Chapter 4 · The Fourth Sweep

Three days out of Iron-Crag and the mark on my back was still bleeding.

I found it the way you find a bad tooth — with my tongue. Two fingers jammed up under my shoulder blade, into the spot where the bond used to sit. That spot used to run warm as a coal. Now it was wet, and raised, and hot in a way that had nothing to do with healing.

Palm flat in the mud. Breathe through the teeth till the black spots quit dancing.

"Up," I told the dirt. "Nobody's coming."

Nobody had. Two hundred wolves in that clearing, and Valerius read my exile off a page like a shipping manifest — the bond is severed, she is no longer any concern of this pack — and somebody in the back row laughed.

That's what wakes me at four in the morning. Not his voice. The laugh.

Then the cramp. Low, sharp, like a fist closing.

Six weeks and two days, by my own count. Half a sleeve of crackers, a canteen that tasted like pennies. Every morning my body woke up wanting warm bread and a hand flat on my belly.