THE REJECTED BLOODLINE

Explicit Clearance

Boundary movement requires explicit clearance. The words had circled Maren's head for two days, the specific bureaucratic flatness of them almost funny if she'd been in any mood to find things funny.

She wasn't.

"I need herbs," she told Ren, on the third morning after the gathering. "Ren. The willowbark's gone. So's most of the yarrow. Whoever's still hurt from the mill is going to need both before the week's out."

"Then someone with clearance goes and gets it."

"Nobody with clearance has time. They're all reorganizing patrols, arguing about who answers to who now that—" She stopped herself before finishing that sentence, though they both knew how it ended.

Ren set down his knife. "You're asking me to sign off on sending you past the boundary."

"I'm asking you to tell me who else is going to do it."

He didn't have an answer for that, which she'd expected. Nobody did. The healers were stretched thin tending to the wounded from the patrol, the fighters were all reassigned to the reduced routes Orsa had ordered, and the handful of pack members who usually gathered herbs on the western slope had all quietly found reasons to be busy elsewhere since the mill.

"It's not my clearance to give," Ren said finally.

"Then whose is it?"

"Orsa's. Or one of the others, now." He looked at her for a long moment, something working behind his expression that she couldn't quite name — not quite reluctance, not quite resignation either. "You really think you're the one to send out there. After everything."

"I think I'm the one nobody will miss if it goes wrong."

She hadn't meant to say it quite that plainly. It came out anyway, flat and unadorned, and Ren's face did something complicated in response — flinched, almost, though he covered it fast.

"That's not—" he started, then didn't finish it either. He picked his knife back up instead, turned it over once in his hand, set it down again. "I'll ask Orsa. Won't promise anything."

Orsa said no. Not directly — Maren heard it secondhand, through Ren, through a conversation she hadn't been present for — but the answer came back within the hour, clipped and final. No unnecessary movement past the boundary. Not for herbs. Not for anything.

"Unnecessary," Maren repeated, when Ren told her. "People are hurt."

"I know."

"So what happens when the willowbark runs out?"

"I don't know, Maren. I passed on the request. That's all I can do."

She spent the rest of that day working in a silence that had teeth in it, gutting and scraping with more force than the task required, until Ren finally took the knife out of her hand without a word and gave her something less likely to end in an accident.

Elias found her that evening behind the smokehouse, sitting on an overturned barrel, arms wrapped around her knees in a way she rarely allowed herself in front of anyone.

"Ren told me," he said. "About the herbs."

"Of course he did."

"He's worried. Not reporting on you. There's a difference."

"Feels the same from where I'm sitting."

Elias didn't argue that. He sat down beside her instead, close enough that his shoulder brushed hers, and for a while neither of them said anything at all. The evening had gone cold fast, the way it did lately, winter arriving early and mean.

"I could go," he said eventually. "Get the herbs. I've got clearance for the western slope, or close enough that no one would question it."

"You don't know which ones to take."

"You could tell me."

"I could tell you and you could still bring back the wrong thing, and then someone bleeds out because I described a leaf wrong instead of just going and looking myself." She said it sharper than she meant to, and immediately regretted the edge in it, though Elias didn't seem to hold it against her.

"So you want to go yourself."

"I want someone to go who actually knows what they're looking for. That happens to be me. Nobody's going to give me clearance for that, so I don't know what you want me to say."

He was quiet a moment, turning something over. "What if you didn't ask."

She looked at him properly then. "You're suggesting I go without clearance."

"I'm not suggesting anything. I'm asking a question."

"That's a very careful way of suggesting something, Elias."

He almost smiled at that, the first real approximation of one she'd seen on him in days. "The west slope path splits about half a mile out. One fork stays inside the marked boundary. The other doesn't, not officially, though it's barely past the line — old deer trail, hardly counts as leaving territory at all. Faster route to where the good yarrow grows, too."

"You've been thinking about this."

"I think about a lot of things I don't say out loud." He picked at his sleeve, the old habit. "I'm not telling you to do it. I'm telling you the path exists, in case you decide to do something stupid, which — historically — you don't. So maybe this isn't even a real conversation."

"Maybe not."

They sat with that for a while, the unspoken shape of it settling between them, neither confirming nor denying what they both understood was actually being discussed.

"If I did," Maren said finally, careful with each word, "hypothetically — how long would I have before anyone noticed I was gone?"

"Depends who's on watch. Corren's rotation starts at dawn, and he's still shaken enough from the mill that he probably won't be paying close attention to who's coming and going near the smokehouse. Give it an hour after that, maybe two, before anyone thinks to ask where you are."

"That's not much time."

"It's not nothing, either." He looked at her sideways. "You'd have to be fast. And careful. And if anything happened out there—"

"I know."

"I don't think you do, actually. I think you've decided the risk is worth it because staying here and watching people die from a fever you could've treated feels worse to you than getting hurt yourself. Which is a very you way of thinking about it, and I'm not sure it's the right one."

She didn't answer that, because there wasn't a version of the answer that would have made either of them feel better about it.

"I'm not telling you to go," Elias said again, quieter this time. "I mean that. If something happened to you out there, I don't—" He stopped. Started over. "Just be careful. If you do this. Which I'm not saying you should."

"Understood."

"I mean it, Maren."

"I said I understood."

He looked like he wanted to say something else, some further caveat or plea, and in the end didn't, which was its own kind of statement. He got up from the barrel, brushed off his trousers, and stood there a moment longer than the movement required.

"For what it's worth," he said, "the yarrow patch is past the split, maybe another quarter mile. There's a fallen log across the stream. You'll know it when you see it — someone carved initials into the bark years ago, before either of us was old enough to have opinions about who owned what tree."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. I didn't tell you anything." He almost smiled again, though it didn't quite reach all the way this time. "Dawn, then. If you're doing this."

"If."

He left her there, alone behind the smokehouse, the cold settling deeper as the light went fully out of the sky. She sat a long while after he'd gone, running through what she knew — the path, the split, the fallen log, the hour or two of grace before anyone thought to look for her — turning it all over the way she'd turned over every other fragment these past days, except this time the pieces weren't a mystery she couldn't touch. This time they were a plan, small and half-formed, but hers.

She thought of Orsa's flat refusal. Of Halvard's warning at the shrine. Of the specific, deliberate watching she'd felt from half the pack since the mill burned, the sense of being suspected of something she hadn't done, standing trial for a crime nobody would name to her face.

If she was going to be blamed regardless, she thought, she might as well be useful while she was at it.

She went back to the lodge before full dark, packed what she'd need for the morning without letting herself think too hard about what she was actually deciding, and lay awake long after Ines and the Reyat brothers had gone quiet around her, waiting for dawn the way she'd once waited, as a child, for a birthday that never once turned out the way she'd hoped.