CHAPTER ONE: THE RIVER
Sheprina smelled the smoke before she understood what it meant. By the time she understood, it was already too late to matter.
It wasn't like her mother's cookfire smell. That one always had something warm hiding under it — bread, wet wool, whatever herbs her mother had crushed between her hooves that morning. This smoke had nothing warm under it at all. It smelled like something burning and nothing else.
She didn't stop to think about that at the time. She'd lost her mother somewhere between the second field and the third, in the dark, in a crowd of sheep all running the same way — until, one by one, they stopped running the same way, and started running every way at once. She called out once for her mother. Only once. She'd heard what happened, off to her left, to the ones who kept calling.
Behind her, the hillside was still screaming. She kept moving away from it, toward the river.
The river was running high. Swollen with rain, faster than she'd ever seen it, brown and full of branches that popped up and disappeared like something alive was moving under the water instead of on top of it. There were trees on the other side. She didn't know if that meant safety. She didn't have time to stand here and find out.
She stepped in.
The cold hit her so hard it almost knocked the breath out of her before the current even got the chance to. For one second she almost climbed back out — from inside the water, everything sounded louder, like the roar was coming from every direction instead of just downstream. But the hill behind her was still burning, and there was nothing back there except more of the same. So she kept going.
The current grabbed her fast. Faster than she'd expected. It spun her sideways before she'd taken more than a few strides, and she understood, too late to do anything about it, that she'd badly misjudged this river from the bank. It wasn't just quick. It was stronger than she was — plain and simple — and it didn't care what she needed. It just wanted her downstream, one way or another.
She fought it anyway, because that's what her mother had raised her to do. You weren't put here just to survive whatever happens to you. She'd heard that line more times than she could count, always at night, always said quietly. So she kicked toward the side that felt like it might lead somewhere solid, even while the water kept pulling her under and letting her up and pulling her under again.
Something scraped along her side. A branch, half-sunk in the water. Her leg went over it before she'd even decided to move — some part of her acted faster than the rest of her could think — and she held on. The branch bent hard under the pull of the current. She kept holding, water washing over her face, eyes shut tight. For a few seconds — three, maybe four — she actually believed she might get through this.
Then the branch snapped loose from whatever had been holding it in place, and she was moving again. Up ahead, the sound of the river changed.
Lower and wider, she'd gone up close enough to water to know what that meant. A river that keeps flowing, sounds different from one that's about to drop off a ledge.
She let out a scared bleat without meaning to — just some sound her body made because it had run out of better ideas — and the roar from the flowing river swallowed it whole, like it had never happened. The water was going to be the thing that got her, this time. Not the wolves, she thought.
A movement caught her eye, up on the rocks above the gorge.
She only saw it because the current happened to spin her the right way at the right moment. A wolf, low against the stone, watching her the way something watches a thing indecisively. .
Of course it was a wolf. It was probably always going to come down to a wolf tonight, one way or another. She'd just assumed the water would get to her first.
She kept kicking for the far bank anyway. Her mother's voice was still doing its work in her somewhere, even now, even with almost nothing left in her to swim with. The falls kept getting louder. The wolf on the rock still hadn't moved.
Then it moved.
It left the rock in one motion, there was no hesitation, she could see. The wolf hit the water in a flat dive, well ahead of where the current would carry her. It cut across the river instead of fighting it head-on, the way she had. Only something that already knew this river would think to do that. She had time for exactly one thought before her head went under again:
"He's faster than the current."
After that there wasn't much room left for thinking. Just cold pressure and the edges of everything going soft and strange. Then something huge closed around the back of her neck — a grip that could have snapped her spine in half and didn't. It pulled instead of pushed. Somehow, impossibly, it was fighting the river for her instead of against her.
She came up gasping. She was moving sideways now instead of down, dragged through the current by teeth locked carefully around her scruff — close enough that she could feel every single one of them, and not one of them breaking her skin.
The falls roared behind her, closer than she wanted to think about. Ahead of her, finally, was rock. Solid ground that actually stayed where it was.
She didn't remember reaching it. She only remembered the moment right after — lying on the stone, water running off her in sheets, and above her stood the wolf, blocking out what little grey sky there was. He'd just decided, for reasons she had no way of guessing, not to let the river finish what it had started.
He was breathing hard. She could see his whole body move with it.
She lay there, soaked and shaking, her back leg already sending up a warning she didn't want to think about yet. In some tired, simple way, she understood that this night wasn't finished with her.
He looked down at her. His eyes were grey.
She hadn't expected that detail to matter to her. It did, somehow. She couldn't have said why.
He didn't move to eat her.
Not yet, some small, cold part of her thought — and she hated herself a little for thinking it, mostly because it was probably true.
