The Alpha Threw Me To The Hyenas

Chapter Nineteen: He Would Not Look

He came about an hour later and he stopped in the doorway.

The first thing I noticed was that everyone else got out of his way, and the second thing was that he did not seem to want them to.

He was younger than I expected, twenty-five or twenty-six, tall and narrow through the shoulders in a way that suggested he had never been asked to lift anything heavy in his life. Dark clothes, unornamented. Hands that had been used for careful work. There was a strip of something wrapped round his left palm and up between two fingers that was not a bandage, and I never found out what it was for.

He came in three steps and stopped again.

And then, for the next quarter of an hour, that man conducted an entire conversation with me without once putting his eyes on my face.

He looked at the wall behind my head. He looked at the lamp in the niche. He looked at my hands, several times, and at the blanket, and at the floor, and at Behya, who had gone back to work on my other foot as though nothing were happening.

I have been looked away from a great deal in my life. I know the shapes of it. There is the not-seeing you get as a servant, which is a person editing you out. There is contempt, which is a person putting you below their eyeline on purpose.

This was neither. He kept starting to look and stopping.

"You are Doran," I said. Behya had told me that much.

"Yes."

"They call you the Bonekeeper."

"Some of them."

"What does it mean?"

"It means I keep the bones," he said.

I want to be honest about the state I was in. I had been awake perhaps three hours in six days. I could not sit up without help and my voice was a scrape and everything in me hurt. And I was in a filthy mood, because the human body, once it works out it is not going to die, becomes extremely rude extremely fast.

"Look at me," I said.

His jaw moved.

"I have had four days of nothing and six days asleep and I have just been told that a woman I have never heard of is my blood," I said. "The least you can do is look at me while you tell me whatever you have been fetched here to tell me."

"I am not permitted to," Doran said.

"By who?"

"By what you are."

And there it was.

He said it flatly and without any relish at all, the way a man tells you the office is closed on Sundays, and then he pulled the stool round and sat down on it about six feet from the bed and put his forearms on his knees and started at the beginning.

I am not going to set out everything he said in that room, because a good deal of it I did not understand until much later and some of it he got wrong. But the shape of it was this.

Three hundred years ago there were clans along the edge of the salt. Not packs. Clans, which is a different word and means a different thing, and the difference is the whole of it. In a pack, rank comes down through the male line and the strongest male sits at the top of it and everybody arranges themselves under him.

In a clan it comes through the mother.

Not the strongest woman. The mother. A daughter is born into her mother's rank and she does not have to fight for it and she cannot lose it, and the woman at the top is not called an Alpha, because there is no such thing, and there is no Luna either, because a Luna is a woman who is standing next to somebody.

There is a Matriarch. There is only ever one and she is the top of the line, and every female in that clan outranks every male in it as a matter of arithmetic.

"That is not possible," I said.

"You are lying in it," Doran said.

The wolf houses burned them. That part he went through quickly and I understood later that he went through it quickly on purpose. Three hundred years ago the houses came down the salt line and took the clans apart, and they did it in eleven months, and afterwards they took the territory and rewrote what the territory was for.

What was left came out here.

"How many are you?"

"Fewer than we were."

"How many."

"That is not a number I give to somebody I met an hour ago," he said, and I noticed that he had said it without any hesitation at all, and that he had done it without looking at me, and that he had not asked anybody's permission.

"And Neema."

"Neema is the Matriarch." A pause. "She is your mother's mother's sister."

"I do not have a mother."

"Everybody has a mother."

"I have never had one," I said. "I have never had one in the whole of my life. I was in that house before I could walk and there is no record of me arriving and no record of anybody leaving me, and I have asked, I asked for years, and the answer was always the same answer, which is that girls turn up and it is nobody's business."

"Her name was Sarai," Doran said.

The lamp in the niche did something. It probably did not. It probably went on burning exactly as it had been, and something happened in me instead.

Sarai.

Low and level, out of a dark I could see ten feet into, in a woman's voice, said across a distance the way you say a name across a kitchen.

"Say it again," I said.

"Sarai."

"Where did you hear that name."

"It is her name. Everybody here over the age of thirty knows it." He was frowning at the floor. "Why."

I did not tell him. It was three months before I told anybody that, and I did not tell Doran first.

"So you are saying I am one of you," I said.

"Yes."

"Right." I got myself up onto one elbow, which cost more than it was worth. "Then here is the difficulty with that. I am twenty-two years old and I have never shifted. Not once. Not at fourteen with everybody else, not at eighteen, not ever, not one time in my life have I been anything other than exactly this. They had a doctor look at me twice. There is a word they use for people like me in that house and I was called it every day from the age of nine."

"I know."

"So whatever you have all decided about me, you have got it wrong, and I would rather you got it wrong somewhere else."

"You have never shifted," Doran said, "because you have never once in your life been anywhere you could."

"That is not how it works."

"That is exactly how it works for us and you would know that if anybody had ever told you anything." His voice went up for the first time. "You have spent twenty-two years standing in a stone building in the middle of a city full of wolves. What did you think was going to happen?"

"You are a liar," I said.

He went very still.

"You are all liars and you have got the wrong person, and when I can stand up I am going to walk out of here."

Doran got up off the stool.

He did not do it angrily. He crossed the room to the shelf cut into the salt and picked something up off it and came back, and he still, even then, did not look at my face.

It was a mirror. Small, in a wooden frame, with the silvering gone at one corner.

"Behya has had this off the shelf twice a day for six days," he said, "and put it away again, because she did not want it to be her that did it."

He held it out at arm's length and turned his own head away.

I did not want to take it. My hand went out anyway.

The woman in it was thinner than I remembered and had lost a good deal of hair at the front and had a mouth that had cracked and healed and cracked again. That was all fine. That was four days on a salt flat and I had expected worse.

But her eyes were not brown.

I had brown eyes. I had had brown eyes for twenty-two years. I had looked at them in the window of the lower corridor a thousand times while I waited for somebody to open a door.

The woman in that mirror had eyes the colour of the oil in the lamp, pale gold and slightly hot-looking, with the light coming off the back of them the wrong way round.

I looked at her, and she looked at me.

And I understood, with the mirror shaking in a hand that would not close properly, exactly why the Bonekeeper of the Laughing Dark would not put his eyes on my face.