The Rejection Keeper.

I keep a list of the people I have saved, and I keep it in my skin. Forty-one lines. Wrist to elbow, both arms. Pale and flat and shining a little in firelight, like burns that healed wrong. Nobody told me to keep the list. The scars keep it for me. In Silverpine they send for the Keeper the way they send for a midwife or a gravedigger — quietly, at the edge of the day, with the door half-open and their eyes on the road. Nobody says my name in the street. Nobody says the word Keeper either, because a word said out loud is a word that might come back. They say the Calloway girl, which is the same as saying nothing at all. The boy across the ritual floor is nineteen and he has been crying since dawn, and he is doing a bad job of hiding it. "Lennox," I say. "Arm." He doesn't move. His hands are clamped between his knees like he's holding something in. "He said I was nothing." His voice splits down the middle. "In front of the whole pack. He said he'd rather run alone than run with me." "I know." "You don't." "I do." I hold my palm out flat, the way you'd offer your hand to a dog you don't trust. "I just don't need you to say it twice." The hut smells of cold ash and wet wool. The Elder's fire burned down an hour ago and nobody has fed it. That's deliberate. They want this finished before anyone wanders past and sees. There are three of them watching from the wall. The Elder. His daughter. A boy I sat beside for two winters in a schoolroom before the debt took me out of it. None of them will look at my arms. All of them will look at my arms. There's a board on the floor between us. Salt. Ash. Yesterday's rain in a chipped bowl. Lennox puts his forearm against mine. I'm eight years into this work and I still can't describe a thread to someone who has never seen one. It isn't light. It isn't rope. It's the place where two people were joined and then weren't — and when a joining breaks badly, that place keeps bleeding. You can't see it. You can feel it, like a draught in a room with no windows. I find his seam in a heartbeat. I always find it in a heartbeat. Then I pull. Here's what nobody warns you about. When I take a thread, I don't get the pain. I get the evidence. It arrives whole and uninvited, like a voice through a wall. A fragment of whoever did the rejecting. Their face. Their reason. Their version. Lennox's mate never loved him. That's what I get, in the half-second my hands close. A girl standing in a kitchen that isn't hers, thinking about somebody else, deciding — in the small mean way people decide things — that Lennox is a loss she can afford. Lennox doesn't get that. He gets his own life back. Eleven minutes. That's quick. When it works, it's quick. He comes back to himself slowly, the way you wake up somewhere you don't recognise. Then he puts his head down on his knees and breathes. And that's the part the stories leave out. I give them their lives back and then they never look at me again. "Thank you," he says, into his knees. "Go home." He stands. Gets three steps toward the door. Then he turns and looks at my arms, and his face does the thing every face does. Not disgust. I could take disgust. He looks at me the way you look at a ladder you've just climbed down — relieved, and a little sick, and very glad it wasn't your job. "Sorry," he says, for nothing. "It's fine." He goes. The Elder's daughter puts a coin on the board and doesn't wait to be thanked. The Elder walks me to the door with his hand hovering near my elbow, not touching, and says, "You'll not speak of this in the village." "I never do." He closes the door while I'm still on the step. I walk home through Silverpine with my sleeves down. It's a small place. Eleven houses, a mill, a chapel that hasn't had a priest in nine years. I pass the well and two women stop talking. I pass the smithy and the smith's boy studies the ground like it's a text. By the time I reach the end of the lane, everyone in the village knows the Keeper was called out today, and everyone has separately and privately decided not to know anything about it. Thorne pays me in the lane. He always pays me in the lane, because coin isn't supposed to touch the ritual floor. Gammel Thorne is a small man in a very good coat. He's polite in a way that is worse than rudeness. He has never once raised his voice at me in eight years, and I would rather he had. "Forty-one," he says, counting into my palm. "Dear girl. You'll want to slow down." "That's not up to me." "No," he agrees pleasantly. "It isn't." He writes it in the ledger. He always writes it in the ledger. He keeps that book the way other men keep a marriage — close to the chest, and never fully open. Lennox Gray. Severing. Thread forty-one. Held. Fee paid. I read the number and something in my chest goes cold. I have held forty-one threads. I have the scars to prove it. And I have never once been told what happens to a Keeper when the count gets too high. "Steward." "Yes, dear." "What happens at fifty?" He stops writing. The nib hovers over the page. One second. Two. I watch his face do absolutely nothing, which is how I know he's deciding something. "That," he says, "is a question for a different evening." Then he tears a page out of the back of the ledger — fresh paper, far too good for me — and holds it out. "Runegrave," he says. "The Lycan court." I don't take it. "They've sent for a Keeper. The largest fee we have ever been offered. Enough to clear what's left of your mother's debt, and your indenture with it." There is a specific quiet that happens in my head when somebody says mother. "You'll come back with your reputation and your freedom and a great deal of their money," he says. "Or you won't come back at all, and I'll still have the ledger. Either way, dear girl, I win." I fold the paper along its own crease, carefully, the way you put away something that has already gone off in your hands once. "Tell Runegrave I'll come." He smiles and closes the ledger. And that's when I see it — the page he tore from the back, where he keeps the running list. Written in his small neat hand, beneath mine: Wren Calloway. Thread-count: forty-one. Status: active. And under that, a name with no thread-count beside it. Blank. Waiting. I have dreamed that name every night for six years. Ever since the first thread. Ever since I was eleven years old and didn't yet understand what the world had decided I was for. Cassian Vāle.