Chapter 66: The Packs

The wolf-mother came up the hill on a Tuesday, in the rain, on foot.

The Castellan saw her first, of course. It sees everyone first. It was standing in the gate arch in the gray afternoon with water running off its metal shoulders, the way it stands in every weather, when it turned its head and looked down the hill road toward the town. And then it did something I'd only ever seen it do once before, for Aurelia.

It stepped out of the arch to meet her.

I was in the court with Faelan, trying to persuade a very wet goat back into the stable, so I saw the whole thing. Five figures coming up the hill road through the rain. A big broad man in a leather apron, with a butcher's forearms and a beard going gray. Three young women behind him, tall and rangy and quick, with the same strong jaw. And at the front, walking slowly, leaning on a stick of black thorn, an old woman.

Very old. White-haired, with the hair cut short as a man's. Small and wiry and brown, in a long gray cloak with the hood down, so that the rain ran straight down her face and she didn't seem to mind. And all around her throat, from her jaw to her collarbone, a wide pale band of scar. Old and smooth and shiny, like a burn that healed a very long time ago.

The Castellan stopped in the middle of the road, three paces in front of her, and inclined its head.

"Grenna," it said. "Mother of the packs. You are welcome at this gate."

The old woman looked up at it. She had to tip her head a long way back. Her eyes were yellow.

"You remember me," she said.

"I do not forget anyone who has passed my gate," said the Castellan. "You came eight years ago, with Aurelia, for eleven days. You were the first of your people I ever had."

The old woman looked at it for a long moment, with the rain on her face. Then she smiled. It wasn't a pretty smile. She had very long teeth.

"Then you'll have me again," she said. "I've come to ask your King for something. I hear that's how it's done up here."

* * *

I'd met Ansgar before, of course. Everybody in Havenreach has. He has the biggest stall on the butchers' street at the bottom of the lower market, under a painted sign that says ANSGAR & DAUGHTERS, and he was the first of the werewolves to set up shop in the city after the Accord. Nobody would buy from him for a whole season. Then Helena walked down the hill one morning with a basket on her arm and bought every bit of meat the castle needed for a week, in front of the whole market, and paid in silver, and said loudly that it was the best mutton she'd had in years. And after that, everybody did.

His daughters I'd seen behind the stall. Sigrun, the eldest, who does the accounts and has never once been cheated. Ragna, the middle one, who's my age and once threw a drunk sailor clean across the street for kicking a dog. And Ulla, the youngest, about sixteen, who has a laugh you can hear from the top of the castle hill on market days.

But I'd never seen the wolf-mother.

Hardly anyone had. She lives in the hills to the south, where the packs keep their dens, and she came to Greykeep exactly once before, eight years ago, to sit in the Council Hall for eleven days with my father and Aurelia and argue about whether her people could stop being enemies. When I was fifteen. I remember the Castellan logging her in, and the whole castle going quiet, and Helena sending up meat pies on the hour, every hour, for eleven days.

And then she'd gone home, and never come back.

* * *

She didn't want the hall. She didn't want the Council Hall, or the south solar, or the map room, or anywhere with chairs.

"Where's the kitchen?" she said to my father, at the door of the great hall, dripping on the flagstones. "I'll talk where the food is. Always have. You find out more about a house from its kitchen than its throne."

My father looked at her for a moment. Then he grinned.

"This way," he said.

So it was in the little kitchen, at the scrubbed table, with the rain running down the window and the kettle on, that the wolf-mother made her request. Helena put a plate in front of her without being asked. Not biscuits. A thick slice of cold mutton, from Ansgar's stall, on a heel of bread. The old woman looked at it, and then up at Helena, for a long moment.

"You're the one who bought the mutton," she said.

"I am."

"In front of the whole market."

"It was very good mutton," said Helena. "I said so because it was true."

The wolf-mother picked up the bread and the meat in her two hands and ate it, slowly, the whole thing, without saying anything else. Then she wiped her hands on her cloak and turned to my father.

"I've come to ask you something," she said. "You can say no. I hear that's the rule here, too."

