The WitchWolf Queen

Chapter 13

Elara's POV

I did not go home directly after the meeting.

I told myself I was simply taking the long way back. That the afternoon was clear and the air was good and I had been inside for most of the morning and there was no particular reason to hurry. I told myself this with the specific conviction of a person who knows they are not telling themselves the truth and has decided to proceed anyway.

I walked.

Not toward the lane. Not toward the market road or Kairo's house or any of the ordinary points of the ordinary map of my ordinary life. I walked in the other direction, along the wider path that ran south through the settlement before it thinned and narrowed and became something less like a path and more like the memory of one, winding through the lower edge of the pack land where the houses grew fewer and the trees grew closer and the particular quality of the air changed in a way that was difficult to name but that you felt in your chest before you felt it anywhere else.

I had been turning Arthur's words over since I left the study.

At the ball, my brother and I noticed something.

Something.

Not someone. Not you. Something. The word chosen with the care of a man who measured his words and knew what each one cost. He had not said I noticed something about you the way a man notices a woman. He had said something about me in the register of a man who had identified a thing and wanted to understand it better before he spoke about it further.

Are you aware of anything particular about yourself?

I had not answered him directly and he had not pressed me and we had moved on to tea and the eastern forest and the autumn light, and all of it had been easy and genuine and I had liked him, I did like him, and none of that changed the fact that I had walked out of that study carrying a question he had put into me that I had not brought in with me.

Something unusual.

The path narrowed further and I followed it without quite deciding to follow it and the trees came in on both sides and the settlement sounds fell behind me in degrees until what was left was the particular quiet of the pack land at its edges, where the maintained and the wild met each other and neither entirely gave way.

I had heard about Silver the way you hear about things in a pack neighbourhood that no one discusses directly. In pieces. Through the accumulated texture of half-sentences and redirected conversations and the particular kind of silence that falls when a name comes up that people have agreed, without agreeing, not to pursue.

Silver.

The name itself was not a name anyone had given her. It was what she was called because of her hair, which had been white since she was young, not old-white but the white of something that had decided on that colour and meant it. This was what Maret had said once, years ago, when I was young enough to be listening to things not meant for me from the top of the stairs while Maret talked to my mother in the front room below. The white came in before she was twenty, Maret had said, and my mother had made a short sound and changed the subject to the kind of firmness that meant she had noticed me not being asleep.

I had asked my mother about it later. She had told me Silver was a woman who had lived on the edge of the pack land for a long time and that some people went to her when they had questions and that she was not someone I needed to think about.

When your mother tells you someone is not someone you need to think about, you think about them.

But I had been a child and then I had been older and the question had settled into the background of everything the way unasked questions settle, always there, never urgent, never gone.

She knew things. That was the common understanding, spoken or unspoken. Not in the way of gossip or experience or the accumulated knowledge of a long life, though she had that too. In the other way. The way that did not have a clean name in ordinary conversation, that people approached through implication and stepped back from through discomfort.

She knew things she should not have been able to know.

She had told a woman on the western road that her son would come home before the winter and he had come home before the winter. She had told the grain merchant three years ago that the eastern field would not take the crop he was planning and he had not listened and the eastern field had not taken the crop. She had told things to people who had asked and things to people who had not asked and some of what she had told them had been welcome and some of it had not been and she had not, by any account, distinguished much between the two.

People went to her when they were out of other places to go.

I was not out of other places to go.

I kept walking.

The cottage was where it was supposed to be.

I had never been here. I had heard it described, the same way I had heard Silver described, in the accumulated pieces of overheard things, and the description was plain and specific enough that I recognised it immediately when it came into view through the trees. Small. Stone. A roof that had been repaired in sections over a long time, the patches visible from a distance in the way of a house that had been maintained by necessity rather than plan. A garden that had been allowed to grow according to its own preferences, which were apparently considerable. Herbs I could name and herbs I couldn't and something climbing the left side of the wall that had reached the roof and was making further enquiries.

No smoke from the chimney.

One window facing the path.

I stopped walking.

I was perhaps twenty feet from the front door. A wooden door, old, the paint on it once green and now the suggestion of green. There was no bell. There was a knocker in the shape of something I could not quite make out from this distance, worn smooth by its own years.

I stood there.

I was aware, standing there in the thin trees at the edge of the pack land with the afternoon light coming through at its late angle and the settlement twenty minutes behind me, that I had not told anyone I was coming here. I had not told my mother. I had not told Kairo. I had not thought it through in any deliberate way. I had simply walked in this direction, the way I had walked through the side door of the ballroom without making the decision, the way my feet sometimes moved toward a thing before the rest of me had settled the question.

Are you aware of anything particular about yourself?

Nineteen years of small things set aside.

I walked to the door.

I raised my hand.

I did not knock.

Because the door opened.

