The Scarred Man

Mara met the scarred man on her fourth day, and she met him with an axe in her hands. She had been put to work splitting wood behind the longhouse — honest, brainless work that let the body labour while the mind kept quietly bleeding. The rhythm of it helped. Lift, set, swing, the crack of the round splitting clean. She had got good at it faster than she expected. Anger, it turned out, was excellent fuel. She did not hear him approach. That alone told her who he was, because a wolf who could cross a snow-packed yard in silence was a wolf who had learned to. She set the axe down and turned. Garrick Vane was younger than she had imagined, and harder. Maybe thirty. Tall in the way that made low doorways an enemy, with dark hair going early grey at the temple and a build that spoke of work rather than display. But it was the scar she would remember. It ran from his left brow down across the cheekbone and vanished into his collar — old, silvered, the kind of mark that should have taken an eye and hadn't quite. He looked at the woodpile. Then at her. Then at the woodpile again, and there was a long, weighing silence. "You stack it wrong," he said. Of everything Mara had braced for, that was not it. "Excuse me?" "Bark side down. It holds the damp. Bark side up, it sheds." He crossed to the pile and picked up a split round and turned it in his hand like proof. "Do it the way you've been doing it and half this wood won't burn come the deep cold. And in the deep cold, that's the difference between a house and a grave." He set the round down. He had still not said hello. He had still not said her name, or asked it, or offered his. Mara felt the anger flare up bright and useful. "I've been here four days," she said. "Nobody told me." "I'm telling you now." "You could have started with hello." Garrick looked at her properly then — really looked, the way the enforcers back at Ashfall had looked, except without the pity. His gaze went over the line of her shoulders, the set of her jaw, the place on her chest where the severed bond still showed itself in the way she held herself, slightly guarded, like a person favouring an injury. "You're the rejected one," he said. Not unkindly. Just the way a man names a fact. "Mara." "I know your name. Senna told me." He picked up the axe she had set down and held it out to her, handle first. "Hello, Mara. Now stack it bark side up." She took the axe. Their hands did not touch. She told herself she was glad of it, because the last time a man's hand had been near hers the moon had tied a bond and a boy had torn it apart in front of three hundred people. "They said you don't explain yourself," she said. "Senna talks too much." He was already turning to go, the brief audience clearly over. But at the edge of the yard he stopped, and without looking back he said, "You swing well. Angry, but well. The anger will fade. The skill won't. Keep splitting wood and Greythorn will get its winter fuel and you'll get whatever it is you came here to get." A pause. "Whatever that is." Then he was gone, soundless across the snow, and Mara stood holding the axe with her heart doing something complicated and unwelcome in her chest. She picked up a round. She set it on the block. Bark side up. She told herself it meant nothing, that listening to him was simply sense, that the man was cold as the valley and twice as closed and she had not crossed forty miles of frozen forest to feel anything for anyone ever again. She believed roughly half of it. The axe came down. The wood split clean. And somewhere above the longhouse the dark windows of the alpha's house caught the last grey light of the afternoon, and for the first time since the bonfire, Mara Voss was curious about something other than her own pain.