"It is," said my father. "What's your want, Grenna?"

She told him.

* * *

"The coast," she said. "From Westmere south. All the way to Orselle, and past it, down to the last fishing village before the marshes." She put one brown, knotted finger on the scrubbed table and drew a long line with it, as if the table were a map. "The packs want to walk it."

"Walk it?"

"Every night. Every beach. Every cove and cave and slipway and harbor wall." She tapped the table. "Two hundred and some of us, in seven packs. Young ones, mostly. Strong. Fast. Bored." She looked at my father with her yellow eyes. "And we've got noses."

My father didn't say anything. He was listening, the way he does, with his whole face.

"Your wolf told us," said Grenna. "The big one. Fenrir. He came down to the dens after the night that goddess sat on your storm's bed. He wears our cloth on his arm, so he came and told us, the way family does." She glanced at the window, as if she could see right through the rain and the stone to wherever Fenrir was lying in the long grass. "Salt, he said. And lavender. And cold iron. He smelled her in your court an hour before anyone else woke up. One nose did that. One." She held up a single finger. "I've got two hundred."

"Grenna..."

"And then the thing at Skellow," said Grenna. "The singing fog. Three of my young ones went down to that beach a week after, because they were curious. They came back and couldn't sleep for two nights. They said the sand smelled of nothing. Not salt. Not weed. Not fish. Just nothing, in the shape of something. Like a hole." She shook her head. "They'd know it again. Anywhere. Any beach. Any night."

She leaned forward over the scrubbed table.

"And the branded ones," she said, more quietly. "The porters. The ones with the little link burned on the wrist. Your Eleanor caught one at Orselle, in the autumn." She tapped her own wrist. "We can smell them, King. Burned hair and cold iron, under everything else. We could smell them in the market before anybody knew what they were. We just didn't know it mattered." She sat back. "Now we do."

* * *

It went quiet in the little kitchen. The rain ran down the window. The kettle ticked.

And then my mother, who'd come in from the infirmary halfway through and was standing in the doorway with her coat still dripping, said quietly, "Why?"

Grenna turned her head and looked at her.

"Forgive me," said my mother. "I don't mean it rudely. I mean it truly. Why? It's winter. It's a long coast. It's cold, and wet, and dangerous, and none of it is yours to guard. Your packs live in the hills. They've got their own young to feed." She came in and sat down at the end of the table. "I've seen a great deal of what your people did in the war, Grenna. I stitched some of it closed. I'm not saying that to wound you. I'm saying it because I want to understand what's changed."

Ansgar went very still in his chair. Behind him, his three daughters looked at the floor. I saw Ragna's hands close into fists.

But the wolf-mother didn't flinch.

She put her hand up to her throat. To the wide pale band of scar that went all the way around it, from her jaw to her collarbone. And she touched it, very gently, the way you'd touch an old wound that still aches in the rain.

"You know what this is, Healer," she said.

"Yes," said my mother. "I think I do."

"Surtr's collar," said Grenna. "Iron. Worked with something that wasn't iron. He put one on every wolf in the packs when I was younger than this one." She nodded at Ulla. "Every one. And when the collar pulled, you ran. Wherever it pulled. Whatever was at the end of it. Villages. Children. Fleeing people driven into the shallows." She didn't look away from my mother. "We did what you stitched. All of it. With the collars pulling."

Nobody said anything.

"Your King broke them," said Grenna. "At the end. Him and Aurelia and that great fire-giant himself, once he'd changed his mind. Took them off, one at a time, every wolf in the packs. It took a winter." She took her hand down from her throat. "And then it took us twelve years to come up this hill and ask if we could stop being what we'd been. And eleven days to ask it. And eight years since then of being allowed."

She said the last word as if it tasted of something.

"Allowed to sell meat," she said. "Allowed to walk in the market. Allowed to live. Your people have been kind, Healer. Kinder than we deserved, some of them. That woman bought the mutton." She nodded at Helena. "But in eight years, nobody in Avarra has ever once asked a wolf to do anything. Nobody's ever needed us. We're allowed. That's all."

She looked back at my father.

