The Forged Mark

The diesel heater had been ticking all night, and by morning the cabin smelled of hot metal and wet wool. I woke with Aldric's arm across my waist, his breath slow against my shoulder, and for a moment I let myself pretend the bond was real.

Then he moved, and the mark on my throat stayed cold.

"You're awake," he said. His voice came out rough. He pulled his arm back and sat up on the edge of the bed, and I watched the long muscles move under his skin in the grey light from the window. He had a scar on his left shoulder from a challenge four winters back, and a habit of rubbing it when he was thinking. That morning he rubbed it a great deal.

"The trucks come at six," I said. "You wanted to be at the landing before the mill crew."

"I know what I wanted."

He turned and looked at me. Aldric was forty-one and looked it, with a broad face and iron grey eyes that had never once softened for me in the way a mate's should. My mother used to say a Luna could read her Alpha's mood by his hands. I could read Aldric's by the set of his jaw, and that morning it was set like a locked gate.

He leaned over and kissed me, because the pack house had thin walls and we had a performance to keep. His lips were warm and dry, and his hand slid up my ribs under the quilt, practiced and unhurried, and my body answered the way it had learned to answer in four years of marriage: willingly enough, while my mind stood off to one side and watched. He pulled me against him and I let him, and the friction of his skin on mine built into something that should have mattered. It didn't. When he finished he pressed his forehead to mine and breathed, and I lay still and stared at the ceiling beam and thought about the ledger I had left open on the table.

"You'll want to see the manifests," I said.

"Later." He got up and reached for his shirt. "Marit. The blood moon is in three weeks."

"I know when it is."

"Then you know what it means for us."

I said nothing. He pulled on his boots and left, and the door banged, and I lay there a while longer with the cold creeping back into the sheets.

That was the last time I saw him alive.

I went down to the pack house at seven to sort the mail and found Kellan in the kitchen with a mug of coffee and the radio on. He was thirty-five, broad across the chest, with blond stubble he never quite shaved clean and a jaw that made him look more stubborn than he was. He had wanted the Alpha seat once, before Aldric took it, and he still wore the grudge lightly, like a coat he might put back on if the weather turned.

"Alpha's late," he said.

"He's at the landing."

"The landing's two miles. He left before six."

I poured myself coffee and said nothing. Kellan watched me over the rim of his mug. "You look tired, Luna."

"Long night."

"Mm." He set the mug down. "Dara's been in the archive since four. Said she found something in the trap reports you should see. I told her you had a pack to run and she told me to mind my own business, so now I'm telling you."

I put my coat on and went out. The morning was clear and hard, the kind of cold that makes the spruce trunks click, and the snow on the road was packed into ruts by the mill trucks. I walked because I liked the walk, and because the truck belonged to the pack and the pack's fuel was written in a ledger I would have to account for.

Timber Landing sat where the access road met the cut block, a wide flat pad of frozen mud and snow with a loading ramp on one side and the hydro line running along the ridge above it, four wires strung between leaning poles. The mill crew had not come yet. The trucks had not come. There was only the wind and the smell of diesel and pine sap, and a shape on the ice at the far end of the pad where the ground dipped toward the creek.

I knew it before I got close. I knew it the way a wolf knows weather.

Aldric lay on his back with his arms out and his eyes open, and the front of his coat was black with frozen blood from his throat to his belt. The snow around him had been trampled, then smoothed over, then left. His throat was torn open the way a wolf tears a throat, one deep bite and a wrench.

I knelt. My knees made a sound in the crust. I did not touch him. I had never touched him easily when he was alive and it seemed a poor time to start.

Then I saw the ice beside his left hand. Someone had carved into it with something sharp, and the carving was fresh enough to be white against the grey. Three letters and a fourth that had been scratched out. M. A. R. Then a long score where the second letter had been gouged away. Someone had written my name beside my husband's body and then changed their mind about the ending.

I got up. My hands were steady. That surprised me. I had spent four years being told I was a Luna of moderate gifts, that my calm was my greatest asset, and there on the landing I discovered what my calm was for.

I did not run for the pack. I stood there and looked at the hydro line and listened. The wires were humming, faint and low, the way they did when the cold pressed down on them. Three weeks to the blood moon and the lines already singing. Aldric had known. Everyone would know soon.

I found the second set of tracks in the snow past the ramp. Boots, not paws, size large, coming down from the ridge road and going back up. I followed them ten yards and stopped where the snow turned to frozen gravel and left no print at all, and stood looking up at the black wall of spruce and the four wires cutting across the sky.

When I came back down, Kellan was there. He had brought two warriors and the truck, and he stood in the snow with his hands at his sides and his face gone the colour of the mill's old ash.

"Luna," he said. "Marit."

"Don't touch him."

"I wasn't going to." He took a step closer anyway. "Who did this?"

"Someone with boots and a reason." I looked at the ice. "Cover the landing. Send someone up the ridge road and have them bring back what they find, and tell them not to eat anything they find."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I've read the boundary reports this year, Kellan, and half of them are signed by men who were dead when they signed them." I walked past him to the truck. "I'm going to the archive. Tell the pack I'll speak at noon."

He caught my arm. His grip was careful, and his voice was quiet, and his thumb rested exactly where the mark sat under my collar, cold as a stone. "At noon you'll stand up in front of the pack house and tell them the Alpha's dead and the bond passed to you. And they'll look at your throat, Marit. They'll look at your mark and they'll want to see it lit up and burning for him. Are they going to see that?"

I looked at him. Somewhere behind his careful voice something else was moving, some thought he had been carrying for a long time and had finally found a reason to take out and hold up to the light.

"At noon," I said, "I'll tell them the truth."

The hydro line hummed above us, and the wind brought the smell of the cut block down the road, sap and diesel and old snow, and under it, faint and wrong, a stranger's scent I did not know.