Wolfless

Find Her and End It

His father kept him standing for the better part of a quarter of an hour.

Rhys had started counting somewhere in the first minute, the way he had counted in that room since he was six: the tall clock, the fire, his own pulse, anything with an edge to hold on to while Torvald Draven finished whatever it was that mattered more than the son he'd sent for.

The Alpha of Hollowmere signed three orders. Read a fourth twice. Put the pen down.

"Ninety-one," he said.

"Ninety, sir. The Corran transport came in two light, one died at Ferrow, one at the ford."

"There are ninety-one names on the requisition and there were ninety mouths in my yard." Torvald turned round. He was sixty and looked forty, which is what a strong wolf does to a man, and the effect was never reassuring. It was like being looked at by something wearing your father. "A clerk's error, probably."

"Probably."

"And yet."

He went to the window. Below them the ward vaults would be dark; above the vaults the kennels; above the kennels four hundred years of the seven houses' sons learning which of them was permitted to speak first.

"You were fourteen when we settled the Vale question."

"I remember."

"You remember what I told you it was for."

"Containment," Rhys said. "Their blood was a contagion in the bonds. Left alone it would have ended fated mating in the north inside three generations, and when the mating goes the packs go, and when the packs go we're dogs in the road." He heard himself give it back complete and flat, the whole catechism, the thing he'd recited at fourteen with his boots still stinking of smoke. "Containment, sir."

"And containment is only containment when it's complete."

Rhys said nothing. There was no version of this conversation that got better by his adding to it.

"The blood line closed at Vale. The servant-born were spared, and the mercy was the point: six houses watched us spare them, and six houses are still watching." Torvald came back from the window. "But there was a daughter."

The fire cracked. Rhys kept his hands where they were.

"Eleven years old at the time. Not accounted for at the burning and not accounted for since, and I have had nine perfectly good years of no daughter. But there are ninety-one names and ninety mouths, and somewhere under my kennels tonight there's a girl whose paperwork was put together by somebody clever."

"You want her found."

"I want her ended." No heat in it at all. It was the voice you'd use about a window that wanted shutting. "Quietly, and not by me. If I do it, six houses watch an Alpha finish a bloodline he swore was already finished, and every one of them goes home and starts counting how long their own name has left. If a ward dies of a fall in the Trials, or a fever in a vault, or a discipline that ran a bit long. That's Hollowmere. That's a hard school. Nobody writes a treaty about a hard school."

"And if I'm wrong about which one she is?"

His father smiled.

"Then you'll have been wrong about a servant girl," he said. "You'll survive it."

A quarter of an hour standing and it took him twenty seconds to hand it over. That was how things went in that room. Torvald didn't give his son tasks, he gave him tests, and the grade never got posted, and the only way you found out you'd failed one was to be quietly stopped from inheriting.

"Verification's on the new moon," Rhys said. "She'll be in the ring with the rest of them. A Vale heir has a wolf, which narrows it to..."

"A Vale heir has a wolf," Torvald agreed. "Which is why she'll have spent nine years learning how to look like she hasn't." He picked up the pen again. "Find her before the ring."

"Sir."

"You stopped. In the yard."

The room got slightly smaller.

"I lost my place on the roll."

"You have never lost your place on anything in your life." He'd gone back to his orders. "Nine nights."

Out in the upper gallery it was cold enough to see your breath, and Rhys put both hands on the rail and let himself do the thing he'd been refusing to do since four o'clock that afternoon.

He thought about the yard.

He had read out ninety names and felt nothing whatsoever for eighty-nine of them, and then he'd said two words, a nothing name of the sort you give a girl born into a house where the good names have all been used already, and something in him had come up off the floor of his own chest like a hound coming up off a warm stone.

His wolf hadn't moved without being called in six years. He'd made sure of it. That was what the discipline was for, that was what the Trials were for; the whole architecture of being the heir came down to being a man who does not want anything at the wrong moment.

It had moved in the yard. It was moving now, in the gallery, in the cold, over nothing.

He looked down the length of the black hill towards the kennels and the vaults under them, where ninety people were asleep and one of them was a girl his father had just told him to kill.

The appalling part, the part he had no intention of examining and could already feel arranging the next nine days for him, was that he wanted to find her.

Not because she was Vale. He simply wanted to find her, and his wolf had been pointing down that hill like a needle at north since four in the afternoon, and nothing he'd been taught in twenty-three years explained it.