crossed the back room with him, set him under the blue cover, and pulled the cover up to his chin.
The lore book was in my hand. I read him three pages — the cadence I'd been listening to through the cottage walls for weeks, the slow careful rhythm of a witch's apprentice who'd been the only adult in the cottage to read to him for five years.
I blew the candle, and I sat on the edge of the bed for a beat after the boy was asleep with my hand on his small back.
I hadn't sat on the edge of a child's bed in six years. The wolf in me was very near the surface and very still.
In my own bones, the wolf was howling.
Not loud. I didn't have the room in this kitchen for the wolf to be loud.
The howl was inside the bone, in the place a wolf went when the man it lived inside refused to give it air — howling at the child whose head had just rested against his father's side for the first time in six years, howling at the woman at the workbench who didn't look at my face when our hands touched on the kettle the night before, and howling at the six years I'd stood at a grave without knowing what I'd been standing over.
I held the howl where it sat.
In twelve years of being an Alpha, I learned that a wolf held quiet was a wolf you could still command. I wasn't yet ready to learn that there were some things a wolf wouldn't let a man command around forever.
I walked out into the dooryard at the back of the cottage.
The night was cool. Marion was at the well in her shawl with the wooden bucket, drawing the night water, the small private chore she did every night for years. I hadn't, in three weeks of being in her house, intruded on it. I stopped at the corner of the cottage and almost turned back.
I didn't.
I crossed the yard slowly enough that she heard me before I reached her.
She drew the water and set the bucket on the lip of the well-stone.
She didn't look at me until she did. The moon was high enough that I could see the line of her cheek and the expression at her mouth that wasn't the one she wore at the workbench in the daytime.
"Thank you," she said. "For reading to him."
I hadn't expected sincerity from her.
"I should be thanking you for letting me," I replied.
"That's a very Alpha thing to say," she stated.
"Is it?"
"Polite. Slightly stiff. Slightly correct. Rom of Ashfen sort of speaks the same way when we heard him pass by."
"You'd prefer I was rude?"
"I'd prefer you stopped reading to him like you were addressing a council."
It came out flat and dry and not entirely unkind, the small careful flat of a woman who worked out a sentence at her workbench for the better part of three weeks and finally found the rhythm of it.
"I was told my cadence was being listened to through the walls."
She caught the line. Her face didn't move. She looked down at the bucket and looked back up. "It might have been."
"Then I was reading correctly."
The smallest movement at the corner of her mouth — where a smile could be. The wolf in me, which was howling against the bone of my chest a minute ago, went very quiet at it.
"I apologize," she said. "I know I haven't been very… welcoming."
"That's one way to put it."
The dry note in my voice was something I hadn't used since Savannah. She caught it. The small careful expression at the corner of her mouth went, after a pause, into a brittle little laugh. The laugh was so quiet the woods on the other side of the well didn't hear it.
I heard it.
The wolf in me consumed the laugh where it had been consuming every specific thing about this woman for three weeks. I let it go quiet between us before I said the next sentence.
"You're protecting him. I understand."
"He's my son. He's… all I have."
The wolf in me moved. I didn't let it cross my face. "I know. Marion…"
I stopped.
I said her name. I had used her name scarcely. I said it once on the roof in the rain through the storm, and I hadn't said it inside her yard in three weeks. The name in the moonlight had a different weight than the name in the rain.
"I'm not here to take him from you," I stated.
"Do you really believe that?" she asked.
Her voice was level. She wasn't asking me for reassurance. She was asking me for information that I never gave her.
"What happens when he realizes he belongs… with you? In a pack?"
I took a long breath.
"Wolves are known for their loyalty. He won't forget." I paused and looked at her face. "Just as I won't forget how you cared for him all these years in my stead."
"That's a fine sentence."
"Is it not true?"
"It is true. Still a fine sentence."
"I'm trying," I said.
She looked at me a beat longer than she had looked at me in any moment in three weeks. The dry note went out of her face. Something else came into it that I had no shelf for in any of the careful shelves I built for the woman at the workbench in the daytime.
"I know you are," she said. "I've been watching."
We looked at each other across the well-stone for a long beat.
The moonlight was on the cottage roof behind us.
The cold of the well-stone was under her hand and the woods on the other side of the yard were the kind of quiet they went on the nights that weren't, in any part of the woods, actually quiet.
Her hand was flat on the lip of the well-stone — palm down, fingers spread.
“Good night,” she said without looking at me a second time.
She set the bucket on the stone and crossed the yard toward the back step. To reach the kitchen door, she had to pass within two paces of me — close enough to feel impossible, yet not nearly close enough for what my body was asking for.
The wolf in me went very loud at the moment she passed.
The wolf was telling me, plainly, to reach for her.
To put my hand on her back where her shawl was sliding off the line of her shoulder, and pull her against me, and lower my mouth to the place under her ear where her braid came loose, and say her name a second time into her skin.
The man held his hands at his sides. The man held them so still the knuckles on the right one went white where the fingers were closing on the air a hand would have closed on.
She passed me.
The shawl at her shoulder brushed the sleeve of my cloak. She didn't slow her step at the brush. I didn't follow.
I stood at the well-stone and listened to the kitchen door open and close behind her. I pressed my forehead against the cold of the well-stone where her hand was a minute before, and the wolf in me, which was very loud a moment ago, said one thing very clearly inside the bone.
Not her. I won't do this twice.
I didn't decide anything.
I let myself know the thing I'd been refusing for three weeks to know — that the woman who'd just brushed past me in the moonlight was a woman my wolf had named the first afternoon the wind on the western track carried two scents across my body, and that I'd been calling the naming by another word for three weeks because I hadn't yet earned the right to call it by the right one.
I picked up the bucket she left at the well, set it down on the porch where her hand would find it in the morning, and went back to the couch in the front room.
I couldn't sleep.
The cottage was still quiet. Not like my keep. I lay on the couch with my sword on the floor beside it and I didn't sleep, and the night went by in a long quiet stretch.