The howl carried a second time, thinner now because the wind had turned, and the whole back hall seemed to lean toward it.
Mara felt it in her teeth.
For one stupid second she thought of Corin as a boy with his knees muddy through spring, coming in with a trout he'd caught wrong, grinning because it was still a fish even if he'd had to half fall in after it. Then the thought was gone. Corin was twenty-six, broad-shouldered, short-tempered, already halfway out of the pack if the wrong men got hands on him first.
Lucan opened the side door.
Cold air hit them, sharp with pine and wet dirt and the faint ash smell from the smokehouse outbuildings lower down. The lodge yard was a mess of thawed ruts and trampled straw. Light spilled from the back windows in a yellow block across the mud. Beyond that it was dark enough to swallow a person whole.
Mara went through the doorway with him and nearly clipped his arm because he stopped again to listen.
"South trail," he said.
"I know where south is."
"Do you ever hear a useful sentence and let it pass unbitten?"
"Not from you."
His mouth moved like he almost smiled. It vanished fast. The bundle of papers was still under his arm. He had not forgotten it for even one breath.
She noticed that, because of course she did. Everything tonight had attached itself to objects. The silver bowl. The wrong twine. His cuff button. Now the packet under his arm, too close to his ribs. Too important. If he opened it before she saw what was in there, the shape of things would change again.
Behind them the lodge was no longer pretending calm. Voices had started up, low and quick. Someone was bolting one of the front shutters. Someone else was arguing about whether to bank the hearth if the rite was delayed. A dog barked from one of the side sheds, hysterical for three bursts and then quiet.
Lucan stepped off the porch into mud like a man who hadn't noticed he was in formal boots. Mara followed, gathering her coat closed with one hand. The grocery stub was still stuck to her heel and finally came loose with an annoying wet flap.
From around the corner of the kitchen lean-to came old Brannik with a lantern and a shotgun he probably did not need. "I heard it."
"You hear your own knees crack and call it tactical," Mara said.
Brannik ignored her. "South line, maybe east of it. Not ours."
"Stay in the yard," Lucan said.
Brannik spat into the mud. "I didn't ask what to do."
"No," Lucan said. "You never do."
They looked at each other one hard beat too long, old friction laid bare and ordinary as fence posts. Brannik had backed Lucan's father and never fully forgiven the son for surviving him into power. Everyone knew that. Pack histories had a way of staying in the skin.
Then Brannik handed over the lantern without another word.
Lucan took it, surprising Mara. She'd expected rank, order, one more command. Instead he took the light and gave nothing back but a glance toward the trailhead. Move, that glance said. So she moved.
The path behind the lodge sloped through bare birch and stunted pine, slick with runoff and last autumn's leaves turned black. Mud sucked at Mara's boots. Once she put a hand out to the rail of the old deer fence, and the wood came away damp and splintery in her palm.
Lucan walked a step ahead, lantern swinging low, the packet still tucked against his side. He moved like he always had economy without softness, not trying to look powerful, which usually made him look more so. Irritating. Deeply irritating. There was mud on the hem of his formal coat now.
Mara said, "If you're going to read those, do it where I can see."
"Now?"
"Yes, now."
"There's a rogue howl on our line."
"And there are council-sealed records under your arm that came out of my father's shelves."
He kept walking.
That should not have felt like refusal in the body, but it did. She was too keyed up. Too aware of him. It was not lovely. It was practical and humiliating. His shoulder almost brushed hers at every turn of the narrow path, and each time her body noticed first and her mind came late, angry at the delay.
The trail flattened near the lower wash. Water moved somewhere unseen in the dark. Lucan lifted one hand.
They both stopped.
Nothing. Just the drip from branches and the lodge noise dulled by distance.
Then, faintly, voices.
Not talking. More like a burst of men's laughter cut short. Too far off to place cleanly.
Mara's heart began knocking again. "Corin."
"Maybe."
He turned his head slightly, listening. The lantern lit the edge of his jaw and the damp shine at his throat where the collar clasp sat too tight. She wanted, with absurd force, to reach up and pull the clasp loose. Not for tenderness. Just because it looked uncomfortable. Just because he looked like he was choking on duty half the time and sometimes she was so angry about it she almost mistook it for pity.
She hated that thought as soon as it came.
They moved again, slower.
At the marker stone, half sunk in moss and bent grass, they found Rhett first. He stepped out of the dark so abruptly Mara nearly swung at him.
"Easy," he hissed. "It's me."
"You smell like old onions," she said, breathless. "Announce yourself better."
Rhett looked past her to Lucan and straightened. He had a scratch down one cheek and his hair was wet. "South watch is broken."
