It Doesn't Work on Me
The new Alpha of the Harrow Reach gave his first order in my infirmary at a quarter past midnight, and everyone in the room obeyed it except me.
Before that it had been an ordinary bad night. Dougie Rennie had fallen off his own ferry dock, drunk on the election, and I had a curved needle through his left eyebrow and was explaining for the third time that whisky doesn't numb a cut if you drink it afterward.
"It's a celebration, Mistress," he said. "Soren Kincaid. A ferryman's son. Thirty-one stones to twenty-eight." He tried to raise a fist, and I put it back on the table.
"Then hold still and celebrate quietly."
Peigi, my apprentice, was stirring a pot of sallow bark on the hearth and trying not to laugh. Down the hill the Sallow ran high and loud under the fords, and somewhere in Ferryhaugh people were still singing. It had been two nights since the Moot of Stones and the Fens hadn't sobered up yet. For two hundred years the Reach had been ruled by Dunmarrow blood. Now it had picked a ferryman's son, and the boatmen were taking it personally.
I tied off the third stitch. That was when the door hit the wall.
It came off its upper latch and slammed back hard enough to rattle the copper heron on the lintel. The cold came in, and a crowd of men came in behind it, and the first one through was carrying somebody.
I knew him by the torc before I knew anything else about him. It was a ring of plain twisted iron at his throat, older than the hall it came from. The rest of him reached me in the order a healer notices things. He was big, and wet to the thighs, which meant he'd come through the ford instead of over it. Most of the blood on his coat belonged to someone else. A burn scar climbed the right side of his neck and disappeared under his short beard. He was breathing hard but evenly. He wasn't the patient.
The patient was a young man in a gray cloak, nineteen at most. A crossbow bolt stood out of his right thigh and his lips were turning the color of slate.
"Table," I said. Dougie Rennie rolled off it onto the floor, stitches and all.
The Alpha laid the boy down. The boy's head lolled, and I had my fingers at his throat before it stopped moving. His pulse was fast and thready, his skin cool. Below the bolt his trouser leg was soaked dark. Above it, under the skin, thin black lines were spreading toward his groin like ink in water.
That was silver. Under the copper smell of blood there was also something bitter and green.
"Wolfsbane on the head," I said. "Peigi, the sallow, now. As strong as you can make it."
"Not her."
The voice came from the doorway. It belonged to a tall man with close-cut dark red hair and a Dunmarrow plaid held at the shoulder by a silver brooch the size of my palm. Gideon Dunmarrow. We had never been introduced. We'd never needed to be, since every girl in the Reach grew up knowing his face the way she knew the face of the moon.
He was staring at me. "That's Lennox's girl. The Hollow. Where's the Mother Healer?"
"Under the yew on Heron Hill since the Snow Moon," I said, and slit the trouser leg from knee to hip. "I'm what's left."
"Then send to Kinloch for someone. Calum is my cousin. I won't have him—"
"He'll be dead before your rider reaches the loch."
More of them were pushing in behind him. There were Dunmarrow riders, boatmen from the tavern who'd come up to see the shouting, and an old woman with a walking stick and a crown of white braids who I was fairly sure sat on the Kindred. Someone put a hand on my shoulder. Whether he meant to pull me away or help, I never found out.
"Out," I said. "All of you. I need light and I need room."
Nobody moved. Nobody ever had when I said it. A Hollow's word carries about as far as her arm can reach.
Then the Alpha said, "Out. Everyone who isn't a healer."
He didn't shout, and he didn't need to. The words went through the room the way wind goes through reeds, and every person in it bent.
I watched it happen. Boatmen turned for the door with their mouths still open mid-sentence. The hand left my shoulder. Dougie Rennie crawled out on his knees with my needle and thread still swinging from his eyebrow. Gideon Dunmarrow's face twisted with rage even as his feet carried him backward over the threshold. The old woman went last and slowest, with her eyes narrowed on me over her shoulder. Peigi stayed, because she wore a healer's apron. She didn't even sway. I noticed that, and put it away to think about later.
The door swung shut on its one good latch.
I hadn't moved. I'd been reaching for the long tongs when he spoke, and I was still reaching for them.
The Alpha wasn't looking at the boy. He was looking at me, with the face of a man who has missed a stair in the dark.
"That doesn't work on me," I said. "Hold his leg. Both hands, above the knee. Don't let go if he fights."
He held the leg.
The bolt was Skerrach work, or made to look like it. The head came out in one piece, and I was grateful for about two seconds, until I saw that it had been built as a cage of silver wire around an iron core. Part of the cage was still inside him.
"Peigi. Warm salt water, the big jug. Then the sallow under his tongue, one spoonful at every count of fifty."
"Yes, Mistress."
I found the first splinter by the blackness around it. Silver poisons a wolf where it lies, so you follow the damage back to the source. This one was a sliver no longer than a grain of barley, deep in the muscle. I drew it out with the tongs and it clicked into the dish. The boy screamed and arched, and the Alpha leaned his whole weight on the leg before I could tell him to.
"Good," I said. "Again in a moment."
"How many are in there?"
"I'll tell you when I've found the last one."
There were five. The fourth sat against the bone and I had to open him further to reach it. My left palm brushed the edge of the wound where the silver had been, and the old scar there flared as if I'd touched a stove. I didn't stop. I'd had eight years to get used to it.
