Rejected Luna

One Hand, Two Books

Nobody spoke.

Rennick looked down at my hand on his paper for a long moment, and then he lifted his head and said it over me, to the yard, in a voice pitched to carry to the fence.

"A packless hand has no standing before the road. Her count is air. Anybody may say a number."

"Then count it yourself," somebody said, from the edge of the yard, and it was not me. It was Maeve, with her arms folded and her chin up.

"I count what the road hands me," Rennick said, without turning his head. "The road keeps its own book. I do not count for orphans."

And that was true.

It had been the law since before the ridge had a name. I could count until the Long Night and not one figure of it would stand up in a road court, because I was not a person the law had been built to hear. It hurt worse than the words.

I turned to the front row, where the elders stand when they intend to be seen not watching.

"Elder Rowan."

She did not pretend not to hear me.

"The book is the book," she said. "It is kept in the hall, in the hand of this pack's own writer, and it is the record of this valley the same as the ridge is the shape of it. If the count is in it, the count stands." She turned her head, slowly, to Rennick. "Read your claim from a page, factor. Or take it down the road."

"There is no need for it to come to that," he said, and smiled, and drew the charter out from under my hand so smoothly that it seemed rude of me to have been holding it. "The road will wait. The road is very good at waiting."

"Understand me," Elder Rowan said, to me. "I did not stand for you. I stood for the book. Do not mistake one for the other."

"I won't."

"Good." She looked at me a moment longer than she needed to. I had known it already, and it had still given me something to stand in, and losing it hurt. "You counted out loud today, in front of the whole valley," she said. "I have not decided yet whether that makes you useful, or merely loud."

And she settled again into not watching.

The yard broke up, and on the steps of the hall Caden had not said one word from the beginning of it to the end. He had stood with his sleeves pushed back and let the Saltmarrow man talk and the elder rule and the pack arrange itself in rows, and now he did not look at the wagon, or at Rennick, or at the elders.

He studied my hands.

They were still flat where they had been, on nothing now, and the knuckles were split from the lye and the cracks had gone the colour of ash. He looked at them for one second, maybe two. In twelve years, he was the only wolf in this valley who had ever watched me work, and my hands were ashamed under his eyes.

"Noted," he said, to nobody. "Not answered."

Then he climbed the hill.

The bolt was on the back room by dark.

Nessa was in the yard when I returned with my blanket, standing where the store room's shadow met the light from the hall door, and she watched me try the bolt twice before she spoke.

"It holds," she said.

"It holds."

"Then say the other thing, girl. Say what you are going to do with it."

"Sleep," I said.

"That is not what I asked."

"No," I said. "It is what I am going to tell you."

She looked at me for a while. "Three winters I have kept that ledger, and not one wolf in this valley has ever asked me what is in it. You asked me the first week. That is either the best thing that has happened to me in this valley or the worst, and I have not decided yet which."

My things were a blanket, a comb, and the stub of pencil I had carried since the week after the circle. The store room smelled of salt and cold stone, and the back room was four steps by six, and it had no window and no lamp, and it was the first room I had ever slept in alone, and I lay in it and cried once, and was angry at myself for the noise.

I took the store book down after the last lamp went out.

The hall was empty, and I had the right to be there now, which changed nothing about how my hands felt lifting it off the shelf. My hands hurt on it. I counted the year as Nessa had asked, from the frost three winters back, and I did it honestly, because I had learned by then the difference between what a pack says and what a pack writes down.

The first winter was clean. The second winter was clean. The third winter had a hole in it the shape of a room with one door.

A crate out here, a crate out there — never so many at once that a man running his thumb down the column would pause and read it twice. Six in a season against a smokehouse. Four against a road mended in the spring. Two against a name I went and found in the store roster, a woman from the terraces with the standing to draw them and no reason under the moon to want six crates of nothing.

Three winters. Slowly, a little at a time, and always in a hand that had been taught to write fast.

I had seen that hand before.

I went and got the hall book off its stand and carried it back with both arms, the way you carry a child, and opened it at the back, where the names are all crossed through, and beside each one a year and a single word. Released.

The crossing-out was the same stroke as the crates.

Short. Slanted. Made by somebody who had learned to write their own name in a hurry and had never since learned to make it plain. One hand had kept the store room's columns and the hall book's last page for three winters, quietly taking salt out of the one and quietly putting names out of the other.

I had a hand. I did not have a name. But a hand belongs to somebody this pack has decided to trust, and a pack's trust does not fall on nobody, and I hated that more than the crossing-out.

I had the lamp low and my copy half made when the door at the far end of the hall opened.

I kept my eyes on the page. There is one way of walking in this valley that sounds like nothing at all, and it belongs to one man, and I had spent two months learning not to turn around for it.

He did not come in. He stood in the doorway, and the hall was very quiet, and the pen went on doing what I had told it to do, which was copying a column of numbers I could no longer see, and my heart was going so hard the pen shook.

I reached the bottom of the page and my hand made a mark I had not told it to make — a long stroke down the side of the column, and the nib tore the paper at the end of it, and the sound the paper made was very small and very loud, and I wanted to put my face down on the page.

I sat still with the pen in my hand.

Behind me, nobody moved. Nobody said my name. Nobody asked what the mark was for, and nobody crossed the floor to take the book out of my hands, which is what I had learned, in this valley, to expect from a man who had never once raised one, and I had a grief for it, because it was the only thing he had ever given me.

Then I heard him, once. One step, and then the small dry click of the lamp at the end of the table being turned up, so that it threw its light down the page I was working and onto the corner of the book where my own bad marks were.

When I turned my head, the doorway was empty.

I had not heard him touch it, and I ached with the not-hearing.

Maeve was at the ash pit before the bell, and she had not brought soap this time, and she did not pretend to be riddling anything.

"You are up early," I said.

"I am up early because you are." She said it without heat, and without the pity I had been bracing for since the bell. "Half the yard says you were in the hall last night, and Perrin says it twice."

"Perrin says everything twice."

"Then say something back to him once." She did not look away, and she did not soften it either. "Wren. What was on the page?"

"Numbers."

"Numbers." She let the word sit between us. "I have watched you count since we were nine years old, and you have never once counted a thing you did not mean to do something with, so I am asking you plainly, as the person who stood beside you in that line, and I am only going to ask it the one time. What are you going to do with them?"

"Put a price on them," I said.

She stopped.

"On the numbers?"

"On everything," I said. "They told the whole valley today that a packless hand has no standing before the road, and they will tell it again tomorrow, and every day after that. So I am done carrying what I find to people who are allowed to be heard. From now on I carry it to people who are not, and I make them pay for it, and the first of them is going to be whoever made that hole."

"Then you will need somebody on the inside," she said, "and I have been standing next to you since we were nine, and I am not going to stop now because the rest of the yard has decided to look the other way."

She looked at me for a long moment, and then she picked up the riddle and went back to work, which is how she has always told me that she has heard me, and I wanted to cry and did not.

I sat with his lamp burning higher than I had set it.

By the end of that afternoon, every wolf in the yard had heard the factor say that a packless hand has no standing before the road, and had heard Elder Rowan agree with the half of it that mattered, and it was law now, and it would be law tomorrow.

I had counted that a loss. I was wrong, and I was afraid of what I would become, and did it anyway.

A packless hand does not count. Very well.

So from that night on, nothing I counted would come free.