Chapter Two: The Cart North

It took the cart nine days to reach the border of the North, and by the fourth, Isolde had stopped expecting to wake up.

This was a strange and gradual thing. At first, she had pinched herself on the hour. By the second day, she had settled on the theory that she was in a coma and her brain was doing something creative with the hospital's ambient sounds. By the third, she noticed that the dream had smells, and that no coma in the history of medicine had ever produced the particular smell of twelve unwashed people and a wet horse.

On the fourth day, she accepted that it was real, and it was the most terrifying acceptance of her life. It was also, to her faint surprise, quiet. Panic needs somewhere to go, and there was nowhere to go in a cart in the middle of a wilderness. So the panic simply sat down inside her and stayed.

Instead, she did what she'd always done when a system was too big to understand. She gathered data.

Isolde learned the following things by the end of the first week, mostly by keeping her mouth shut and her ears open:

One. The world was called Velmora, and it had three great powers and one great underclass. The fairies held the South, the elves held the old forests in the middle, and the wolves held the frozen North. Humans held nothing, and had not for as long as anyone could remember.

Two. The fairies bought and sold humans as a matter of routine, the way her own world had once traded in sugar and salt. The elves, Hester said, did not buy humans, but they did not stop anyone else from doing it either. "They think it's beneath them to care," she said, with the flat precision of someone who had thought about it for years. "That's the elves for you. Cruel by being polite."

Three. The wolves were the only ones who didn't care. They bought slaves, yes, but they bought them the way a man buys firewood, and then they simply forgot about them. There was no cruelty in it, and no kindness either. There was only a vast, cold, uninterested silence.

"It's the best a human can hope for," Hester said, on the sixth night, while the cart rocked through a dark pine forest and the others slept. "Honest, I mean. The wolves don't pretend you're a person, and they don't pretend you're not. You're just there, like a chair. And a chair doesn't get beaten for being in the wrong room."

"That's a terrible thing to call a mercy," said Isolde.

"Aye," said Hester. "It's the only kind we get."

On the seventh day, the weather changed.

It began with a sharpness in the air, like a blade drawn slowly across glass. Then the trees thinned and the sky lowered, and the first thin flakes of snow came drifting down out of a sky the color of old pewter. By the eighth day the road was white. The grey horses plodded on, steam rising from their flanks, and Steward Brannoch walked beside them with his heavy coat pulled close, his amber eyes fixed straight ahead.

He had not spoken to the humans since the Market. Twice a day he tossed a loaf of hard bread and a skin of water into the cart, and once a day he walked back to check that no one was dying. That was the whole of their relationship.

On the ninth day, the cart crested a ridge, and the North opened out below them.

Isolde had never seen anything like it. It was a vast white country of black pines and frozen lakes and jagged mountains that rose so high they seemed to hold up the sky. In the distance, so far it looked like a toy, stood a single great fortress of black stone, with towers like broken teeth and a thin plume of smoke curling up from its heart.

"The Keep," said Hester, very softly.

And just ahead of them on the road, there was a line.

It was not a wall or a fence. It was simply a place where the road passed between two enormous standing stones, each taller than a house, carved all over with runes that glittered faintly under their coats of frost. The air between the stones seemed to shimmer, as if it were a pane of glass that someone had breathed on.

"The border-wards," Hester murmured. "Every living thing that crosses is known to the king. Or so they say. I've been through twice, in thirty years, and I never felt a thing."

The cart rolled forward. The horses' hooves rang on the frozen stone. Steward Brannoch passed between the pillars first, and nothing happened.

Then the wagon followed him in, and the world changed.

Isolde felt it before she understood it. It started in her chest, in the same warm, strange place that had woken at the Market, and it didn't flicker this time. It flared. A pulse of heat went through her whole body like a struck bell, from her breastbone to her fingertips and back again, so strongly that she gasped out loud.

"Isolde?" Hester's hand closed on her wrist. "What is it?"

"I don't," Isolde whispered. "I don't know, I just..."

