Mated to My Hunter

The lake had been talking to itself all evening, and by midnight it had settled into a low, grinding mutter under the ice. I knew that sound the way a farmer knows hail. It meant the freeze was shifting, opening seams out past the point, and any man foolish enough to be out on the crossing would do well to keep his weight spread and his pole moving.

I was that foolish man.

The coffin sat behind me in the flat bottom of the ferry, strapped down with two lengths of rope and a canvas tarp that had gone stiff as a board in the cold. It was a plain pine box, nothing fancy, the kind the undertaker up at Coldwater Landing turned out four at a time. No name on the lid. No carving. Just a shipping stamp burned into the wood, and a paper tag I had already turned over twice to make sure the ink hadn't run.

Twenty pounds of silver ore, the tag said. Consigned to the Council receiving house at Iron Bay.

That was a lie, of course. There was no ore in that box. There was a hundred and twelve pounds of smuggled tobacco, six bolts of mill cloth, and, if the manifest from my brother's old route held true, a sealed tin of letters some clerk in the capital would pay handsomely to get back. None of it was worth a man's life. All of it was worth more than mine, which was how I had come to be out here at this hour with the wind cutting through my coat and the ice groaning beneath my boots.

The ferry was a wide, shallow scow, fifteen feet of oak and tar, built to ride low and take a load. She had no name painted on her bow, which suited her. I had bought her secondhand from a man in Duluth who had gone into the shipping business and was glad to be rid of anything that smelled of the water. She leaked a little at the seams when the ice pressed her, and she answered her pole like an old horse that knows the road home. I called her nothing at all, most days. Naming a thing makes it harder to lose.

I drove the pole down through the slush at the edge of the channel, felt it bite, and walked it back hand over hand. The ferry slid forward. My breath came out in a white rope that the wind tore apart before it could rise.

My wolf was awake in the back of my skull, the way he always was on the ice, and he did not like it. He had a long body and pale fur the color of my own hair, and he paced when he was uneasy. He was pacing now. The ice is thin past the point, I told him. We've crossed thinner. He did not answer me in words. He never did. He only pushed at my senses, sharpening them, and the world came in all at once, the cold iron smell of the water under the ice, the pine resin from the far shore, the faint sourness of the canvas tarp.

And then something else.

I stopped the pole. Stood still. The ferry kept drifting, and the ice groaned, and I turned my head to listen with a thing that was not quite my ears.

A heartbeat.

It was small and rapid and it was not mine. Mine was slow, the way it got when I worked. This one was fast, a bird's pulse in a box, and it was coming from under the canvas.

I had loaded that coffin myself. I had helped the carpenter nail the lid down at the dock, and I had watched him set the last nail and wipe his hands on his apron. There had been nothing alive in that box when it went onto the ferry. I would have bet the boat on it. I would have bet my own hide.

The wind changed. It came off the north shore, off the dark line of pines, and it carried a smell that made my wolf stop pacing and lift his head.

Silver. Not the ore in the tag. Real silver, cold and bitter, the smell of a chain or a blade. Under it, faint but clear, was something warmer. Something like cedar smoke and clean skin and winter apples.

The heart in the coffin beat faster.

I set the pole down across the thwarts and walked back along the narrow deck, one hand on the gunwale. The tarp was frozen stiff and I had to work my fingers under the edge to get a grip. I peeled it back. The pine lid looked the same as it had when I loaded it, no crack, no gap, no sign that anyone had touched it.

I put my ear to the wood.

The heartbeat was there, close and quick, and I heard breathing, short and careful, the breathing of someone trying not to be heard and failing.

I had a pry bar in the locker under the stern seat. I got it. I wedged the flat end under the edge of the lid and leaned my weight on it, and the nails gave one by one with a sound like small bones snapping. The lid lifted. Cold air rushed into the box, and with it came the full force of that smell, cedar and silver and apples, and my wolf made a low sound in the back of my mind that I had not heard from him in years.

There was a woman inside the coffin.

She was curled on her side in a nest of straw and shipping blankets, and her hands were bound in front of her with a chain that gleamed dull in the moonlight. Her hair was long and wavy and the color of a copper kettle, and it spilled across the straw and caught what little light there was. Her face was turned up toward the gap I had opened, and her eyes were green, a bright, clear green, and they were open and fixed on me.

She had a soft face. Round cheeks. A small straight nose. Two deep dimples that showed even now, when her mouth was set in a hard line.

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen on that lake, and I had seen the northern lights over it more times than I could count.

I did not move. She did not move. The ice under the ferry shifted with a long, grinding sigh, and the boat rocked, and her chain rattled against the side of the coffin.

"You're not the man who put me in here," she said.

Her voice was low and rough with cold, and she spoke like someone who had been rehearsing the words for an hour and had finally decided to use them.