"And now there's a man across the sea putting collars on gods," she said. "Little iron links. On their wrists. On children's wrists. Pulling them wherever he likes." Her yellow eyes were very steady. "We know what that is. Better than anybody living. And we'd like to stand between it and your coast. That's what's changed, Healer. Somebody's doing it to someone else now. And we remember what it felt like."

My mother looked at her for a very long time.

Then she got up from the end of the table, and came around it, and put out her hand. Palm up. The way Rysa taught us.

"Evelyn Grey," she said. "I'm sorry for asking it like that. I'm glad I asked."

Grenna looked at the hand. Then she took it, in her own knotted brown one, and held on to it.

"So am I," she said.

* * *

"There's one more thing," said my father.

Grenna turned back to him.

"The coast isn't mine," said my father. "Not all of it. Westmere's Tamar's. Orselle has its own council. Skellow's got thirty houses and a woman with a boathook who I wouldn't argue with for a kingdom. The fishing villages south of there belong to whoever's lived in them longest." He spread his hands. "I can ask you to walk it. But I can't ask them to let you. They'd have to say yes themselves. Every one."

"I know," said Grenna.

"Some of them remember the war too."

"I know," said Grenna again. She reached into her wet gray cloak and took out a bundle of folded papers, tied with butcher's string, and put it on the scrubbed table in front of my father. "That's why we asked them first."

My father stared at the bundle.

"My girls carried them," said Grenna. She nodded at Ansgar's daughters behind her. "All down the coast. On foot. Three weeks. One letter for every harbor, every village, every fishing hamlet with more than four houses. Sigrun wrote them. She's got the best hand." Sigrun went pink. "Asking. Properly. The way you do it up here. Our names. What we want. Whether they'd let us. And that they could say no."

My father untied the string.

There were twenty-three of them. Some were on good paper, with seals. Some were on the backs of old bills of lading, or torn out of ledgers, or written on scraps of sailcloth in tarry ink. I read them over his shoulder.

Westmere Hold. Yes. Keep off the north sands at low tide; that's where the Princess practices her fire. T. Vale.

The town council of Orselle has voted, eleven to four. Yes. The four would like it noted that they will be watching.

Kip Marrow, porter, Orselle. I'm not the council but I'd like to show them around the harbor steps if they want. I know every corner. I'm not frightened. K.M.

Skellow. Yes, if they mind my nets. And if they find anything that smells of nothing, they're to come and tell me first. B. Cobb.

And at the bottom of the bundle, on a scrap of brown paper with a fish scale still stuck to one corner:

Yes. Tell them there's fish heads in the bucket by the slip for anybody cold. Mother Kitto.

Twenty-three letters. Twenty-two yeses. One village, far down the coast past the marshes, had written back No. We remember. And Grenna had brought that one too, and put it on the top of the pile where my father would see it first.

"We won't go there," she said simply. "They said no."

My father didn't say anything for a long time. He sat at the scrubbed table with the twenty-three letters in front of him and read every single one, all the way through, the yeses and the no, while the rain ran down the window and the kettle ticked.

Then he looked up.

"Grenna," he said. "Mother of the packs."

"King."

"Would you walk my coast?" He said it very simply. Not as a king. The way you'd ask a neighbor to keep an eye on your house while you were away. "Every night. Every beach. From Westmere to the marshes, wherever they've said yes. And if you smell anything that shouldn't be there, would you come and tell me?" He paused. "You can say no."

The wolf-mother looked at him across the scrubbed table for a long, long moment.

I saw her throat move, above the pale band of scar.

"Yes," said Grenna.

* * *

They started that night.

I went down to Westmere to watch. I asked Tamar first, and he said yes, and then said I should go and ask Fenrir, because apparently Fenrir had been told and had opinions. Fenrir was lying in the court of Westmere Hold, in wolf shape, across the bottom of the sea-tower stair, the way he lies across every door now. He lifted his great gray head when I came through the gate, and looked at me with his yellow eyes, and then got up and walked out of the court and down to the north sands without waiting to see if I'd follow.

I followed.

