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Home / Werewolf / Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy / Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

All Chapters of Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

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CHAPTER 61

WrenThree days north of Greywater my snares came up empty and stayed empty, and that told me more than Maren had in all three.I set them right. Edda used to say I set a snare like I had a grudge against the rabbit, and she wasn't wrong, I do, you should, a loose snare is a slow death and a slow death is just cruelty with extra steps. So when I walked the line that third morning and found every loop hanging the way I'd left it, dew on the wire, no fur, no fight, no nothing, I knew it wasn't my hands.Nothing had come through. Not the rabbits, not the fox that should have been robbing me, not the crows that rob the fox. The wood had gone quiet.I didn't tell Maren that. I told her the ground was bad for game and she said "mm," and kept walking with that stick of hers stabbing the dirt, and I wanted to take the stick and throw it in the creek.She knew where we were going and wouldn't say the name."You'll meet her or you won't," is what I got, the first time I pushed. "Names carry. I'

CHAPTER 62

WrenThe door wasn't locked. Maren went in like she'd done it ten thousand times, ducked the low stone lintel without looking, and I understood before my eyes adjusted that she'd lived here. The way her hand found the peg by the door for a coat that wasn't on it.Cold inside. Not the dead-ground cold, the wrong cold. House cold. The cold of a place where the fire's been out so long the stone forgot it. I've been in houses where people died and houses where people left in a hurry, and they smell different, and this one smelled like the second. Onions strung over the hearth, half of them gone soft. A bowl on the table with something in it that had been food in another month. A chair pushed back, not knocked over. Pushed back. She stood up from a meal and didn't finish it and didn't sit down again.Maren wasn't looking at any of that. Maren was looking at the walls.They were covered. Floor to the low ceiling, every flat stone, hung with cord. Knotwork. Not decoration, I knew that the se

CHAPTER 63

AmaraThe cold woke me before the horn did.It started at the back of my neck, where it sits now, a weight like a coin somebody had left on my skin. Tonight the coin was cold, and getting colder, and I sat up in the dark already knowing what that meant.Aldric was awake too, standing in the doorway, watching the river."How long?" I asked."A little while." He didn't turn around. "I was going to wake you.""No, you weren't."He didn't argue. That was answer enough.Then the horn sounded from the bridge tower, two long notes, and there was no more time to talk.By the time I reached the wall, the cold had rolled up off the river and turned the whole yard to white breath. The fire-line was already lit, just the way we'd drilled it: pitch and green wood, the green wood for smoke, because Bram swore the smoke confused the dead and nobody wanted to test whether he was wrong.Rell sat her gray horse below the tower, calling orders. Her people and ours moved as one line now, no gap between t

CHAPTER 64

ZaneAmara slept past dawn for the first time since I'd known her, and that scared me more than the dead had.She didn't sleep. She powered down. She lay on the cot in the corner of Rell's hall and didn't move, and the new white streak in her hair caught the morning light, and I sat on the floor next to her with my back against the cot and didn't go anywhere.Bram crouched to check her and stood back up. "She's spent. Not hurt. There's a floor under how far she went, and she stopped above it." He looked at me. "She knows where her own floor is. That's not nothing.""She went under it last night and you know it.""She went close." He didn't argue past that.The trouble started in the yard before she even woke.I heard it through the door... voices, too many, the particular pitch of a crowd. I went out. Maybe forty of them, Greywater folk mostly, some of Rell's, gathered near the well. The woman from last night stood near the front with her little girl on her hip, the girl's bad leg wra

CHAPTER 65

WrenWe didn't stay the night in the dead woman's house. Maren wouldn't, and I didn't push it.We made a mile and stopped in a stand of pines and laid no fire, on Maren's word, and sat in the dark with our backs to the trees. She had the new knot closed in her fist the whole way. It was the only thing she'd taken out of sixty years of that house.I gave her until I couldn't stand it."You going to tell me the name," I said. Not soft. I was done being soft for the day."You won't know it." She didn't open her hand. "It's older than anything you'd have been taught.""Then it'll be a short conversation. Try me."She was quiet long enough that I thought she'd just refuse."Orsel."She was right. It meant nothing to me. A name, two pieces, a woman's name probably, old-fashioned. I waited for the rest because clearly there was a rest."Who's Orsel.""The first one I ever found in the lore who could do what your friend does." Maren finally opened her hand and looked at the knot like it might