"Broken how?" Lucan asked.
"Pavin went downslope to check the lower snare posts. Didn't come back. I heard one call from the ravine side. Then that howl."
"Rogue?"
Rhett hesitated. "Maybe not rogue."
Mara stepped in. "What does that mean."
"It means," Rhett said, plain and tired, "it sounded like someone trying to sound rogue."
That landed.
For a moment the three of them just stood there with the lantern between them and the dark pressing around the edges. Mara could hear her own breathing. Could hear Lucan not reacting yet, which was its own kind of reaction.
A fake howl. A distraction. Someone trying to turn their heads while something else moved.
Corin, she thought. Or council. Or both. Everything kept wanting to become both.
Lucan said, "Tracks?"
Rhett pointed with two fingers toward the ravine cut. "One set down. More than one back up. Mud's bad."
Mara was already moving that way when Lucan caught her elbow. Not hard. Firm enough.
"No."
She yanked once. "Stop doing that."
"Then stop running ahead of sense."
"My brother is out there."
"And my pack is out here."
She stared at him. He let go but only because Rhett was watching, because everything private between them had the bad habit of turning public at the wrong second. Even so, her elbow burned from the grip in a way that was not injury and not remotely useful.
Rhett looked away with exaggerated care. "I can go down."
"No," Lucan said. "You stay high and listen. If you hear Pavin or Teren, you answer once and only once."
"You think it's a pull?"
"I think somebody wants us split."
Mara said, "Then let me go low alone."
Both men looked at her as if she had suggested setting the lodge on fire for warmth.
"What?" she snapped.
Rhett, tactless as a boot heel, said, "Because if it comes to running or fighting, your brother's more likely to bolt with you than with him."
It was a rude thing to say. It was also probably true.
Lucan's face hardened at the edges. "That isn't the only consideration."
Rhett's silence said it was one.
The air between Mara and Lucan thickened into that old, maddening, repetitive thing again. The circling. Him drawing lines. Her pushing through them. Both of them pretending this was only strategy when it never was. Not with them. Not after the pasture, not after winter stores, not after the night in late harvest when he had stood too close in the grain room and neither of them had stepped back until somebody outside dropped a crate.
Mara said, quieter now because the dark seemed to demand it, "If Corin sees you first, he'll think he's already judged."
Lucan looked at her for a long second.
Then he pulled the paper bundle out from under his arm and shoved it at Rhett. "Hold this."
Rhett blinked and took it. "What am I—"
"Don't open it."
"Wasn't planning to."
Lucan stepped closer to Mara. Too close, suddenly. His voice dropped. "You go ten paces down and no farther unless you call back. You see movement that isn't Corin or Teren, you come up. You understand me."
She should have said something cutting. She almost did. But he was right there and the lantern light made his eyes look darker than they were, and she was aware of the clean smell of his skin under cold air and wool and the fact that his hand was still half-lifted like he might touch her again and was stopping himself.
It made her answer come out strange. "I understand words."
His jaw flexed. "Mara."
There it was again. Her name like a grip.
She moved before she could do something stupid, ducking under the low branch and starting down the ravine edge. The slope was slick. Mud slid under her boots. Wet roots caught her ankles. She went farther than ten paces almost immediately and knew it and kept going.
Behind her Lucan swore once, low.
The ravine was shallow here, opening into a run of scrub pine and broken stones where spring water cut through. Somebody had gone down recently. The bank was torn up with tracks, not clean enough to read in the dark. Mara crouched, fingers to the mud. Cold soaked straight through her glove.
There. A torn strip of flannel caught on thorn.
Gray-and-red check.
Corin's overshirt.
Her chest clenched.
"Lucan," she called, not loud.
He was beside her faster than she wanted to think about. His knee bumped hers as he crouched, and for one awkward second they nearly knocked foreheads because there simply wasn't enough space. The contact was stupidly intimate. They both pulled back at the same time. Irritating.
She held up the cloth.
He took it, rubbed it once between his fingers, brought it near enough to scent. His shoulders went very still.
"That's him," Mara said.
"I know."
No softness in it. No doubt either.
Above them, Rhett shifted with the papers rustling under his arm. The sound was weirdly loud. Paper in the woods. The wrong sound in the wrong place.
Lucan looked up sharply. "Rhett. Quiet."
Too late.
From somewhere uptrail, back toward the lodge, came the crack of a single gunshot.
Everything inside Mara dropped and surged at once.
Rhett cursed. Lucan was already rising.
Then, from the dark below the ravine, Corin's voice tore upward, raw and furious and too near.
"Mara, don't let him read it."