It had stopped raining. The clouds were breaking up over the sea, and there was a thin cold moon coming through them, and the tide was out, and the long wet beach was a mirror with the moon lying in it. Seraphina's line of glass from the beach practice was still there, a long dark streak across the sand with a little kink in it below the Hold.

And at the far end of the beach, by the old wreck, there were wolves.

Twenty of them. Maybe more. Big ones, bigger than any ordinary wolf, gray and brown and black and one almost white, standing in a loose half-circle on the wet sand with the moonlight on their backs. And in front of them, in a long gray cloak, leaning on her blackthorn stick, a small old woman.

As I watched, she put her stick down on the sand.

And then she wasn't an old woman anymore.

I'd seen Fenrir change. This was different. Fenrir changes like a cloud changing shape, slow and huge. Grenna changed like a knot coming undone. Quick and quiet and all at once. And where the old woman had been, there was a wolf. Smaller than the others. Gray going to white. Thin, and old, and scarred, with a wide pale band of bare skin all the way around her throat where no fur had ever grown back.

She lifted her head and looked at the sea.

Fenrir walked out across the sand to her. He towered over her. He could have stepped over her without bending his knees. And when he reached her, he lowered his enormous head, right down, until his muzzle was level with hers, and touched his nose to the scar on her throat.

Then he lifted his head and howled.

* * *

I've heard Fenrir howl before. Once. The night Ithren came, when he called his brother out of Greymere. That was low and long and so deep that only the Castellan and Elenos heard it.

This wasn't like that.

This was high, and clear, and it went out over the whole north sands and the harbor and the town and up the hill to the Hold, and out over the sea toward the line of the horizon. And when it ended, there was a moment of silence.

And then, from somewhere south, very far off, down the coast, another howl answered.

And then another. Farther. And another, farther still. One after another after another, all the way down the coast in the dark. Each one fainter than the last. From the cliffs above Skellow, and from the harbor steps at Orselle, and from coves and beaches and fishing villages whose names I didn't even know. Passing south along the coast like a lamp being handed from hand to hand. Twenty-two of them. I counted.

Then, last of all, so faint I wasn't sure I'd heard it, from somewhere past the marshes, where the one village had said no, there was a single short bark.

Not a howl. A bark. As if to say, here. We're here. We're not coming in. But we're here.

The wolves on the beach turned, all together, and went. South. Along the edge of the sea. Loping, in a long loose line, low to the ground, noses down, the moonlight on their backs, the old white-throated wolf at the front. Within a minute they'd gone around the headland and I couldn't see them anymore.

Fenrir stood on the beach beside me for a long time, looking after them.

Then he turned his head and looked at me. And I'd swear, though Fenrir doesn't do it, and wolves can't, that he smiled.

* * *

The Castellan logged it that night. Mary showed me the next morning, because she'd gone down to the gate at five to fetch the ledger and found the entry written in its square metal hand.

Midnight. The packs. Westmere to the marshes. Twenty-two harbors. One no.

And under it, in a separate line, the way it only writes things it has decided for itself:

They are mine also.

* * *

Mary wrote it in her own book at breakfast, with Ansgar's mutton on the table and Helena cutting the bread.

Grenna, mother of the packs, came up the hill in the rain and asked. She had already asked the coast. Twenty-three letters. Twenty-two yes. One no, which she put on top.

Uriah asked her back. She said yes.

The packs walk the coast from tonight.

And in the green laundry ledger, on a new page, in very careful capitals, because Faelan had gone straight down to the butchers' street after school and asked Ulla to ask her great-grandmother the three questions, and Ulla had laughed her laugh you can hear from the top of the castle hill, and then gone and asked:

WHAT IS YOUR NAME? — GRENNA.

WHAT DO YOU DO? — I WALK THE COAST NOW.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE THING? — BEING ASKED.

Faelan showed me that page at supper. Then he turned back, a long way, to the front of the ledger, to my page. The one with the lopsided horse with the chipped ear. And put his finger on the last line.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE THING? — BEING ASKED FIRST.

"Same," said Faelan, very satisfied. "Nearly."