The Stormbringer's Mate

The first thing I noticed was the smell.

It cut through the fuel and the cold before the chopper even touched down, thin and sweet at the edge, the way a body goes when it has been lying in the open for a day and a half. I had been smelling it for the last forty minutes of the flight, and Angus had been pretending he couldn't, his knuckles pale on the cyclic and his jaw set in a way that told me he was counting the miles.

The second thing I noticed was the woman standing on the landing pad with a silver knife in her hand.

She was small against the weather, a ginger shock of hair cropped close to her skull, a heavy green coat buttoned to the throat with a scarf wound twice around her neck. The wind pulled at her sleeves and tried to take her hood, and she stood there as if it were a mild afternoon in a town with a bakery. She had a lantern hooked to her elbow, a thermos in her free hand, and a face I couldn't read at two hundred yards through blowing snow.

Angus set us down hard, the skids grinding on the packed ice, and killed the engine. The rotors slowed. The noise fell away and the blizzard came in to fill the gap, a high whistle across the metal.

"Don't leave it in there," he shouted at me over the wind, jerking his thumb at the rear compartment. "She won't have it in her station. I told them at the house, I told them twice."

"You told them what?"

"That it's her station." He was already climbing out, his boots crunching, his grey hair whipping. "She runs it. She runs the mountain, near enough. You want to argue with her, do it before she gets cold, because she gets worse when she's cold."

I climbed out after him. The cold hit my face like a wet cloth and the snow came at me sideways. I had not been up here in three years, and my body remembered the pitch of it before my mind did, the thin air, the way sound died fast in the drifts.

The woman came toward us. She stopped four paces off, which was one pace farther than polite, and looked at me the way a farmer looks at a horse he might buy.

"Callum," she said.

I hadn't told her my name. Angus hadn't either, not on the radio, not in the flight plan. I was listed as a maintenance contractor, a name that belonged to a man who had died in Aberdeen in 1979.

"Who's asking?"

"Elsie Dunbar. I run the station." She lifted the thermos. "Tea, if you want it. The body first."

"There's a body in the back."

"I know there's a body in the back. I've been hearing about the body in the back for six days." She turned and walked toward the rear of the chopper without waiting for either of us, the lantern swinging from her elbow, and I followed because there was nothing else to do and because her voice had a flat, practical edge that made arguing feel like a waste of heat.

Angus and I hauled the rogue out of the compartment and laid him on a sledge she had waiting at the edge of the pad. He was a big man, or had been. Brown hair, a beard gone stiff with ice, a grey jacket torn at the shoulder. His eyes were open and frosted over. There was no blood on him that I could see. No wound at all.

"Found him on the east ridge," Angus said. "Two days back. One of the patrol lads brought him up to the house and the house sent him here, because the house doesn't want him in the ground and doesn't want him above it either."

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Nobody knows. That's the point of him." Elsie crouched by the sledge and set her lantern in the snow, and the light came up on her face. Grey blue eyes, a scatter of freckles across her nose, eyebrows so pale they almost vanished. She looked at the dead man's hands, at his boots, at the collar of his jacket. "No pack mark. No council tag. No scent worth a name, which means he was either very careful or very far from home."

She reached up and slid the silver knife from her sleeve. It was a plain thing, a kitchen blade ground thin and rehandled in dark wood, and she turned it over in the lantern light and held it near the dead man's throat.

Nothing happened. The corpse did not smoke or twist or do any of the things a corpse does when silver touches a wolf who has died badly.

"He's been dead long enough that the silver doesn't bite," she said, and put the knife away. "That's a fact worth knowing. Now I know it."

"You always greet visitors with a knife?"

"I greet everyone with a knife. The weather is the only thing up here that doesn't lie to me, and the weather has been wrong for three weeks." She stood and picked up her lantern. "Bring him inside. The cold room is on the north side. Angus, you can put the chopper in the hangar and then you can come and eat something before you fly back, because I am not scraping you off a mountain in the dark."

Angus gave me a look that said good luck and got back into the chopper. Elsie walked toward the station and I dragged the sledge behind her.

The station was a low stone building with a tar paper roof and a radio mast guyed out to four concrete blocks, sitting on the flat top of a ridge above a valley I could not see. There was a hangar to one side, a shed to the other, and a fence that had given up in two places. The windows were dark except for one on the east end, where a lamp burned behind a curtain. Snow had drifted nearly to the sills.

