The Rogue He Claimed

Chapter 5: My Brother's First Hunger

The small room off the kitchen had a bed, a stool, and a window the size of my hand. Maeve had left a candle on the sill and a bowl of water on the floor, and Ronan was lying on the bed with his boots still on.

I pulled them off. His feet were cold, which was worse than the fever.

"Elara." His voice came out thin. "It hurts."

"I know."

"Not the ribs. Here." He put his hand on his chest, then lower, over his stomach. "It is like something is eating me from the inside. I did not want to tell you."

I sat down on the edge of the bed. My brother had my mother's nose and my father's stubbornness, and he had spent three years being brave in a way that made me want to shout at him.

"Your wolf is trying to come out," I said. "She is hungry and she does not know what for. That is what the first shift feels like. Everything gets louder and there is a hole in the middle of you that nothing fills."

"How do you know?"

"Because I went through it. Everyone does." I pulled the blanket up to his chin. "You will not die of it. You just have to hold on until she comes out."

The first hunger came an hour later.

He was asleep, and then his eyes opened and they were not his eyes. He sat up so fast the blanket fell to the floor. His hands were shaking, and when he breathed in he made a sound I had only heard once before, in the weeks after Ashfall, from a wolf who had lost everything and had not yet learned how to be alone.

"Ronan. Look at me."

His eyes were half gold and half brown, the way they go when the wolf is close to the surface, and there was something in them I did not like.

"I need to eat," he said. "Elara, I need to eat something, I need it now."

The pack kitchen was at the end of the corridor, and the guard Angus had posted was standing at the far end with his arms crossed. If I walked past him with a wild-eyed boy, he would have questions.

"Stay here," I said.

He grabbed my wrist. His grip was too strong. That was the first sign of how much trouble we were in.

"Elara, I am sorry, I cannot, my hands are shaking and I do not know why."

I crouched in front of him and held his face between my hands. "You are going to stay on this bed. You are not going to move. I am going to get you food, and if you get off this bed while I am gone, I will make you regret it. Do you understand me?"

He nodded.

I went past the guard, who raised his eyebrows and did not ask, and found a candle stub in the kitchen and lit it from the hearth coals. I took a loaf of bread, a hard cheese and a quarter of a cold pie, and wrapped them in a cloth.

When I came back, Ronan was on the floor.

He was on his knees with his back against the bed, shaking all over, and there was a thin line of blood at the corner of his lip where he had bitten himself.

"I could not help it," he said. "I tried to stay on the bed, and then I was on the floor and I do not remember how I got here."

I knelt and pushed the bread into his hands. "Eat. Slowly. If you eat too fast you will be sick, and I am not cleaning that up."

He ate the whole loaf and most of the cheese and all of the pie, and then his breathing slowed and his eyes went back to brown.

"That is better," he said. "It is still there, though. Like a toothache in my stomach."

"That will pass when the shift comes. Tomorrow, or the day after."

"And then what?"

"And then you will be a wolf, and you will need to eat more than you eat now, and I will stop worrying about you every hour." I sat down beside him on the floor. "You should sleep."

"Will you stay?"

"Yes."

He fell asleep against my shoulder, and I sat there with the candle burning down and listened to the pack house settling. A door closed upstairs. Someone laughed, low and quick, and someone else told them to be quiet.

I did not realize I was crying until I felt the wet on my cheek.

It came out of me slowly, the way it always did, without a sound. I had learned to cry quietly in the first winter after Ashfall, with Ronan sleeping six feet away and a wolf on the road outside, and I had never unlearned it. My chest shook. I wiped my face with the back of my hand and told myself it was the smoke from the candle.

I missed my mother. I missed the way she used to sing while she worked, some song she made up herself that never had the same words twice. I missed my father's laugh, and the fat grey dog we had at Ashfall that could not hunt and had slept at the foot of every bed in the pack.

Most of all I missed being a person who had not yet seen her family burn.

The door opened.

I had not heard footsteps. Finn stepped inside and stopped when he saw me. He had changed his shirt, and his pale golden hair was damp where he had pushed his hands through it. He had a blanket folded over one arm and a jug in the other hand.

"I came to check on the boy," he said.

"He is asleep."

"Good." He set the jug down and looked at me. "You have been crying."

"Your kitchen is smoky."

"The kitchen is a floor below us."

I did not have anything to say to that, so I looked at the candle instead.

Finn crouched and held out the blanket. "For the floor. The stone holds the chill."

I took it. "Thank you."

He sat down against the opposite wall with his back to the door and folded his arms. He was not looking at me anymore. He was looking at the ceiling.

"My mother used to sit with me like that," he said. "When I was small and could not sleep. She would sit with her back to the door and not say a word, and I would fall asleep because I knew she was there."

"What happened to her?"

"She died in the winter, four years ago. I was twenty-five." He was quiet for a moment. "My father has not been the same since. None of us have."

I wanted to tell him something true. I had been holding my secrets so close for so long that the truth felt like a coin I had forgotten how to spend.

"My mother would sing," I said. "Not properly. She made up the words as she went. My father used to say the song changed every time she sang it, and she would say that was the point."

Finn did not say he was sorry. He just sat there with his back to the door, and after a while his breathing evened out, and I realized he was not going to leave.

I pulled the blanket over Ronan and then over myself, and I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes.

I woke sometime later to the sound of footsteps in the corridor.

Finn was already on his feet with his hand on the knife at his belt. The footsteps stopped outside the door. There was a long silence, then three slow taps.

"Finn." A woman's voice. Isla. "I know you are in there. Open the door."

Finn looked at me, and I saw the same thought pass across his face that had passed across mine.

"What do you want, Isla?" he called.

"A word about the enforcer. There was a letter in the grain store this morning, and it was not meant for me." A pause. "There is a silver knife in that room, Finn, and my father's guard is asleep at his post. If you want to keep this secret any longer, you will open the door and hear what I have to say."

Finn's hand did not move from his knife. He looked at me, and this time there was something in his eyes I had not seen before.

"Stay behind me," he said.