What I Became

Two years. It doesn't sound like much, written down. Two years. But I have learned that you can put a whole new person together in two years if you stop sleeping in the wreckage of the old one. Rivermouth took me on as an extra hand on the trade routes, and that should have been the whole story — a rejected wolf finding quiet work in a lowland pack, growing old and careful and small. It nearly was. For the first three months I was exactly that: quiet, careful, small, flinching from the bond every time it gave its slow backward pull. Then the Rivermouth trackers lost a child. Not lost as in died — lost as in a five-year-old wandered off the trade road into the marsh country in the blue hour before dark, and the pack's trackers, good as they were, could not find her. I heard the horns going up at dusk. I heard the particular note in them that means a pup is out in the dark alone. And I found I could not stay in the bunkhouse. I went out into the marsh with the search, an extra body, nobody's tracker, nobody's anything. And somewhere in the reeds in the dark I discovered the thing about myself that two years would be built on. I could feel her. Not the way you feel a mate — nothing like that, I want to be clear. It was fainter and stranger and entirely my own. A wolf with a torn bond, it turns out, becomes painfully, permanently sensitive to the bonds of others. I had spent two years living next to my own wound; it had made me able to feel, like heat off a fire, the invisible threads that ran between every wolf in a pack. The child in the marsh was small and frightened and her bond to her mother was pulled taut as a wire, and I could feel which direction the wire ran. I walked straight to her. Forty minutes, through marsh that had defeated trained trackers for two hours, straight to a cold wet five-year-old in a hollow under a fallen tree. The Rivermouth alpha did not let me go back to the trade routes after that. For two years I trained. Rivermouth sent me to the Northriver pack, and Northriver sent me on to the old tracker-mistress in the high passes whose name even the alphas said carefully. They taught me to read a bond the way you'd read a map — to feel a missing wolf, a lying wolf, a wolf in danger, by the pull and slack and fray of the threads that joined them to the world. There is not, the tracker-mistress told me once, another wolf in five hundred miles who can do what you do. She did not say it kindly. She said it the way you'd note a useful tool. She also told me, near the end, the thing I had walked two years to be ready to hear. "That ability of yours," she said. "You think it's a gift the Goddess gave you to make up for the bond you lost." She'd looked at me over the fire with her flat old eyes. "It isn't. You can feel every bond in the world, Della, for one reason only — because there is still a bond in you, live and burning, and you've spent two years learning to listen to the kind of thing it is. You never lost your mate-bond. You built a life on top of it. There's a difference, and one day it will matter which one you did." So. That is who walked back up the mountain road this spring — not the girl who walked down it. The packs call me now. Three territories know my name and the word that goes with it, and the word is not rejected. The word is finder. And the message that came to the high passes, the message that has me climbing the nine switchbacks toward Ashfall territory after two years of swearing I never would — it came under the Ashfall seal. Wolves are going missing on the mountain. Their own trackers can't find them. And the alpha of Ashfall, the man who said no to me in front of three hundred witnesses, has sent down the mountain for the one tracker in five hundred miles who can. He doesn't know it's me. The message just asked for the finder. I am going to let him find out in person.