THE REJECTED BLOODLINE

Wrong Shape

By the third day of Ren rationing her the worst cuts to smoke — the fatty ones nobody wanted, the ones that took twice as long and turned the whole shed into a haze — Maren had stopped bothering to ask why.

She'd learned that asking why, in Blackthorn, only ever got her one of two answers. Either silence, or an explanation just reasonable enough that arguing with it would make her look petty. Ren didn't hate her. He'd probably have said, if pressed, that he was just being practical, giving the hardest jobs to the wolf who couldn't be trusted with the easier ones that required shifting, or speed, or strength. It wasn't spite. It was arithmetic. Somehow that was worse than spite would have been, because spite could at least be argued with.

She scraped fat off a haunch of venison and thought, not for the first time, that there was a kind of relief in work that didn't require anyone's good opinion. The meat didn't care who she was. It only needed to be handled correctly, and she could do that, whatever else was true about her.

"You're quiet today," Ren said, from the other end of the table.

"I'm always quiet."

"Quieter than usual." He didn't look up from his own knife. "Mill's got everyone on edge. Even you."

"I'm not on edge."

"Didn't say you were scared. Said you were on edge. Different thing." He set a fresh cut in front of her, one of the fattier ones, and this time said nothing about why.

The mill patrol had left at dawn that morning — the fourth day since the attacks began, though nobody was calling them attacks yet, not officially. Officially it was still rogue trouble, opportunistic, the kind of thing that happened every few years when a lone wolf or two wandered too close to settled land and got desperate enough to risk it. Unofficially, Maren had heard enough fragments passed between people who forgot she was in the room to know that nobody actually believed that anymore.

She watched the patrol go from the smokehouse doorway — a dozen wolves, four in human shape carrying weapons, the rest already shifted and pacing at the edges of the group, restless with the kind of energy that came before a real fight rather than a routine sweep. Darius rode out with them himself, which told her more than Elias's warning had. He didn't usually bother with boundary trouble unless it was worth his time, and he hadn't left the territory himself in longer than Maren could remember.

She thought about the mill sometimes, in the years after. Not then. Then it was just a place at the edge of the territory where she wasn't allowed to go, one more door closed among the many, and she filed it away and went back to work, because there was nothing else useful to do with the thought.

Elias came by twice that day, both times with some excuse — borrowing a knife he didn't need, asking about a task that could have waited. The second time, she finally asked him outright.

"Why do you keep checking on me?"

He hesitated long enough that she knew the answer wasn't the one he gave her.

"No reason. Just — bored."

"You're never bored, Elias. You're the only person in this pack with something to do at all hours."

He didn't argue that. He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve instead, which was what he did when he was choosing his next sentence carefully, a habit she'd known since they were children too small to be assigned real work and had spent whole afternoons doing nothing together instead, back when nobody minded who she sat next to.

"People are saying things," he said finally. "About the mill. About what's been getting into the stores."

"What kind of things."

"Rogue-talk, mostly. But Orsa's had the healers looking at some of the tracks they found." He glanced toward the elders' hall, though there was nothing to see there but a closed door. "She wouldn't say why."

Maren set down the knife she'd been using to scrape a hide clean, more out of instinct than decision.

"You think it's connected to me."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

He looked at her properly then, the way he almost never did, straight on instead of sideways. "I don't know what it is, Maren. Nobody's told me anything. I just don't like that nobody's telling anyone anything."

Neither did she, though she'd had years of practice pretending otherwise. She picked the knife back up and went back to the hide, and after a moment Elias left her to it, the way he always eventually did, because there was only so long either of them could stand in a place like that without something to be busy with.

She worked until the light went, then a while longer by lamp, because Ren didn't stop her and she didn't want to go back to the lodge yet, where Ines would be mending something and the Reyat brothers would be pretending she wasn't there, and none of it would be different from any other night.

When she finally did walk back, the yard was quieter than usual. No gathering, no fire behind the elders' hall, no laughter she wasn't invited to. Just the ordinary sounds of a pack settling in for the night, low voices behind closed doors, someone's dog barking once at nothing and then going quiet.

She passed the old stone foundation on her way and thought, briefly, of the carved shape she'd found there two nights before — three lines, crossed, worn nearly flat. She didn't stop to look at it again. It was too dark to see clearly anyway, and there was no reason to think it meant anything at all.

The next morning, the smokehouse was unusually full. Half the pack seemed to have found some errand that brought them past it, lingering longer than the errand required, the way people did when they were waiting for news and didn't want to admit they were waiting.

"You'd think they'd all shifted overnight and forgotten how to be subtle about it," Ren muttered, watching a cluster of them pretend to inspect a drying rack that didn't need inspecting.

"Nobody tells me anything, so I wouldn't know what they're waiting for."

"Patrol's due back today. Or was due back yesterday, depending who you ask." He didn't offer an opinion on which version was true, and Maren didn't ask him to.

She kept working. It was easier than standing in the yard with everyone else, watching a gate that wasn't going to open any faster for being watched. Ren didn't send her on the water run that day — an unusual mercy, though he didn't call it that, just said the well nearer the lodges had thawed and there wasn't any need — and she wondered, without much hope of an answer, whether he was trying to keep her close to the smokehouse on purpose, in case something happened that he thought she shouldn't see alone.

Elias didn't come by at all that morning, which was its own kind of message. She pictured him standing at the gate with the others, waiting the way everyone else was waiting, and didn't resent him for it, though some small, unkind part of her noted that once again she was the only one not standing there.

By midday, the yard had the particular kind of quiet Maren remembered from the night of the ceremony — not silence, but the quiet of people who already suspected what they were about to be told and were only waiting for someone official to say it out loud.

She was hauling a fresh load of firewood past the smokehouse when she heard the shift in the wind — that was the only way she ever thought to describe it afterward, though it wasn't really the wind at all, just the sudden change in the pitch of the voices near the gate, a dozen low conversations breaking off at once into something sharper. She set the wood down and went to see, because for once nobody stopped her, nobody blocked the way, nobody seemed to notice her at all.

The patrol was straggling back through the gate in the wrong shape — half of them still wolves, exhausted, dragging; the rest human and bloodied, moving like people who'd used up everything they had to get this far and nothing more. One of the human ones had an arm wrapped in a shirt that had once been a different color. Another was being half-carried by a wolf who kept stopping to nose at his side, as if checking he was still breathing.

Darius wasn't with them.

Maren counted the wolves twice, certain she'd miscounted the first time, and got the same number both times. Twelve had gone out. She counted eleven coming back, and even that felt generous, given the state some of them were in.

Orsa pushed through the gathering crowd before anyone else could, moving faster than Maren had ever seen her move, the ledger she carried everywhere left behind for once. She grabbed the nearest returning wolf — one of the human ones, young, barely more than a boy — by the shoulder.

"Where is he."

The boy didn't answer right away. His eyes were somewhere else, fixed on a middle distance that had nothing to do with the yard he was standing in.

"Where is he," Orsa said again, quieter this time, which was somehow worse than if she'd shouted.

"He told us to fall back," the boy said finally. His voice cracked in the middle of it, and he didn't seem to notice, or didn't care. "He told us to fall back and he stayed."

Nobody said anything for a moment. The yard, which had gone from busy to quiet to something else entirely, seemed to be holding its breath along with the rest of them, waiting to see what shape the next sentence would take.

"Stayed where," someone finally asked.

The boy didn't answer that one at all.