14. Marion
Marion
Cain was up before me.
I knew it before I crossed the kitchen. The cold air of a door opened and shut an hour ago. The kettle on the stone slab instead of the trivet. Through the kitchen window, the dark line of his boot in the dew on the back step.
I heard him rise through the wall of the back room some time before first light. I lay there for a quarter-hour. I rose with the kettle still warm and the line of his boot still in the dew.
He came in from the yard a few minutes later.
He'd been out to the cherry tree. He had a small wooden bowl with him, half-full of the late pitted cherries from the lower branches. He set the bowl on the table without looking at me, crossed to the basin, and washed his hands.
"You didn't sleep," I said.
"Some."
"Some is a word men use when they didn't."
There was the smallest movement at the corner of his mouth. He didn't answer. He dried his hands on the cloth at the basin and sat down at the table. Noah came in from his room with the lore book under his arm, and the three of us ate the bread, the butter, and the cherries from the bowl.
The kettle on the stove was off. The lore book was at Noah's elbow where it lived now. The wooden bird, wolf, and key were on the windowsill where Noah put them. The hum at my sternum hadn't gone anywhere.
I stopped trying to catalog around it.
An hour later, there was a step on the path.
I knew the step before I looked up — the careful tread of two pack mules behind a man who walked slower than the mules did.
I knew that tread for eight years. The last time I heard it was on the third afternoon of Cain's gate-siege when the peddler stopped at my fence and asked me whether the wolf at it was the wolf he thought it was.
Owain.
He hadn't come back up the path in weeks.
I went to the kitchen door.
Owain was at the gate. He didn't shift the strap of his pack the way he usually did. He stood with his hand on the post like a man who came a long way for one sentence and was deciding whether to say it.
He looked past me into the yard.
Cain was on the back step with Noah, the lore book between them. The peddler saw the man on the back step. He saw the boy beside him. He looked back at me.
"Child.” He called me that again. “I would like to speak with you. And with him."
Owain gestured to Cain.
I crossed the yard to the back step. Cain's head was still bent over the lore book with Noah.
"Cain," I said.
He looked up.
"Owain wants a word."
Cain rose without a question. He spoke once to Noah, low. "Stay where you are, cub. Read me the next page when I'm back."
Noah nodded. The word cub came out of Cain's mouth as easily as the boy's name came out of mine for five years, and I didn't have a definition for the ease of it.
He crossed the yard and stopped a respectful arm's-length from Owain, nodded once. Owain nodded back. I brought a cup of water out from the kitchen. The peddler took it, drank slowly, and set the cup on the post.
He told us together this time.
He was on the road south of the cottage three days ago — not the main road to the village but the smaller track that went down through the woods to the federation post a mile out, the track he took when he was carrying letters for the federation rider.
Two men passed him on that road riding north.
The men were in plain cloaks. The horses weren't plain horses.
“I have been buying tack at the Swiftwater gate for thirty years,” Owain began. “I know the cut of a Swiftwater saddle skirt at fifty paces. These were not Swiftwater warriors. The warriors I know by face."
Cain didn't speak. He stayed focused on Owain’s words.
"I saw the same two riders yesterday. Not on the road.
On foot. At the east edge of the neutral woods, in the brush at the line where the trees thin out to the cleared ground.
" He looked past us, toward the east. "They were watching the cottage.
They stood at the brush for the length of an afternoon.
I passed them on my own track and they didn't see me pass.
I turned around at the next bend and came back up the path. "
Cain looked at the peddler's face the way a man looked at a face he was committing to memory.
"What did the horses' tack look like?"
Owain didn't pause. "The saddle skirt was cut short at the back, the same as the Swiftwater quartermaster has been cutting them since he came in five years ago.
The cheekstrap was bronze. There was a mark on the inside of the bridle near the curb-ring — a small thing, three lines and a circle.
I have only seen it on tack that left the south stables at Swiftwater. "
Cain's face didn't move.
His knuckles, on the hand he braced against the gate-post, went white where the fingers were closing on the wood.
"Thank you, Owain," he told the peddler.
"There is one other thing, Alpha."
It was the first time the peddler had used the word. Cain heard it — I could tell by the almost-nothing that moved through him before he stilled again.
"I would not have known the riders if I had not been on that southern track.
I do not take it often. There is no reason a man should be riding north out of the federation post in plain cloaks on Swiftwater horses unless he does not want to be seen riding north.
" He looked at Cain. "Keep her close. And the boy. "
He shifted the strap of his pack and clicked his tongue at the mules. The road took him out of sight at the curve past the elderflower stand, the same curve I watched him walk around for eight years.
I stood at the gate with the empty cup in my hand.
Cain stood beside me.
"Cain."
He didn't look at me.
I tried to ask. "The mark on the bridle, who’s —"
"I know the mark," he finished for me.
"Whose stables?"
He didn't answer at once. He kept his hand on the post, his eyes on the bend where the peddler went. The muscle along his jaw worked once before he spoke.
"My beta's. Gregor."
I didn't say a word. The name landed in me with the weight of a kettle dropped from a trivet onto a stone floor.
I didn't know much about wolves, but a beta was the closest thing an Alpha had to a best friend. It meant the shadow at my back had a name now — and the name was someone Cain loved.
"And the men in the brush at the east edge?" I asked.
“They were not riding alone," he said.
He turned. He didn't say anything else. He crossed the yard to the back step, where Noah was still sitting with the lore book closed across his knees. He sat down beside his son and put one hand, very lightly, on the back of the boy's neck.
It was the first time he'd put his hand on the back of his son's neck in the weeks he'd been in my house.
Noah didn’t move or ask. He sat very still under his father's hand and let himself, for one long beat, be held.
I didn't cross the yard.
I stood at the gate with the empty cup in my hand and watched father and son on the back step.
I had been watching them like that for three weeks — from doorways, from windows, from the corner of the workbench.
Now I watched knowing the men in the brush at the east edge of the clearing were watching the same two I was.
I crossed back to the kitchen. My hands found the work before the rest of me did. The afternoon came a few hours later.
The light across the yard turned the orange-gold it always turned at the end of August — and warmed the wood of the back step where the man and the boy sat for the better part of an hour without moving.
Noah fell asleep against his father's hip.
The small dark head was against the long line of Cain's side, the lore book closed beside them, and Cain didn't move his hand from the back of the boy's neck.
I came out of the kitchen.
I crossed the grass. I didn't go to the back step. I went past it to the gate. The post under my hand at the gate was warm where the late afternoon sun was on it. I looked at my son, then at the man beside him.
"He fell asleep an hour ago," Cain said, low.
"I know. I was at the window."
"You should sit."
"I'm fine at the post."
He didn't push, and I understood that it was the only thing he had left to give me after a long afternoon with his son.
I said it quietly, the hum at my sternum steady under the words.
"There is an elderflower stand forty minutes' walk west of here. I have been gathering from it since I was nineteen." I waited for a beat. "Would you walk with me tomorrow to gather?"
Cain looked up at me across the yard, his hand still on the back of the boy's neck. He didn't move. He didn't ask me why I wanted to leave the cottage. He didn't ask me why I wanted him with me.
"I will," he said.
"At first light?" I asked.
"At first light."
"Noah stays here."
He held my eyes a beat longer than the answering required. "He stays."
I didn't let my face move.
I kept my hand on the post.
I let my hand stay on the post a beat longer than the standing required. The hum at my sternum stopped being a question. Then I turned and went back inside.