Inside, the door shut behind us and the wind went quiet and my ears rang in the sudden stillness. The corridor smelled of paraffin and wet wool and something baking. Elsie hung her coat on a hook and her hair was even shorter than I'd thought, a ginger cap against her skull, and she was thinner than the coat had made her look.

"Cold room," she said, pointing.

The cold room was exactly that. I got the rogue onto a slab, and she came in after me with a notebook and a pencil and wrote down the time and the date and his clothes and his boots and the exact shade of his jacket, and she did it all without asking me to help or step aside. When she was done she shut the door and rubbed her hands together and looked at me properly for the first time.

"Tea," she said. "Then we talk."

The kitchen was the warmest room in the building. A stove, a table, four chairs, a shelf of books with the spines cracked, a barometer on the wall that ticked faintly when the wind gusted. She poured two mugs and set one in front of me without asking if I wanted milk. There was a chip out of the rim, and I turned the mug so the chip faced away from me, and she noticed, and something in her face moved and settled again.

"You're wondering how I know your name," she said.

"It had crossed my mind."

"Three years ago a wolf called Callum was exiled from the Cairngorm pack for failing his Alpha on a night nobody talks about. He went north and then he went quiet. Six days ago the Council of Alphas sent a letter to this station asking whether we had seen a rogue with a grey jacket and no pack mark, and the same day the pack house sent a different letter asking whether we had seen you." She blew on her tea. "So when a maintenance contractor with no surname arrives in a chopper with a dead man and a pilot who can't stop staring at him, I put the two letters together. I'm good at that. It's most of the job."

"You read a lot of letters."

"I read the sky. The letters are easier."

I drank the tea. It was strong and it had too much sugar in it and I was grateful for both. "What did the pack house say about me?"

"That you were coming to find a traitor." She said it plainly, no softening, and watched me over the rim of her mug. "That's what Duncan's letter said. A rogue is dead on the east ridge, someone on this mountain is helping the others across the border, and you have until the next full moon to find out who."

"And the Council's letter?"

"The Council's letter said the rogue was a danger and that any wolf who shelters him will answer to them." She set the mug down. "The two letters arrived in the same post bag. The same bag, Callum. Someone wants both of us watching the same door."

The barometer on the wall clicked. I looked at it. A brass face, a black needle, a small hand that had moved a hair off its mark.

"Who else is up here?"

"Finn, my mechanic. He's in the village below, fetching parts, and he'll be back tomorrow if the road stays open, which it won't. Fiona, the pack healer, is at the pack house and comes up when the moon is full. Angus you've met. That's everyone. It's a weather station, not a barracks."

"You're a wolf."

She did not blink. "Yes."

"But you didn't shift. When the wind changed and the dead man's scent came down off the sledge, your eyes went yellow for a second and then they didn't." I put my mug down. "A wolf your age shifts when the moon pulls. You didn't. Which means you're either sick, or bound, or something I haven't heard of."

The silence went on long enough that I heard the snow hit the window in small dry ticks. Her fingers were laced together on the table and she looked at them and not at me.

"Something you haven't heard of," she said at last. "Drink your tea. I'll show you to a room."

"That's not an answer."

"No. It's not." She stood and took my mug and set it by the sink. "You have until the next full moon, and I have a dead man in my cold room and a barometer that has been lying to me for three weeks. I don't know you, and I don't know what you did on that night three years ago, and I am not going to hand you my secrets because the pack house sent you." She pulled a ring of keys off a nail and tossed them at me. I caught them. "Room at the end. The stove in there is temperamental. If it goes out in the night, don't come and wake me, because I sleep with a knife and I don't wake up friendly."

She went past me into the corridor. I stood in the warm kitchen with the keys in my hand and the barometer clicking and, beneath the paraffin and the baking, faint and sweet and impossible, the smell of a wolf who was not supposed to be there. Not the dead man. Her. Something in her scent had hooked itself into the back of my throat and it was not letting go, and my wolf, who had been silent for three years, lifted his head and made a sound I had not heard since I was a boy.

I went after her.

"Elsie."

She stopped at the turn of the corridor. The lamp was behind her and her face was in shadow and her eyes caught the light and held it, grey blue and steady and not quite afraid.

"When you opened the door," I said, "you knew what I was before you saw my face. You knew by my scent. A wolf doesn't learn another wolf's scent from a letter."

"Maybe not," she said.

"So where did you learn mine?"

She looked at me for a moment longer than she needed to. The wind pushed at the roof and the lamp flickered and the whole station seemed to lean in around us.

"The east ridge," she said. "Three weeks ago. I found your scent in the snow on the east ridge, and I have been trying to work out why a dead man would carry it with him."