Around the fourth splinter, Calum Dunmarrow stopped screaming, which was worse. His heart was slowing. Wolfsbane makes the heart forget its own rhythm, one missed beat at a time.
"He's going quiet," the Alpha said.
"I know." I flushed the wound with salt water until it ran pink instead of black. "Peigi?"
"Count of forty, Mistress."
"Give it to him now."
She tipped the spoon between the boy's lips. Bitter sallow is bark from the willows at the edge of the fen, boiled down until it tastes like a punishment. It reminds the heart what it's for. It doesn't always work. It works often enough.
I pressed two fingers to his throat and counted. The Alpha said nothing, and I could feel him saying nothing, the way you feel weather coming. His thumb was tapping very slightly against his own wet thigh. He was counting too.
At sixty, the beat steadied.
At ninety, the color began coming back into Calum's mouth.
I found the fifth splinter because of what was missing: one last thread of black that didn't fade when the rest did. I pulled it, packed the wound with moss and honey, and sat down hard on the stool behind me, because my knees had decided they were finished for the night.
"He'll keep the leg," I said. "He'll limp till spring. If he's lucky he'll complain about it."
The Alpha straightened slowly. He looked at the boy's chest rising and falling, then at the dish with five black splinters in it, then at me.
"Thank you."
"Thank Peigi. She brews the sallow."
Peigi went pink to the ears and fled to the copper with the empty jug.
Gideon Dunmarrow came back in once Peigi had mended the latch. He stopped beside the table and looked down at his cousin, and I watched the anger drain out of his shoulders and something more complicated settle there instead.
"He's breathing," he said.
"He'll do better warm. The copper's in the back. Fill the stone bottles and put them at his feet."
He looked at me. This was the heir of Dunmarrow, who had grown up with servants who fetched his water before he knew he was thirsty.
He filled the bottles.
The old woman with the walking stick watched him do it from the doorway. Up close she was small and very upright, with a face that had been handsome once and had decided somewhere along the way that sharp was more useful. "Una Baird," she told me, though I hadn't asked. "Of the Kindred. You're Hollis Lennox's eldest."
"I am."
"The Hollow."
"Yes, Elder. That too."
She nodded as if I'd confirmed the price of wool. Then she turned to the Alpha.
"Twenty-nine nights, Kincaid," she said. "I'd get some sleep."
She left. Gideon followed with his men and didn't look at me again, and the boatmen drifted back down the hill to tell the tavern what they'd seen. It was nearly three. Calum slept. Peigi slept too, sitting up by the hearth with her red-blond braids in her lap.
The Alpha didn't leave.
He went to the stairs, opened the narrow linen press tucked behind them, took out two clean cloths without searching, and handed me one.
I looked at the press. Its door was painted the same color as the wall. People who had lived their whole lives in Ferryhaugh didn't know it was there.
"How did you know where that was?"
"Lucky guess." He wiped the blood off his forearms. There was a long, shallow graze above his left wrist. I reached over and turned his arm to the lamp without asking, and he let me. "That bolt was meant for me," he said quietly. "Calum was riding on my left. He'd borrowed a gray cloak because his own was soaked."
"Then someone knew what you'd be wearing."
"Yes." He watched me clean the graze. "Why didn't it take? The Voice."
I'd been waiting for that. People always asked sooner or later, and they always asked as though I'd been rude to them.
"I'm Hollow," I said. "My thread never woke at my Kindling. I can't ring with a mate, I can't feel the pack, and an Alpha's Voice goes through me like wind through a fence. You'd have heard it within the hour from someone who'd enjoy telling you more than I do."
"I'd rather hear it from you." He said it flatly, like a remark about the tide. Then: "I didn't get your name."
"Iona Lennox."
"Lennox. The Chief's—"
"Eldest. The one he doesn't count."
He didn't say he was sorry. I liked him a little for that.
I let go of his arm. Since we were being plain with each other, I said, "When Alpha Lachlan lay in state at Kinloch, I asked the Kindred for leave to examine him, and they refused. I saw his hands at the lying-in, though. There were gray crescents under every nail, like a silver burn from the inside." I wrung out the cloth. "A heart giving out doesn't do that."
He didn't move at all. His eyes were gray-green, the color of the river where it runs over stones, and they stayed on my face.
"Who else have you told?"
"Nobody who listened."
"I'm listening."
I believed him, which was a foolish thing to do at three in the morning. Then he put on his coat and told me what Una Baird had meant.
The Charter of the Reach said an Alpha had to be tied to a Luna by the Hunter's Moon after his election. If he wasn't, the Kindred could call the clans back to the Moot Stone and vote him out. That gave him twenty-nine nights. At noon he would ride to Lennox Hall to ask my father for a marriage alliance: the fords, the boatmen, the infirmary, and a Lennox bride.
My father had two daughters, and he only counted one of them.
"Good luck," I said, and meant it, and went to check Calum's leg so I wouldn't have to watch him go.
The sky over the fen was going gray when Elsie came through the door.
She was barefoot, her hem soaked to the knee, honey-brown curls falling out of their pins. She had run the whole mile from Lennox Hall in the dark. This was my little sister, who had never run anywhere in her life because her mother said it made a girl look hungry.
"Iona." She grabbed both my hands, and hers were like ice. "Father's promised me to the Alpha. He's announcing it at noon."
"Elsie—"
"Davey and I rang at the Well. In the spring. You know we did, you were there." Her voice cracked down the middle. "Father says it doesn't matter. He says the Moon-Speaker can cut it."