The runes on the standing stones blazed.

All along both pillars, the silver glow ran up from the base to the crown in a single rippling wave, and for one impossible second the air between them turned gold. A soft shimmer of light went rolling outward across the snow, as gentle as breath on a window. Every flake that drifted through it caught fire, tiny and bright, like a falling constellation.

And then it was over.

The runes dimmed, the gold melted out of the air, and the snow was just snow again. Up ahead, Steward Brannoch had stopped walking. He stood very still with one hand on the nearest horse's bridle, looking back at the stones with an expression that was almost curiosity.

"Huh," he said. It was the first thing Isolde had heard him say in nine days.

Then he shook his head, shrugged his big shoulders, and walked on.

"Did you see that?" Isolde breathed.

"See what?" Hester said.

Isolde turned. All around her, the other humans were slumped in the cart, half-asleep, hunched against the cold. Nobody was looking at the stones. Nobody had lifted their heads. The old man beside her snored on.

"The light," Isolde said weakly.

"What light?"

She looked down at her hand. It was trembling. For just a moment, between her fingers, she thought she saw the faintest thread of gold, like a hair of sunlight, there and then gone.

Stay small, she told herself, and put the hand under the blanket.

Somewhere far ahead, on the very top of the black fortress, a bell began to ring.

Kaelan Duskmere was in the middle of a council meeting when it happened, which was, in retrospect, unfortunate for the council.

There were twelve of them in the Great Hall, seated around a table that had been carved out of a single enormous slab of black oak: the wolf lords of the North, grizzled and scarred, who had come to argue about the winter grain stores. They had been arguing for two hours. The king sat at the head of the table with his chin in his hand, saying nothing, which was how he had conducted every council for the past century.

Then, with no warning at all, he stood up.

The chair behind him went over backwards and hit the floor with a crash. Twelve wolf lords stared at him. None of them had ever seen the king move so fast.

Kaelan was not looking at them. He was staring at the far wall of the hall, at the high arched windows facing south, and his silver eyes had gone wide. His whole body was rigid. His hand had closed on the edge of the table so hard that the black oak had begun to crack.

"My lord?" said Lord Rhoswen, the eldest of the council, cautiously. "Is something—"

"The wards," said Kaelan.

His voice was low and rough, like a voice that had not been used much and had forgotten how to be gentle.

"The wards have been crossed."

"Yes, my lord. They're crossed a dozen times a week, it's the winter trade—"

"No."

The word cracked across the hall like a whip, and every wolf in the room flinched.

Kaelan pressed a hand flat to his own chest. His breath was coming fast and uneven, which was an entirely new sight for the people who had known him for centuries. Something was happening behind his eyes, a vast slow collision of recognition and disbelief.

"Something has come into the North," he said, so quietly the lords had to lean in to hear. "Something mine."

No one at the table breathed.

"Close the gates," Kaelan said. "All of them. No one leaves the Keep, and no one enters. Wake the garrison. Search every road, every hall, every stable, every servant's quarters. Question every traveler who crossed the border in the last hour." His voice was rising now, barely under control. "Find them. Find them, do you understand me? I want them found before nightfall."

"Find whom, my lord?" asked Lord Rhoswen.

Kaelan turned on him, and for one terrible second the old wolf lord saw what was behind the king's eyes. It wasn't anger, and it wasn't even fear. It was a naked, desperate, ancient hunger, and it was aimed at something none of them could see.

"I don't know," said the King of the North. "But they're here. I can feel them. I have felt them for the last five hundred years, a little more with every winter, and today for the first time they're close enough to touch."

He turned and strode out of the hall, and the doors slammed open before him and slammed shut behind.

For a long moment there was silence.

"Well," said a dry voice from the back of the room. "That was interesting."

Maren Ashgrove, Beta of the Grey Court, had been leaning against the wall for the entire meeting, with her boots crossed at the ankle and an expression of studied boredom. She was a lean, sharp-featured wolf-woman with a long red braid and a perpetual look of someone who had already figured out the joke and was waiting for everybody else to catch up. She was also the only person in the North who would have dared to say that out loud.