It opened without sound, without warning, without any preceding noise from inside the cottage that would have suggested someone was on the other side of it and aware that I was here. One moment it was closed and the next moment it was not, and Silver was standing in the doorway.

She was not what I had built in my mind over the years of half-information. I had built something larger, somehow, something that occupied more space. The woman in the doorway was not tall. She was slight in the way of certain people who have always been slight, and she stood very straight in a way that made the slight irrelevant. Her hair was as described, white and pulled back simply. Her face was the face of a woman somewhere past the middle of her life, neither old nor unlined but with a quality to it that was difficult to place, the quality of a face that had been paying close attention for a very long time and had not wasted the effort.

Her eyes were dark.

They looked at me.

Not the way people looked at me in the lane, with the sideways consideration of a neighbourhood watching something unfold. Not the way Arthur had looked at me, with the warm and genuine interest of a man choosing to pay attention. Not even the way Gaius had looked at me, with the particular gold-eyed assessment of a man taking something in.

She looked at me the way you look at something you already know.

Like I was not new information.

Like I was, in fact, very old information that had simply arrived on her doorstep in a form she had been expecting and was not surprised to see.

The moment stretched.

I did not speak because something in the way she was looking at me made speaking feel like the wrong first move, like trying to answer a question before it had been fully asked.

She looked at me.

She looked at me for long enough that the afternoon felt it.

And then she said, in a voice that was quiet and even and entirely without apology, the following:

"Come back when you are ready to hear the truth."

And she closed the door.

The sound of it was very small.

That was the thing I would remember later, not dramatically but persistently: the smallness of the sound. A door that fits its frame well makes almost no sound when it closes, just the soft definitive compression of wood meeting wood, a sound so slight it is almost only the absence of the door having been open.

That was the sound.

And then nothing.

I stood on the path in front of the closed door with my hand still half-raised and the afternoon light still doing what it had been doing and the garden still growing in its particular unmanaged way on either side of me, and I did not move.

My heart was doing something I did not have a composed way to describe.

It was not pounding the way it had when Gaius had spoken from the dark of the corridor and I had nearly lost my footing on the stone floor. This was a different quality of reaction. Less sudden. More like something that had been slow and steady and had abruptly increased, the way a river increases when it has reached a narrower place, not louder but faster, more urgent, the same water moving differently.

Come back when you are ready to hear the truth.

Not: I don't know what you're talking about. Not: I can't help you. Not: wrong house, wrong person, wrong question. Not any of the things a person says when someone appears at their door in the late afternoon without warning.

The truth.

She had said the truth as though she knew what the truth was.

As though she had been holding it for some time and was perfectly comfortable continuing to hold it until I decided I wanted it.

I looked at the door.

The worn green paint. The knocker, which I could see now was in the shape of a wolf, the detail almost gone, rubbed smooth by decades of hands. The stone of the frame around it, dark with age, edged with the climbing thing that had no interest in being identified.

I had come here because Arthur Lingson had said something unusual and set it down on a shelf and left it there and I had walked home carrying it and had not been able to put it down.

I had come here because nineteen years of small things set aside had been sitting quietly in a pile and the pile had been growing and I had been pretending the pile was not growing and at some point, apparently, a pile becomes too large to walk past without noticing.

I had come here because my father had a smile he did not explain and words he did not say and a quality of waiting that I had never been able to account for.

I had come here because somewhere at the bottom of every question I had not asked there was the same question wearing different clothes, and I had not wanted to ask it because asking it meant I would have to hear the answer.

I stood at the closed door.

The garden moved slightly in the small wind that came up from the lower pack land at this hour, and the light continued its late-afternoon work, and somewhere in the trees behind me something moved, and the settlement was twenty minutes away, and my mother was cooking supper, and my father was standing at a fence post that did not need him anymore.

Come back when you are ready to hear the truth.

My hand was still half-raised.

I lowered it.

I looked at the door for one more moment, at its closed and patient and entirely unmoved face, and I felt something I had been carrying for nineteen years shift its weight in a way it had not shifted before. Not lifted. Not gone. Just moved. Like a stone that has sat in one position for so long it has made a shape in the ground and has now been turned over, and the shape it made is visible, and it cannot be unnoticed.

I was not ready.

I knew I was not ready.

She had known it too, before I raised my hand, before I walked up the path, probably before I left the house this morning.

She had opened the door anyway.

To tell me to come back.

Which meant she was expecting me to come back.

Which meant she believed that at some point I would be ready.

I turned away from the door.

I walked back up the path through the cottage garden with its herbs and its climbing thing and its long habit of growing without permission, and I went back into the trees, and I did not look behind me, and I told myself that I was not going to think about this on the walk home, that I was going to put it where I put things, in the drawer, with the other things, and close the drawer.

I thought about it the entire way home.