CHAPTER ONE - Market Day
By the time the ford bell rang for midmorning, Wren Hale had sold every bundle of feverfew she’d brought and counted the green twice.
It was a habit, nothing more. Eleven stalls on the trampled grass, the miller’s boys squabbling over a crate of turnips, old Tobin asleep against the well with his hat over his face. Two carters had come off the Thornwood road at dawn and gone again before the mist lifted. She had noted which way each turned. She noted most things. Her stall sat at the end of the row, where the lane to the mill ran behind it, and the gap in the byre fence was eleven steps from her left boot. She had paced it the week she arrived.
“You’ve got the look again,” Orla Fenn said, setting her son on the edge of the table. “Like you’re listening for rain.”
“It’s autumn. I’m always listening for rain.” Wren turned the boy’s hand palm up. A split across the heel, two days old, the edges puffed and shiny. “Tam. What did you cut this on?”
“Nothing.”
“A scythe?”
Tam studied his boots. “Maybe a scythe.”
She smelled it before she touched it, a faint sour sweetness beneath the dirt. Not yet bad, but it would be by tomorrow. She cleaned it with boiled water and salt while Tam bore it with a seven-year-old’s grim dignity, then packed it with honey and crushed yarrow and bound it in clean linen.
“Change this at dusk. If the red starts creeping past the cloth, or he runs hot, you come to my door, and I don’t care what hour it is.”
Orla pressed two coppers into her palm, then a third. “For the trouble.”
“There was no trouble.”
“Take it, Wren.” Orla held her hand a moment longer than she needed to.
It was the third time that morning someone had done that. It was not quite gratitude. It was something softer and more careful, and she did not like what it suggested. Garrow, the reeve, had ridden through at first light and knocked on every door. The baker’s wife had swept the green twice. When Wren walked past, conversations thinned and started up again about nothing. King’s business, was all anyone would say. Everyone to be on the green by noon. Nobody had met her eye while they said it.
The last time she had walked into a place where everyone knew something she did not, she had been eleven years old. She never had to finish the thought. Her mother had finished it for her years ago, in a voice Wren could still hear when the house was quiet. Be small. Be quiet. Live.
So she had been all three. Twelve years in Marlow’s Ford as Hesper Quill’s niece, the herb-wife’s girl, a registered Omega with no wolf to speak of, which was what Hesper had told the reeve and what the reeve had written in his ledger and never questioned. Hesper had been in the churchyard four years now. Wren kept her cottage at the edge of the green, with its two doors and its loose floorboard, and kept her stall. She took Hesper’s tonic every morning, bitter as green walnut, to keep her scent dull to anyone who might know how to read it. The vial in her apron pocket was nearly empty.
Elias had promised to bring another by market day.
He had never been late. In three years he had never once been late, which was the only reason she kept looking at the road. He had turned up the first winter after Hesper’s burial, a lean young scribe with ink on his cuffs and coal-tar soap in his coat, asking to buy a poultice for a cough he didn’t seem to have. She had waited for the questions. Where she was from, why a girl her age lived alone, what the pale crescent on her wrist was. They never came. He came back the next month, and the one after that, and sometime in the second year she realized she had started listening for his step on the path the way other people listened for a kettle. He brought the tonic, news from the south, and a quiet she could put her full weight against. She had not told him her real name. She had told him nearly everything else.
“Held up by weather,” she told the empty air, and the sky, clear and pale as skimmed milk, did not agree.
At noon the bell rang again and the village drifted toward the well. Garrow stood on the stones with his hat crushed in both hands. Wren stayed where she was, at the end of the row, with the lane at her back and a bundle of dried mint in her fist that she did not remember picking up. She found she was counting again. Three exits. The fence, the mill lane, the ditch behind the byre that ran down to the river. She had known all three for twelve years.
The sound arrived before the riders did, a low drumming from the north road that the children heard first and ran toward. Then the column came around the bend of the ford, twelve horses, black and crimson, mud to the knees. Wren had not seen that crimson in twelve years. Her body knew it before her mind caught up. She did not breathe in until she was sure she could do it quietly.
The man at the front dismounted stiffly, the way men did when they had been in the saddle since dawn and were no longer young. Gray at his temples, a face like a closed gate. He unrolled a parchment sealed in black wax and held it at arm’s length, and when he spoke his voice was pitched to carry over a battlefield rather than a village green.
“By the hand of Osric Varrow, Alpha King of Veyra, and in the name of the Concord, a Writ of Peace.”
Orla Fenn pulled her son against her skirt. Old Tobin finally woke and took off his hat. The reeve stared at his own boots.
The captain’s eyes traveled the green, unhurried, row by row. They reached the end of the stalls and stopped.
He did not look away. For a moment, he did not read. Something crossed his face that Wren could not name, and then it was gone, and he lowered his eyes to the page.
“The Crown summons Elowen Ashenmoor.”
Nobody in Marlow’s Ford had ever heard that name. It dropped into the silence like a plate on stone, and the whole village turned, slowly, one head after another, to look at the herb-wife’s girl.
Three exits, Wren thought, and could not reach any of them unseen.