She pushed off the wall now and walked after the king.

She caught up with him at the top of the great stair, where he stood at a narrow window with both hands braced on the stone, staring out at the white wilderness as though he could pull the answer out of it.

"Five hundred years," Maren said. "That's a long time to wait for a package."

Kaelan did not turn around. "Maren."

"I'm just saying. Most people would've filed a complaint by now."

"It's her."

Maren's smile faded. "Her."

"The one I've been feeling. The one from the dreams." His voice was very low. "You know what I mean."

She did. Every wolf in the North knew the story, though no one said it out loud. Wolves do not choose their mates. They are given them, by the old magic of the moon, and when a wolf's mate is born into the world, he will feel it, a faint distant pull, like the tug of a string tied around the heart. Most wolves meet their mates within a few decades. Some wait a century.

Kaelan had waited five.

He'd felt her for so long that the feeling had become a part of him, a low steady ache under every other thing. Over the centuries he had gone from hopeful to bitter to hollow, and then, somewhere around the three hundredth winter, to something quieter and far more dangerous. He had stopped hoping. He had started counting. Every night, he'd stood at that window and counted the stars, one by one, as if each were a day he'd been promised.

And now, at last, the string had gone taut.

"I'll send the garrison to the border," Maren said. "We'll find her, Kael."

"Today."

"Today. If she's within ten miles of this castle I'll turn over every rock between here and the sea." Maren studied him. "Kaelan. I'm going to say something you won't like."

"Then don't."

"She might not be what you've built her up to be. Five hundred years is a long time to make a person out of a feeling."

For the first time, the king turned his head, and the look he gave her would have frozen a lesser wolf where she stood.

"If anyone lays a hand on her," he said, very softly, "if anyone so much as frightens her, I will end them. You understand? I don't care who. I don't care what it costs."

"I know," said Maren. There was something almost gentle in her voice, which was alarming. "That's what worries me."

The search began within the hour.

It was a magnificent operation. The garrison tore through the Keep like a storm. Doors were flung open, lanterns held up, travelers hauled out of the guest quarters and questioned at length. A visiting merchant from the Elven Marches was woken from a nap by six wolf guards and a very upset interrogation. An envoy from the Southern Courts was detained on the road and politely but firmly searched. Three of the stable boys were asked, at spear-point, whether they'd seen "anyone strange."

The guards looked in the guest wing, the armory, the great library, and the chapel of the moon. They searched the watchtowers, the kennels, and the long frozen road that led back down to the border-wards.

What they did not search was the cart.

It had arrived at the south gate at dusk, just before the doors were sealed, with twelve thin and silent humans in the back. The gate-captain had barely glanced at it. "Servants for the kitchens," Steward Brannoch had said, and the captain, who was preoccupied with a king in a fury and a castle in an uproar, had simply nodded and waved the cart in.

No one had looked at them twice. No one ever did.

That was the whole strange genius of it, if you thought about it. The wolves of the North were the strongest creatures in all Velmora, and they had built a kingdom without a single weak point, except for one. They could not see the people who scrubbed their floors. They didn't choose not to. It was simply that, for five hundred years, no wolf in the North had ever thought to look.

The Undercroft was the lowest level of the Keep, a long vaulted cellar of black stone that smelled of tallow, damp wool, and boiled turnips. It was warm, at least. A great stone furnace at the far end gave off a dull orange glow, and long wooden tables ran down the middle of the room, scattered with the debris of a hundred years of servants' meals.

There were about forty humans living there, give or take. They were the kitchen hands, the laundry maids, the stable boys, and the lamp-lighters, an entire invisible city living under the castle, running every part of it, and unknown to nearly everyone who lived above.

