The Alpha's Tidebound Luna

Chapter 2: The List

By noon the whole camp knew what the paper said, because Orsa read it aloud twice and then a third time for the ones who did not believe it.

Fifty silver marks for every hearth. Timber for forty new homes, cut and carried at Vale's cost. A place in the spring rebuilding of the low town, if the Council allowed it. In return, one signature from each family on a single page, saying that Saltmere accepted the Council's finding and would bring no further claim.

We sat around the big fire with our bowls in our laps. Nobody ate.

"Fifty marks," said Dagny Pike, who mended nets and whose husband had gone under with the rest. "I haven't seen that much silver since my wedding."

"That's what a grave costs," someone said from the back.

"Then it's a cheap one," Dagny said, and a few people laughed, the thin way people laugh when they are close to something else.

Orsa tapped her stick against a log until the talk died. She was seventy, bent at the shoulders, and she had been burying Saltmere dead since before I was born. When she spoke, people stopped to listen without being asked.

"The old law still stands," she said. "Every hearth may send one voice to the Council. Not one voice for the whole pack. One for each hearth. Forty hearths, forty voices, if we have the nerve to use them."

"Or we take the silver and go home," Dagny said.

"Home." Orsa let the word sit. "Where is that, exactly?"

Nobody answered. Down the bank the tide slid in over the mud, quiet as a thief.

I stood up. I had not planned to.

"It's a trap with a ribbon on it," I said. "Read the last line again. They aren't paying us for the dead. They're paying us to stop asking how they died."

"Then say so to their faces," Orsa said. "You're the one who can hear whether they lie."

"Up there?" I shook my head. "The Council hall sits on a cliff behind a wall of stone. Inland I hear less than a deaf mouse. I'd be in a room full of Vale wolves with my one good gift half asleep. And for what? So they can nod politely while I tell them what they already know?" I heard how bitter I sounded and did not take it back. "The Vale family kept the key to that wall. I won't walk into their house and ask them to be sorry."

"Your father would have gone."

"My father is why I know what it costs."

Orsa looked at me for a long moment, then nodded once and let it go. That was her gift. She knew exactly when to stop pushing, which made her harder to ignore.

The meeting broke up in pieces. Dagny went off arguing with Joss about whether silver spent in a Vale shop was really Vale's silver or ours. Children were called in to bed. Someone laid another plank of driftwood on the fire, and for a while the only sounds were the green wood hissing and the tide sucking at the posts of the old landing. I sat with my knees drawn up and watched the sparks climb out over the marsh until they were small enough to mistake for stars.

Orsa kept her list the old way, on a flat piece of driftwood with names scratched in charcoal. At dusk I went to look at it, telling myself I only wanted to see who had the nerve. Eleven hearths had put themselves down. Joss Marl. Dagny Pike. Old Hennick, who could barely walk to the privy.

The twelfth name was written small, in round careful letters I would have known anywhere. Marin Saltmere, for the hearth of Ellis.

I found her in the upturned hull we used as a storeroom, sorting dried fish into baskets by lantern light. She did not look up when I ducked inside.

"You signed the list," I said.

"I did."

"You're not going."

"I think I am." She laid a fish in the basket as though she were putting a baby to bed. "Orsa said I could."

"Orsa isn't your cousin."

"No. You are, and you're doing it right now." She turned. "Wren. Don't."

"You've never been past the ford. You don't know what those people are like. They'll smile and feed you and you'll tell them your whole life."

"That's true. I probably would." Her chin came up. "Because nobody has ever let me find out."

"I pulled you out of that water by your hair."

"I know." She said it quietly. "You remind me every time you want me to do something."

That went in clean and deep. For a moment I could not breathe around it.

"I'm not asking you to carry me," she went on. "I'm asking you to stop deciding for me. I'm nineteen. The only place I've ever been is a hole in the mud where we all wait for something to happen. Ellis was my mother, Wren, not yours. If somebody speaks for her hearth, it should be me."

I wanted to tell her she was right. I wanted to tell her she was wrong. Mostly I wanted to explain that her gift was a whisper, good enough to tell her the tide was turning and nowhere near good enough to tell her a man with a kind face was lying. That a hall full of strangers could take a girl like Marin apart and she would thank them for the attention.

What I said was "Fine," in a voice that meant the opposite, and I left before she could see my face.

I walked to the edge of the camp and stood in the wind until my ears ached. The marsh lay grey and huge in front of me. Somewhere past the wall and the cliff was a stone hall full of people who had put their names to the page that called it an accident, and Marin meant to walk in there alone.

She was not going to walk in alone.

I pushed aside the flap of Orsa's tent. She was sitting up with a blanket over her knees, as if she had been waiting.

"Put my name on the list," I said.

"I did. An hour ago."

"You didn't know I'd come."

"I knew you'd take until dark." She pulled the blanket tighter. "We leave at first light. Wear your good coat. And Wren, you needn't pretend it's only for Marin. Whatever that boy wore around his neck today, you'll want to see it again."

I opened my mouth and closed it. The old woman missed nothing, which was exactly what I had always hated about her.

"Good coat," I said. "Understood."

"And Wren."

"What?"

"Roll your sleeves up properly. You'll catch your death."

I went out into the wind with the sound of her dry laughter behind me. It was a small thing. It was the first time anyone in Gull's End had laughed since the paper came.