"No," I said. "I'm the man who's supposed to deliver the box."

"To Iron Bay."

"To Iron Bay."

She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, something in her face had changed. It was not fear. I had seen fear on the ice before, and it looked different. This was something colder and more patient.

"You need to turn this boat around," she said. "Take me back to the north shore and let me out at the first landing. Do that, and I will tell the Council that the ferryman was not involved."

The Council. The word sat between us in the cold air like a dropped stone.

I looked at the chain on her wrists. It was a fine, flat-linked chain, and it had a shine to it that ordinary iron does not have. Silver. Real silver, the kind that burns a wolf's skin, the kind that slows the healing and makes the blood run thin. There was a small charred mark on the underside of her left wrist where the chain had rested too long against the skin.

"You're a wolf," I said.

"You know what I am." She lifted her chin. "You can smell it on me. Just as I can smell the pack on you. Northshore, by the pine and the wet stone. The ferryman with the blond hair and the dead brother. Ewan."

She said my name the way a clerk reads a charge.

"You've got the advantage of me," I said.

"I have your name, your boat, and your route. That is not an advantage. That is a file." She sat up slowly, working her bound hands under her, and the chain dragged across the straw. "The Council sent me to this shore to find a man smuggling silver ore under a false manifest. I found him. I was making my report at the landing when someone put a needle in my neck and a lid on my head. So you will understand why I am not inclined to trust the man who was paid to carry me."

I crouched down beside the coffin so I could see her better. The wind pushed at my coat. Out on the lake, far off, the ice gave another long groan, and the sound of it ran under the boat like a fingernail on a table.

"Who paid you to say that?" I said.

Her green eyes narrowed. "Excuse me?"

"The Council doesn't send enforcers to a frozen shore in January over a box of tobacco. They send a letter, and a clerk, and a fine. They don't send a woman in a silver chain. So either you're lying about who you are, or the Council has taken an interest in my little boat that I can't explain." I leaned my elbows on my knees. "Which is it?"

She was quiet for a moment. I watched her think, and I could see the calculation move behind her eyes the way the ice moved under the boat, slow and heavy and hard to stop.

"My name is Maren," she said at last. "I am a silver warden of the Council, and I was sent to this shore to execute a smuggler. Not to arrest him. The order was signed and sealed before I left the capital."

The lake seemed to go very quiet around us. I could hear the blood in my own ears.

"And you were going to do it," I said.

"I was going to do my duty." Her voice did not waver. "Until someone decided to bury me alive in the cargo I was sent to inspect. So now my duty is somewhat less clear than it was this morning."

She held up her chained wrists. The silver had left red lines in her skin, and the skin around them was pale and cold. "The key is in the pocket of my coat. That is, if the coat is still in this box."

I found the coat folded under the straw, a dark wool thing with a heavy collar and a pocket sewn inside the lining. The key was in the pocket, small and iron, and it was cold enough to bite my fingers. I unlocked the chain and pulled it free, and she made a sound that was almost a gasp as the silver left her skin. The red lines stayed. She rubbed at her wrists with both hands, and her fingers shook, and she did not try to hide it.

"Thank you," she said.

"I haven't decided anything yet." I dropped the chain into the bottom of the boat. It clinked against the wood. "You said you were sent to execute me. That's a hard thing to hear on a cold night."

"It should be." She looked up at me, and her green eyes were steady. "But the man who was sent to kill you is not the man who is sitting in this box. I am cold, I am tired, and someone in my own Council tried to bury me. I would like to know who. I suspect you would like to know why."

The wind came off the north shore again, and this time it carried something under the pine and the cold water. It carried her scent, close now, cedar and clean skin and apples, and my wolf stood up in the back of my mind and pressed against my ribs and would not be moved.

My hand was on the edge of the coffin. Her hand was on the straw beside it, an inch from mine.

I did not reach for her. She did not reach for me. The cold between us had a shape to it, and the shape was a held breath.

Then her head came up. She turned toward the north shore, and her whole body went still.

"Someone is coming," she said.

I heard it a moment later. Not a heartbeat this time. A howl, low and long, rolling out from the pine line and across the ice, and then another howl answering it from the south, and a third from the east, until the frozen lake was ringed with voices.

The Council's hounds. They had found the scent of the coffin, or they had found the scent of the woman in it, and they were closing from three sides.

Maren looked at me, and for the first time since I opened the lid, her face was not calm.

"Ferryman," she said. "If they take me back, I will not be buried in a box next time. I will be buried in a hole, and your name will be on the charge sheet beside mine. So I am asking you plainly. Do we run, or do we fight?"

I looked at the chain in the bottom of the boat, and the coffin with its lid hanging open, and the woman with the copper hair rising out of the straw like something the ice had given back to me.

The howls came again, closer.

I picked up my pole.