BOUND AFTER THE REJECTION

Chapter 3: Rogue Land

By the time I admitted I was lost, I'd been lost for at least an hour.

Tomas had said to go straight along the road. The road had other ideas. It dropped, doubled back, split around a boulder the size of a delivery truck, and a fallen pine blocked one fork, so I took the other, and after that I stopped pretending there was a road at all.

The fog didn't help. From the gate it had looked thin, almost pretty. Under the trees it was wet wool. I walked with one hand out in front of me like a sleepwalker and learned, by walking into them, that pine trunks do not move.

My bag strap had worn a stripe on my shoulder. My ankle ached again, the same ankle that had sealed itself up like a zipper a few hours ago, and I didn't have the energy to wonder why.

The pull hadn't let up either. It sat behind my ribs like a fishhook, tugging toward Blackridge. Uphill, it eased. Left or down, it burned. So I steered by it, in reverse, the way you steer around a smell.

I stopped on a root to eat the heel of bread I'd stuffed in my coat. Stale as a roof tile. I ate every crumb and licked my thumb.

"Okay," I told the trees. "Moss grows on the north side. Or the south. One of those."

Every trunk was mossy on every side.

I laughed. It went wrong halfway, turned into something wetter, and I pressed the back of my wrist against my mouth until it quit.

That was when the smell reached me.

Wet dog, but wrong. A wet dog left in a cellar. Under it, old blood and something sour, like milk that had been forgotten in the sun. I'd never smelled it before, and I still knew exactly what it was. Pack wolves don't smell like that. Only wolves who've been out here a long time do.

I stood up too slowly. To my left, a branch cracked underweight.

"Hello?" I said, because apparently I'm an i***t.

Something answered with a low, rough noise, like a man clearing gravel from his throat.

The fog parted, and there was a wolf in it.

Thinner than I'd imagined. I could count its ribs from ten feet away. Its left ear was torn into a ragged V, and its eyes had a yellow shine to them that looked lit from the inside. A second one slid out on my right. Then I heard claws scraping stone behind me, and that was the third.

I held out my bag. I actually held it out, at arm's length, like I was paying a toll.

"I've got nothing," I said. "I'm wolf less. Honestly. You'd be wasting your time."

The torn-ear one c****d its head, like it was considering that.

Then the one behind me jumped.

I heard it leave the ground. I heard my own heartbeat. And under both, a sound that had nothing to do with the forest, a deep grinding groan, like a very old door with a bar across it, somewhere inside my chest.

It hit me flat on my back.

The air went out of me in one cough. Weight on my ribs. Breath on my face, hot and rank, and teeth so close I could see a chipped one on the left side, brown at the root. I thought, very clearly, Mirelle is going to be so pleased.

Run. The same voice as in my room. Closer now, and furious. Anna, get up.

"I can't," I said, out loud, to nobody, like a person who'd lost it.

Yes. You. Can.

The groaning door took a hit from the other side.

It felt like being slammed into by my own body. Pain shot up my spine in a single white line, and I arched off the dirt. The rogue on top of me yelped and scrambled back. My skin was on fire, everywhere at once. My gums throbbed. My fingertips burned. I could hear the drip of water off pine needles a hundred feet away, and the thudding hearts of three starving wolves.

I did not shift. I want to be clear about that. No fur, no claws, nothing impressive. Just heat and noise and the sense of a lid being hauled up one inch and then dropped.

But the wolves had stopped.

All three stood completely still. The torn-ear one had lowered its lips back over its teeth, and its eyes weren't wild anymore. They'd gone round and flat, the way you'd look at someone who just stood up out of a grave.

Then, one by one, they dropped their heads.

I lay there with my heart going like a trapped bird. That's not supposed to happen, I thought. Is it?

The big one whined, and its tail tucked under its belly.

And then something else came through the trees.

A sound first. Tap, step. Tap, step. A stick on stone. A lantern swung into view, smoky yellow, and behind it a figure hunched over a walking staff, wrapped in what had to be nine layers of wool, a gray braid hanging past her waist.

"Off," she said.

She didn't raise her voice. She said it the way you'd tell a cat to get off the table.

The rogues went. All three, instantly, slinking into the fog with their tails down like dogs who'd been swatted with a newspaper. I listened to their paws fade, and then it was just the drip of the trees and me, flat on my back, with dirt in my mouth.

The woman came and looked down at me. She was tiny, maybe five feet, and old in a way that seemed like a choice. One eye was milky white. The other was dark and sharp and aimed at my chest.

"Well," she said. "That was early."

"What was?"

"You weren't supposed to wake until the full moon," She sniffed. "Never did you do as you were told. Can you stand?"

I tried. Twice. The second time she watched me land on my backside and made a small noise in her throat, which might have been a laugh.

"Up," she said, and held out her hand.

Her grip was ridiculous for someone her size. She hauled me upright in one pull, and I swayed there with the lantern in my face, trying to remember how mouths worked.

"Who are you?"

"Odalys. Most people say, healer. The rude ones say, "witch." She hadn't stopped looking at me, at my hair, my jaw, like there was something small written on my face. Her good eye had gone wet. "You've got her chin."

"Whose chin?"

She didn't answer. She lifted her hand, slowly, as if I might bolt, and set two fingers on my cheekbone.

"Eighteen years," she whispered. "Eighteen years I've kept this lantern lit."

"I don't understand."

"No. You wouldn't. They made certain of it." She let her hand drop. "Come on. It's cold, and something in you wants to look at."

She turned and started through the fog. Tap, step. Tap, step.

I didn't move. Half of me wanted to follow her. The other half wanted to run until my legs gave out, and the pull behind my ribs wanted neither.

"Wait," I said. "How did you know I'd be out here?"

Odalys stopped. She didn't turn right away. When she did, the lantern cut deep lines into her face, and for a second she looked less like a witch than like someone who'd been holding her breath for a very long time.

"I've been waiting for you," s

he said, "From the night your mother buried your wolf.”