What the Mark Knows

The first thing I noticed was the smell of pine resin and woodsmoke, and the second was that my cheek was pressed against a chest that was not my own. I lay still. My coat was somewhere on the floor of the tent, my boots were still on my feet, and my hair had come loose from its knot and was spread across a stranger's collarbone like a spill of copper thread. The man beneath me was breathing slowly. His skin was warm, and beneath the warmth there was a pulse that beat faster than any human heart should. His hand rested on the curve of my hip, heavy and certain, as though it had found its place hours ago and had no intention of moving. I lifted my head. Sandy blond hair, tousled and flattened on one side where he had slept against the canvas. A strong jaw, unshaven. Deep blue eyes, open now, watching me with the calm of a wolf who had heard me wake three minutes before I knew it myself. "Morning, counselor," Kade said. I sat up so fast that the blanket slid off my shoulders. The air in the tent was cold and sharp, and it raised gooseflesh along my arms. I found my coat, pulled it on, and did not look at him while I did up the buttons. "What time is it?" "Early enough that you can still pretend you slept in your own bed." He stretched, and the muscles in his shoulders moved under his skin. "Elias will have coffee on the fire. You should drink some before you go back through the gate. You look like a woman who has been up all night." I looked at him then. "I was up all night." "I know." A corner of his mouth turned. "I was there." The memory came back in pieces, warm and unwelcome. The storm had hit the camp around midnight, rain drumming the canvas hard enough to drown out the pack's laughter from the main fire. Kade had walked me to the tent he kept for guests and then had not left. I had asked him to stay. I remembered the exact shape of the words in my mouth, how they had felt like a confession, and I remembered his answer, which had been to close the tent flap and pull me gently by the wrist until I was standing against him. His hands had been careful. The rest of the night had been less careful. I straightened my collar. "What happened last night stays in this camp." He sat up and reached for his shirt. "Whatever you say, counselor." "I mean it, Kade. I have a case to build and you are my client's brother, which makes you a witness, which makes last night a complication I cannot afford." "I am not a witness to anything." He pulled the shirt over his head. "I am a feral wolf who lives in a tent. Nobody at the Registry cares what I do in it." That should have reassured me. It did not. I had spent seven years in Registry courtrooms and I knew how a good opposing counsel could turn a private night into a public motive. Halden would not need to prove anything. He would only need to suggest. I found my bag and pulled out the small mirror I kept for hearings. My reflection looked back at me with cornflower blue eyes that were a little too bright and a warm golden tan that had gone pale around the mouth. My cheeks were flushed, and there was a mark on my neck that would not be covered by any collar I owned. I touched it with two fingers. The skin there was warm. "That will fade by tomorrow," Kade said from behind me. "You should not be looking." "I should not be doing a lot of things." I turned. He was standing by the tent flap, holding it open, and the grey light of the morning came in around him. His black wolf was close to the surface this morning. I could see it in the way he held himself, in the faint shimmer at the edge of his pupils, and I could smell it too, that deep scent of pine and cold earth that had been pressed into my hair all night. "When we met," I said slowly, "in the holding cell. You knew who I was before I gave you my name." He did not answer at once. Outside the tent, a wolf howled somewhere in the hills, a long rising note that faded into the mist. Kade listened to it, his head slightly turned, and then he looked back at me. "Yes," he said. "How?" "That is a conversation for another morning." "We have this morning." "We have a summons to collect," he said, and nodded past me toward the camp gate, where Elias was jogging up the muddy path with something white in his hand. Elias reached the tent out of breath, his auburn hair plastered to his forehead. He was a cheerful young wolf with green eyes and a red wolf that he wore like a second coat, always close to the surface, always ready to run. This morning he did not look cheerful. He held out a folded paper to Kade, and then, when Kade did not take it, he held it out to me. "It came through the checkpoint scanner an hour ago," he said. "The guard said it was marked urgent. He said they sent three of them." I unfolded the paper. The seal was the seal of the Luna Registry, pressed into the paper in dark red wax, a crescent over a set of scales. The handwriting beneath it was a clerk's handwriting, neat and impersonal, and the words were the words I had read a thousand times in other people's hands. You are hereby notified that you have been entered into the Luna Registry as the bonded mate of one Kade, feral wolf, unregistered, resident of the eastern green belt. The bond is recognized under the Mate Licensing Act. You are required to appear before the Registrar within five days of this notice to confirm the bond, receive the mark, and accept the terms of co-leadership. I read it twice. The second time I read it aloud, because my voice was the only thing in that camp that still felt like it belonged to me. Elias swore. Kade said nothing at all. "This is not possible," I said. "I am not a Luna. I am an attorney. I am not bonded to anyone. This has to be a clerical error, or a joke, or..." I stopped myself, because I could hear how thin it sounded. A Registry notice was not a joke. The Registry did not make clerical errors about the Mate Licensing Act. "It is not an error," Kade said. I looked up at him. He was standing very still, and the morning light had caught his face at an angle, and I could see the truth on it before he spoke. I had defended people long enough to know when a man was about to stop lying. "The bite," he said. "On your wrist. In the holding cell." "The bite was a scuffle. You snapped at my hand because you were chained and frightened, and I put it down to instinct, and the physician closed it in two days. It was not a mating bite." "It was." He held my eyes. "I bit you on purpose, Nia. I knew who you were, and I bit you, and I have been waiting since that night for the Registry to catch up to what I did." The camp had gone quiet around us. Somewhere beyond the tents the howl came again, closer now, and Elias took a step back as if the ground had shifted under his boots. I looked at the paper in my hand. The words had not changed. Five days. The Registrar. The mark. Then I looked at Kade, at his deep blue eyes and his sandy hair and the careful way he was holding himself, as though he expected me to run and was ready to let me. "You have five days to explain that to me," I said. "Start now."