The Alpha's Tidebound Luna

Joss Marl would not kneel in the mud, so I did it for him. The channel behind the camp was running out, thin and brown, sucking at the reeds on its way to the Grey Channel. I pushed my sleeve to the elbow and laid my palm flat on the water. The chill went straight to the bone. I let it numb my fingers and counted the small waves as they slid past my wrist. Seven, eight, nine. At twelve I stopped counting and listened. The sea does not talk in words. It leans. A good tide leans toward the shore like a dog toward a dropped plate, and a bad one pulls back and waits. This one leaned, then leaned the other way, and under both ran a long low tremble from somewhere out past the sandbars. "Well?" Joss said from the bank. His two sons stood behind him with nets over their shoulders. All three had the look of men who had already decided to believe me and were hoping to be talked out of it. "Two good tides," I said. "Go out on both. The third one turns ugly. Wind from the northwest by dusk tomorrow, and sleet with it." "Sleet." Joss spat to one side. "At this time of year." "The sea doesn't read the calendar, Joss. I only listen to it." Joss dug inside his coat and handed over two mackerel tied by the tails with a bit of cord. They looked as tired as I felt. "Feed that cousin of yours," he said. "And yourself, while you're at it. You're all wrist." "I'll tell Marin you said so. She'll be unbearable." Gull's End did not look like much, and on a grey morning it looked like less. Forty people lived there, packed into tents patched with old sailcloth and three boats turned upside down to make roofs. Smoke from driftwood fires hung low over the marsh and smelled of salt and scorched rope. A small boy dragged a dead crab on a string and tried to look like a hunter. Each time the tide came in, the edge of the camp went under, and each time it went out we scraped the mud off our blankets and started over. Nobody called it a life. It was what remained. Marin was waiting at the cook fire with two tin mugs. She held one out to me as if I owed her money. "Joss paid in mackerel," I said, showing her the fish. "We'll be rich by summer." She took them, sniffed one, and wrinkled her nose. Marin was nineteen, small and quick, with a mess of black curls she kept tying back and losing again. "Your sleeve is soaking. Why don't you ever roll it up before you go in?" "I did roll it up." "Not far enough." She tugged the wet cuff down, wrung it out over the ashes, and then, without a word, unwound her own shawl and put it around my shoulders. I let her. It smelled of woodsmoke and the lavender she bought from the pedlar twice a year, which she thought nobody knew about. The tea tasted like wet leaves. I drank all of it. That was when the horn sounded on the marsh road. It was a short flat call that everyone in the camp knew. Talk stopped. Old Orsa straightened up from the net she was mending and stood with her hands folded at her waist, small and grey and hard as a tent peg. Three riders came along the track toward the ford where the road met the channel. They wore grey coats with a silver wolf's head at the collar, and the man in front carried a rolled paper in his gloved hand. He was young, thirty at most, with a smooth face that had never spent long out in weather. His horse walked straight into the shallows and stood there with brown water around its hooves. I had been about to turn away. Instead I went down to the bank and stopped where the channel lapped at my boots. I always stand near the water when Vale comes. I trust the water more than I trust a Vale face. "I am Tobin Hale," the young man said, "speaking for Alpha Dorian Vale and the Vale pack." He unrolled the paper. "The Moon Council will sit at Blackwater Reach in two days to decide reparations for the losses of the Saltmere pack. Vale offers silver, timber for new homes, and its sincere grief. It is the finding of the Council's inquiry that the Drowning was an accident. No one is to blame." The sea answered him. A lie in the water is a sour note, like a fiddle string pulled just out of tune, and it runs through the channel in a shiver that makes the small waves around my ankles jump. The first half of his speech passed through without a ripple. The inquiry had found what it found. But on the word accident the channel flinched, and the reeds hissed against each other, and nobody else on the bank felt a thing. I could not tell whether Tobin Hale knew he was lying or whether someone had handed him a lie to carry. My gift tells me what is false. It has never once told me why. He stepped down from the saddle to give the paper to Orsa, and a cord swung out from his collar. A locket hung at the end of it. Small, silver, oval. The lid had a dent in one side in the shape of a crescent moon, because I had dropped it on the harbor stones when I was six and my mother had laughed instead of scolding me. The hinge had been mended with a twist of bent fish hook. My father had done that. He had done it at our kitchen table with his tongue stuck out at the corner of his mouth, swearing at the wire. I do not remember crossing the bank. I remember the mud pulling at my boots and Tobin Hale looking up with polite surprise. "Where did you get that?" He followed my eyes and touched the locket. "This? Beta Garrick gave it to me to carry. It came to him after the flood, and the Vale jeweler cleaned it. He asked me to hand it back in the hall, in front of both packs, so that nobody could say Vale had kept anything from you." The channel stayed quiet. "Cleaned," I said. "Yes." "And it took nearly three years to find the family?" "I only carry what I'm given." He gave me a small, careful smile. "In the hall, as he asked. I am sorry." He mounted again and turned the horse. I watched the grey coats go back along the marsh road until they were three small marks against the reeds. Everything that came back to anyone after the flood came out of the harbor mud. I know, because we pulled a thousand spoons and boots out of that mud ourselves. Silver that has lain there for a winter comes out black and pitted. This locket had shone like a new coin in a shop window. It had never been in the sea. When I washed my father's body, three days after the Drowning, his neck had been bare. I had thought the water took it. Somebody in Vale had been keeping my mother's locket dry for almost three years, and now they wanted me to stand in their hall and watch it handed back.