A woman was waiting for the new arrivals at the foot of the stairs. She was short and broad, in her sixties, with iron-grey hair pinned up in a severe bun, forearms like a blacksmith's, and an expression that said she had seen every kind of fool and was prepared to see more. Her apron was spotless. She held a wooden ladle like a scepter.

"Right," she said, as the twelve of them shuffled in, blinking in the firelight. "I'm Maud Greywether. I run the lower halls. You'll be wanting to know three things, so I'll save you the asking."

She raised one finger.

"One. You work. Everyone works. I don't care if you were a duke in your last life or a drowned cat, you pull your weight or you pull my ladle across your knuckles."

A second finger.

"Two. You keep your head down. The wolves don't bother us and we don't bother them, and that's the whole of the peace. If you pass one on the stairs, you stand against the wall and you look at the floor. Don't speak to them. Don't stare. And above all, don't ever let one of them catch your scent when you're afraid."

A third.

"Three. Supper's in an hour, and the turnip stew is mine. Anyone touches it before I've served is on laundry for a month."

There was a brief silence.

"Questions?" said Maud, in a tone that suggested she'd bite the head off anyone who had one.

Isolde, who had spent four years in logistics and could smell a poorly organized workflow from a hundred feet, said, before she could stop herself, "How many people does the kitchen feed?"

Every head in the room swiveled toward her.

Maud's eyes narrowed. "Why?"

"Just curious." Isolde winced inwardly. Small. Stay small. "It's a big castle."

"Three hundred and sixty, on a good week." Maud was still staring at her. "Why d'you ask, girl?"

"No reason," Isolde said, and looked at the floor.

Beside her, Hester made a tiny sound that might have been a groan.

But Maud had already moved on, barking assignments at the new arrivals, and nobody remarked on it any further. Isolde was put on the pots, which was dismal, wet, and thankless work, and she tackled it with the grim thoroughness of someone who desperately needed something to do with her hands.

It was only when she was elbow-deep in a vat of greasy water, scrubbing at a copper stockpot, that she heard it.

It started as a faint rumble in the ceiling, the sound of many heavy boots on the stone far above. Then, a door crashing. Then, muffled shouting. A long, long way off, someone was blowing a horn.

"What's that?" Isolde asked, lifting her head.

"The wolves," said a girl at the next sink, without looking up. She was about sixteen, with a sharp freckled face and a scar on her chin. Her name was Pell. "They've been tearing the place up since noon. Somebody important's gone missing, or somebody important's come, nobody knows which."

"Does this happen a lot?"

"Never. Not once in my life." Pell's eyes gleamed with an unholy delight. "The king himself is in a state. They say he broke a table."

Isolde's hands went still in the water.

Don't, she told herself. It has nothing to do with you.

But under her breastbone the warm thing was beating, strong and steady and eager, like a dog that had heard its name. It turned toward the ceiling as though it could see through three floors of solid stone, and for a moment Isolde could feel it, an enormous, burning, desperate attention pressed against the edge of her awareness, searching.

She lowered her eyes and kept scrubbing.

Far above her, in the empty south corridor of the upper keep, a tall figure in a black coat stood motionless in the middle of the passage.

The guards had long since moved on. The torches sputtered. Somewhere in the walls the wind was moaning, and the king stood alone in the dark with his head tipped back and his eyes closed, listening to something no one else could hear.

He was standing directly over the Undercroft.

Beneath his boots, through a foot of black stone and a vaulted ceiling and sixty feet of dark, a girl with a wet cloth in her hands lifted her head, just slightly, as though someone had said her name.

Neither of them moved.

Then, after a long breath, Kaelan opened his eyes. They were bright, and fierce, and utterly lost.

"Where are you?" he whispered.

The wind took the question and carried it away down the long black corridor, and nobody answered.

Kaelan Duskmere turned and walked on. He would search the whole castle three more times that night. He would not sleep. He would walk every hall, every tower, and every stair, with the patience of a man who had waited five hundred years and the desperation of a man who suddenly could not wait another hour.

And he would pass within a few feet of her six times before dawn, never once looking down.