CHAPTER 66

BramThey came in off the north road at first light, eleven of them, and I knew before they reached the gate that I'd lose some.They were from Two Creeks. A mill town, a day and a half north, never anybody's enemy, never worth taking. Two Creeks had nothing the dead want except warmth, and warmth, it turns out, is the only thing the dead want.I had them brought into the long shed and I started where you start, with who's worst, and the worst was a girl maybe twelve with her left hand and forearm gone the gray of old meat. Frostbite kills warm and slow. This wasn't frostbite. This was the other cold, the cold that takes the warm and keeps it, and there's a line where the live part stops and I could see it on her arm plain as a tide mark, just below the elbow.Sela was already beside me. She shouldn't have been on the leg that long but she'd planted herself on a stool and made herself useful."What's your name," Sela asked the girl, easy, like they had all day."Pell." The girl was pa

CHAPTER 67

AldricBy the second evening the cold had reached the bend in the river you could see from the tower, and I stood up there with Rell and watched a line of white come down the valley at a walking pace, slow, and tried to make a plan out of a thing you can't fight with a plan."We can't hold a wall against weather," Rell said. She'd stopped pretending otherwise that morning. "I've held walls against everything that bleeds. That doesn't bleed.""Then we don't hold the wall. We hold the people." I'd been turning it for a day. "We pull everyone into the keep and the stone barns, we burn everything that burns, and we make Greywater one big fire and dare the cold to come into the light. It's not a plan that wins. It's a plan that buys nights.""Buying nights." Rell almost smiled. "That's all anybody's sold me since I met your girl."The horn went then, one toll, the gate-toll, and a watchman called down two words that put the whole plan on hold."It's Maren."They came in off the north road

CHAPTER 68

SeraphineWe left before dawn, six of us, while the cold was still a half-day off and the gate could still be opened without letting winter in. Six against a thing that had frozen a town standing up. I'd have laughed if I'd had it in me.Amara. The two brothers. Maren, who should have been in a bed and was instead being helped onto a horse by Wren, who was coming because she could read ground and because she'd refused to be left. And me. Because I knew the roads.That was the cold truth of why I was the sixth. I knew the roads south of here better than anyone breathing, because I'd built half of them, moving Corvus's strength from one swallowed pack to the next for eleven years. The dead ground had been my work before it was my grave to visit. Rell looked at me when the party was named and I looked back and we both knew she was sending the one person who could find the way and also the one person who'd have to walk back into every place she'd helped make.Sela came down to the gate to

CHAPTER 69

AmaraBy the third day in the dead ground, Maren couldn't ride more than an hour without Wren walking beside her stirrup with a hand on her knee to keep her in the saddle, and the weight on the back of my neck had stopped being a coin and started being a hand again, the way it was the night it first reached me. The closer we got to the grave, the closer it got to me.We made camp in a hollow ringed with dead birches, white trunks like a fence of bones.Maren went down as soon as we got her off the horse. Bram had sent broth-makings and Wren had the pot on before I'd finished my own count of the dark, and the old woman ate a little and slept, and her breath was a thin thread I could feel from across the fire."She's not going to make it back," I said. Quiet. To Aldric, who'd taken the first watch beside me."She knows that. She came anyway." He fed a branch to the fire. "Don't carry it for her. She'd be insulted."Zane took the far side of the ring, then gave up pretending he'd stay th

CHAPTER 70

WrenMaren couldn't sit the horse at all by morning, so we made a sling of two cloaks between my saddle and Seraphine's and carried her between us, and she let us, which told me more than her gray face did. Maren fought help right up until the day she didn't. I'd seen Edda do the same. You learn the look."Don't bury me out here," she said, somewhere in the worst of the morning. Her eyes were shut. I'd thought she was sleeping. "If it comes to it. Don't put me in this ground. It keeps what you give it. I'll not be a soldier in its yard.""You're not dying out here," I said, which was a lie, and she knew it was a lie."Get me to the grave," she said. "That's all I'm for now. Get me there and prop me up and I'll read it if I have to do it dead."The land had stopped being land. That's the only way I know to say it. By midmorning there was no green thing anywhere, no brown thing, only the white of frost and the black of what the cold had killed standing, and the silence had a pressure to

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