That was the traditional way—a sack, a stone, and the loch. It surprised Danny how much that thought troubled him. He’d never put that much value on the Old Man’s fondness for him—Danny had been smart and useful—but the thought that the Numitor would have preferred to drown him threaded a chill through his memories.
“No,” Kath said. She twisted her mouth as though the memory was sour. “He would have. He was expected to. Fiona, his mate, she wouldn’t have it. Dog or not, it was her wain, and she wouldn’t give it over to the prophets. Fiona would have taken the girl and gone south first, rather than give another litter to the man who killed his own get.”
No one ever talked about the twins’ mother, the Old Man’s mate. Death had rubbed the human edges off her and left this idea of a perfect wolf. Danny had known his mam knew her, but until he heard this story, he hadn’t realized Kathlikedthe other wolf. It occurred to Danny that he might have too. She sounded a lot like Jack.
“What happened?”
“The Old Man let Fiona stay, and let her keep the baby,” Kath said. “He wasn’t gracious about it at first, but dogs love like it’s easy, and that’s hard to resist. By the time she died, he cared enough to grieve. I think that’s the only reason Fiona was able to stay.”
Danny absorbed that. It was a story that he’d never heard even whispered in all his years in the Pack. Not a secret, exactly, just unspoken because it was too tender a scar to poke. He supposed it explained a lot about the Old Man, but so far it didn’t answer his question.
“Did Nick’s grandmother kill the wee girl?” Danny asked.
“See?” Kath said. “You don’t need books to be smart, Danny.”
“Why?”
“She was rabid,” Kath said. Her lips curled back in an expression that hovered between a sneer and a scowl. “No one saw it, though, not until that night. Rose was the highest-ranking wolf in the Pack, the Old Man’s right hand, and if she was a traditionalist, it wasn’t any more than some of the other old wolves. Then one night she got up, stole a baby, and we found her at dawn by the loch with a wet, still sack. People said she was moonstruck, that she’d gotten too close to the moon goddess’s heels during the hunt and been maddened.”
“And you?”
“I think she was jealous,” Kath said. “All those years she’d spent at the Numitor’s side, his loyal wolf, and what did she have for it? Bad enough Fiona had the Numitor’s heart and his cock, but now she had his ear and his child too. I think that was the final straw, that all the wolves Rose whelped had been sent away for being too weak, but Fiona got to keep her dog. She dressed it up with rants about purity and fate and the gods, but in the end, it was her spite. It doesn’t matter, though, because the Old Man killed her, and we buried her out in the moors.”
Danny rubbed his neck, the phantom bite of leather still there, and remembered the contemptuous bite in Rose’s voice as she booted him in the ribs.“You’ll wish your ma had been brave enough to put you in a sack.”
Dead and buried should have been good enough, but Danny had seen enough over the last few weeks that he didn’t think it was that simple. The prophets had kept secrets.
“What does that have to do with Bron?” he asked. “Why would Rose hold it against her?”
Kath looked away. “Because, until that morning when we found her at the loch, I’d agreed with her,” she said. “I thought Fiona should have gotten rid of the baby. I thought the Old Man should have gotten rid of Fiona. I didn’t know what Rose had planned, but I’d heard every word that came out of her mouth and nodded my approval. So when I turned on her, dragged her back to the Old Man with the others, she cursed us for it. If she had a chance to pay me back by killing my daughter, she would.”
Not her son, though, Danny thought, not the dog. That was why Rose hadn’t killed him in Girvan—she thought it was more of an insult to Kath to leave him alive.
“Check her bones,” Danny said. “Make sure they’re there. It’s the Wolf Winter, Mam, a lot of things are coming back.”
MAYBE SHEwould. Danny hoped she did, but it was up to her.
This was up to him. He jogged into the storm, head down and shoulders up. The snow had finally let up but was replaced by an icy rain. It was full of splinters of ice sharp enough to draw blood when the wind found the right angle, and it froze in his hair and the scruff of stubble on his jaw. Danny clambered over a low stone fence and stopped in the shelter of a twisted ash tree, lightning-struck and charred, to pull the map out of his pocket. The rain quickly soaked the map, and he cursed as the paper tore under his fingers.
A wolf wouldn’t need a map. They knew every rock and piss-scented tree of the territory the Pack claimed. Sometimes that wasn’t an advantage. Wolves ran with the Wild at their heels, their paws sometimes on this world and sometimes on rocks that had been gone for centuries. That was the problem—sometimes the geography and the distances didn’t match.
Danny had spent his childhood on the long way around the moors and the old stone roads. He knew the lay of the land, the shortcuts and landmarks, in a way that only the footsore and irritated did.
And he liked to know things. The prophets left no trail to follow to their temple, no path worn through the heather, no scent trail on the rocks. The only way to get there was through the Wild, but no one had been able to find it there either.
That was because it didn’t exist there. Danny coughed cold water out of his mouth and ran his finger over the map to the blob of gray at the fold. There were some things in the real world that left a stain on the Wild, altered and odd as it would be to the people who knew the original. It was hard to tell what, though, the same way people could read a book but only remember a single extract twenty years on.
Some places, though, were just empty boxes with no soul. Like Glenlough—a folly built out here on an industrialist’s whim in the 1900s that was neither inhabited nor left for the weather to wear into dereliction. It was neither home nor ruin, like a shell on the beach a crab could move into to disguise itself.
Danny reoriented himself and struck out over the field to the east. The dog stirred in the back of his head, restless at being penned up in his skin. But Danny needed a human brain for this and human shoulders to carry the duffel.
At least he would if he was right. Danny wiped his hand down his face to scrape off the film of water and ice. He hoped he was right. Back in Lochwinnoch, with Kath’s expectations dropped back onto his shoulders, he’d felt a lot more confident.
He found the crick at the boundary of the Glenlough land when he stepped on it. The thin skin of ice cracked under his weight and the frigid water seeped in through the eyelets of his boots and soaked his socks.
“Shit,” he muttered between cold lips. “I’m going to lose a toe.”
Back in Durham he’d watched the end of the world a dozen times on TV and speculated with his ex and friends what they’d miss most.
