My mother had a duffel bag packed before I woke up.
It sat by the kitchen door, navy canvas with a broken zip held shut by a safety pin. Next to it, her spare boots, laced together. On the table, a mug of tea gone cold and a sock folded into a tight square.
"Forty dollars," she said, without turning from the stove. "It's all there is. Don't spend it on the bus. Walk to the Calder road and spend it after."
I was still wearing the tablecloth dress. I'd slept in it. There were grass stains on the knees.
"You're sending me away."
"I'm sending you out." She cracked an egg one-handed. "There's a difference."
"What did you mean last night?"
The egg hit the pan and spat.
"Mum. You said he wasn't supposed to do it yet. Yet. Like you knew he would."
"I was upset. People say things."
"You don't."
She turned around then, spatula in her hand, and for a second I thought she would tell me. Her mouth opened. Her eyes went past me to the window, to the lane outside, and closed again.
"Eat," she said. "Then change. Then go."
There's no ceremony for a rejected mate in Larch Hollow. Nobody bakes you anything. Nobody comes to sit with you. People think it's catching. A rejected wolf is supposed to sicken. Some go quiet and stop eating. Some go strange and run off into the hills and don't come back as anything you'd want to meet. The elders call it a mercy if it's quick.
I sat at the table and ate the egg because she was watching. It tasted like paper.
"Rules," my mother said, sitting across from me. She held up one finger. "You don't shift. Not once. Not on a full moon, not if you're cornered, not if you're dying."
"Why?"
Two fingers. "If anyone calls you by your whole name, all three parts of it, you don't answer. You walk away."
"Mum."
Three. "You don't come back until I send for you. Or until Bettany Crewe does."
"And if neither of you sends?"
She reached across and took my face in her hands. Her palms smelled of onion and lye soap. "Then you have a life somewhere," she said. "And it's a good one. And I'll be glad."
I wanted to scream at her. I said, "Okay."
Old Crewe came by while I was lacing the boots.
She didn't knock. Nobody in the Hollow knocked on Crewe's account; she'd delivered half of them. She came in sideways, the way she did everything, a basket on her arm and her white hair stuffed under a man's felt hat.
"Ilse," she said.
"Bettany."
They looked at each other over my head for a long moment. Whatever passed between them had a lot of years in it.
Crewe set the basket on the table and took out a flat tin, the size of a biscuit box lid. "Comfrey, yarrow, and a few things you don't need to know about. Cuts, burns, bites. Don't eat it."
"Thank you."
"And this." A little leather pouch, stitched shut with red thread. "You don't open it."
"Then why give it to me?"
"Because I'd rather you had it and didn't need it." She tucked it into my coat pocket herself and patted it flat. Her fingers were knotted like old roots. Up close she smelled of smoke and something green and bitter. "You're going to feel sick for a while. Your wolf's going to go quiet. Let her. She's not dead, girl. She's listening."
"Listening for what?"
Crewe looked at my mother again.
"Go on," my mother said. "Before the lane wakes up."
I left at first light. Frost on the gateposts. The lane empty except for the Tillers' dog, who wagged at me like nothing had happened, which almost broke me in half.
The border stones of Larch Hollow run along the east ridge in a broken line, one every few hundred yards, each one carved on the side that faces out. Elders touch their foreheads to them when they pass. Kids dare each other to lick them, all except one, where Royce's elder brother Aldous was found dead the year before I was born. Fenmark's work, everyone said. I'd never thought about the stones as anything but old.
Cade was sitting on the one by the Calder trail.
He stood up fast when he saw me, like he'd been caught. He was still in last night's shirt. His eyes were red at the rims and he hadn't shaved, and the gold of him looked dulled, like brass that needed polish.
My ribs hurt. The place where the thread had been.
"Wren."
I kept walking.
"Wren, wait. Please. Just..."
"You want no part of me," I said. "You told everyone."
"I know what I said."
"Then get out of my way."
He didn't. He stood on the trail with his hands open at his sides, and I could have gone around him, and I didn't, because some stupid buried part of me wanted to hear what he'd say.
"Don't go to Calder," he said finally. "Go past it. Go to the coast. Port Calder, the harbour side. Nobody from here goes there."
"Is that an order? You're not Alpha yet."
His jaw went hard. "It's advice."
"I don't want your advice." My voice cracked on it, which I hated. "I wanted you. That was all. I didn't need a house or a title or a seat at the long table. I'd have lived in the boathouse."
Something went across his face like a cloud across a field.
"I know," he said. "That's the problem."
I walked around him then. He let me. I didn't look back, and I'm proud of that, still.
Three miles past the stones the Calder trail drops into a gully full of bracken and old spruce, the kind of dark that stays dark at noon. That's where I first noticed it.
Something was walking beside me in the trees.
It wasn't hiding. That was what turned my stomach. It kept pace twenty yards off, on the slope above, moving when I moved and stopping when I stopped. When I stood still and held my breath I could hear it breathing too, slow and deep, in a chest far bigger than mine.
My wolf, who had been silent since the meadow, lifted her head inside me for the first time.
Then a branch cracked, and between two spruce trunks a shape stepped out into a slant of grey light.
A wolf. Grey as wet slate, huge, with a pale blaze down its chest.
And it was looking at me like it knew my name.