Wolfless

They counted us by the mouth, the way you count livestock. The clerk came down the line with a lantern hooked on his elbow and pried each jaw open with two fingers, checking teeth, checking the gums for the grey rot that went through the eastern villages the winter after the war and killed more of us than the war had. His fingers tasted of iron. Also of other people's mouths, which was worse, and which I have never been able to describe to anyone since without them making a face. I opened before he touched me. A woman who opens her own mouth is a woman nobody looks at twice, and anyway I'd rather have my own jaw in my own hands. "Servant-born," he said, and made a mark on the roll. "Servant-born," I said. Nine years of work in two words, and he didn't even look up. It had been raining since before dawn and had settled into that thin sideways stuff off the moor that gets into your collar no matter what you do with it. Ninety of us in the yard, roped at the wrist in strings of ten. The leavings of four broken houses. The Draven banners over the gate had gone so heavy with water they'd stopped being banners at all and hung there like washing somebody had forgotten. I had put myself in that yard on purpose. That's the part nobody would believe, if there had been anyone left to tell it to. Three months earlier a name went onto a requisition list in a garrison office at Corran, and the name was Wren of Vale, servant-born, twenty, verified. It cost me a stolen seal and four nights copying a dead woman's handwriting by a window, and a bribe I paid in information instead of coin, because information is the only currency I have ever had enough of. Ninety people in that yard were dragged there. I applied. The girl roped in on my left was a cook's daughter out of Corran, seventeen or so, and she'd been crying since the count started, quietly, in the disciplined way of somebody who has learned that loud grief gets you noticed. The clerk hooked her chin up with one finger. There was a bruise going yellow along her jawline. "That healing?" "Yes, sir." "Slow." "I've been ill, sir." He made a different sort of mark and moved on, and she looked at me, and I looked at the mud, because a wolf heals a bruise like that in a night and a half. Two nights if she's starving. Everybody standing in that yard knew the arithmetic, including her, and she had just failed it out loud in front of a man with a lantern and a pen. I didn't look at her again for the rest of the afternoon. I have a rule about that and I'm not proud of it and I keep it anyway. The guard came down the line somewhere in the second hour, bored, doing what bored men do to pass an afternoon in the rain. He took the bracelet off my wrist without asking, which was his right. Turned it over in his glove a couple of times. Braided hair, dark, one strand of it gone grey; nine little bone beads, none of them bigger than a peppercorn. My mother made it out of my grandmother, the way our people did, which is a thing I have learned to stop mentioning since it got called barbarous by everyone who was in a position to call us anything. "Charm?" "Nothing, sir." "Nothing," he said, and pulled. The braid gave. The beads went into the mud and the mud took them, all nine, faster than it takes to say it. He watched my face the whole time. That was the entire point of the exercise; not the bracelet, my face, and whether a servant girl from a slaughtered house had anything in her worth walking up the hill and reporting. So I gave him nothing and counted instead. One by the drain grate. Two and three near his left boot. Four went under the rope somewhere. Five, six and seven I lost. Eight against the wall, and nine on the stone lip of the drain, still sitting there, still mine. I would come back for them. I wouldn't. But I let myself have it for the length of the afternoon, because believing something cheap is sometimes the only way to keep your jaw still, and my jaw stayed still. "Nothing," the guard agreed, and went on down the line. The transport came at the fourth hour and the Dravens came behind it. You could feel the yard rearrange itself. Ninety people found their spines and their chins and their eyes without anybody saying a word, the choreography of the beaten, which we'd all learned in the same year off the same teachers. The clerk stopped chewing whatever he'd been chewing. Six riders, grey and black, no ornament on any of them, which is what power wears once it has stopped having to explain itself. The one who dismounted took the roll out of the clerk's hand without looking at him. He was young for it. Three years older than me, four at the outside, and built like somebody who'd been handed every advantage a body can be handed and then made to earn all of it twice over. Wet black hair. He stood in six inches of churned mud as though it were a floor in a house he owned, which, I suppose, it was. "Heir Draven," the clerk said, in the voice of a man who wants a receipt for his obedience. Rhys Draven didn't answer him. He was already reading. He read like an accountant. Name, mark, name, mark. No pause for the crying girl. No pause for the old man at the end of the second string who'd been an armourer to a house that doesn't exist any more and had his tools taken off him at Ferrow and hadn't spoken since. He said each name once, flat, and each name answered him, and he went on to the next one. I watched his hands on the paper and made myself think the thing I have to think on purpose, because it never comes by itself: those hands signed nothing. He was fourteen. His father signed. "Wren of Vale." And something went through me. It came in low, under the sternum, hot and narrow, like a wire being pulled taut through a place that has no business having wires in it, and it went down into my hips and closed my throat and took my breath out of the middle of a word. I didn't make a sound. I'd like that on the record. Twelve years of practice held, and my face stayed exactly where I'd left it. But across the yard Rhys Draven stopped reading. One beat. Two. The clerk shifted his weight. Six riders sat their horses in the rain and waited on him, and the heir of the house that burned my family out of the world lifted his head and looked at ninety identical wet grey nobodies like one of them had said something to him. "Wren of Vale," he said again. Slower this time. It happened again. Worse, and with a direction, and the direction was him. Which is impossible. I have no wolf. I have never had a wolf. A wolfless woman feels a mate bond exactly as much as a stone feels the moon, and I have spent nine years and every clever thing I own making sure nobody in this country ever finds out which of the two I am. "Here," I said. Level. My voice is the one part of me I've never had to forge. He found me. Straight to me, across all that mud, no hunting about it. And I understood, before I was frightened (which is its own kind of problem), that I had just been given away by the only witness I never thought to bribe. My own body.