The Rogue He Claimed

The heather was wet when I fell into it. My wolf noticed the cold before I did, the cold of wet stone and old moss, which meant water close by, and shelter, and a place to put Ronan down before my arms gave out.

He was a dead weight across my shoulders, breathing ragged in my ear. Seventeen years old and thin as a fence post, and heavier than he had any right to be.

"Almost there," I whispered. "You hear me?"

He made a sound that might have been my name.

The pines thickened as the ground climbed, and the moon came out long enough for me to see the ridge ahead. A cairn stood at the top, grey stones stacked about as tall as a man, and past it the heather dropped toward a dark line of water.

Then the wind shifted and I smelled them. Wolves, a pack, and a strong one, their scent mixed with woodsmoke from somewhere below. My wolf went rigid behind my ribs. I had run from Council enforcers for three years and I knew the smell of a hunting party. This was settled territory, a border, and I had walked into it with my brother on my back and blood drying down my arm.

"Ronan. Hold on to me."

His hand closed weakly on my collar, and I started forward. If I stopped, I would not get up. I had learned that about myself on the road from Ashfall, when the only thing that kept me moving was that my legs did not know how to stop.

A wolf stepped out from behind the cairn.

He was not enormous the way the old warriors of Ashfall had been, but he moved like he had been waiting all evening for something exactly like me. His fur was pale gold in the moonlight, and his eyes were a bright gold-brown that fixed on me and did not move.

I set Ronan down. There was no point running with him in my arms, and I had spent three years learning the arithmetic of hopeless fights. Better to stand and let the wolf decide.

"Please," I said. "He is hurt. He is seventeen. Whatever your pack law says about rogues, he has done nothing. We need one night."

The wolf's ears flattened. Then the air bent the way it does when a shift begins, and he came up onto two legs and became a man.

He was tall and lean through the shoulders, with the build of a shepherd who walked hills all day rather than a warrior trained in a yard. His hair was pale golden blond, short and curling with sweat, and his eyes were the same gold-brown. There was a knife in his hand, and the blade caught the moon and showed the white gleam silver always gives.

I knew silver when I saw it. My whole body knew it.

"You crossed the border," he said. His voice was calm and strangely formal, like a man reading from a page. "There is a law in this pack. Rogues are executed where they stand. I do not make the law. I only carry it."

"I know what the law is. I also know you have not used that knife, and I have been standing here a full minute talking to you. So either you are slow, or you are curious. Which is it?"

Something moved in his face. Not a smile. Almost.

Behind me, Ronan groaned and tried to push himself off the grass. The man's eyes dropped to him, to the thin wrists and the shirt hanging off him, then back to me, and I watched him take a breath.

Then his whole body went still.

He stood there with the silver knife in his hand and his chest stopped moving, and his eyes widened as the wind carried my scent up the ridge. I watched him breathe it in and saw what it did to him.

I felt it at the same moment. A pull in my chest, low and hot and unwanted, like a hook had gone through the meat of me and someone on the other end had given it a tug. My wolf surged forward with a sound that was not quite a growl. Every cold calculation that had kept me alive for three years told me to run from this man.

The knife shook in his grip.

"No," he said, and it was not to me. His hand tightened until the knuckles went pale. "No, this is not. I cannot."

"You cannot what?" My voice cracked. "Kill me? Then put the knife away before you cut yourself, because your hand is shaking and I would hate for a great Cairn warrior to die of a scratched thumb."

He looked at me properly then, and the pull between us tightened until it was hard to breathe. His eyes were gold and full of something I did not want to name, and I knew, with a certainty that made me want to be sick, that he felt exactly what I felt.

"The knife is silver," he said slowly. "I have carried it since I was fourteen and never failed to use it when the law required."

"Then use it."

"I cannot."

"Why not?"

He did not answer. He was still staring at me, and then, very deliberately, he crouched and laid the silver knife flat on the wet stone of the cairn. He stood back up with his hands open at his sides.

Because I am your mate, I thought. The words arrived whole and terrible. And you know it, and I know it, and neither of us can say it out loud.

"My name is Finn," he said. "Son of Angus, Alpha of the Cairn Pack. What is your name?"

I should have lied. I had a dozen lies ready. Instead I said, "Elara," and heard how bare it sounded.

"Elara." He said it carefully, as if learning the shape of it. Then he looked down at Ronan, and his jaw tightened. "Your brother cannot stay on this ridge. There are patrols out, and if my father's warriors find you before I do, they will not stop to ask questions, and I will not be able to stop them."

"And you? What will you do?"

He bent and picked up the knife, and I flinched before I could help it. But he only slid it into the sheath at his belt, and then he lifted Ronan off the ground as easily as a bag of fleece.

"There is a bothy on the south slope," Finn said. "Old, but the roof holds. You will wait there tonight, and I will bring bread, and in the morning we decide what to tell my father."

"You would hide a rogue from your own pack."

"I would hide you," he said, quiet and certain, and the pull in my chest ached. "Do not make me regret it."

He started down the slope with my brother in his arms, and I followed because there was nothing else I could do. At the bottom of the ridge, where the heather gave way to pines, he stopped and turned his head.

"One more thing. The full moon is in nine days. Whatever you are running from will find you before then. I would like to know what it is before it arrives at my border."

I opened my mouth to lie. What came out was, "There is a man named Torin. He is coming, and he will not stop at the cairn stones. He will not stop at anything."

Finn's face changed. It was small, a tightening around his eyes, but I saw it.

"Torin," he repeated, and then, almost to himself, "the enforcer."

"You know him?"

"I know of him. Everyone knows of him. He has been hunting one rogue for three years, and the Council has never once asked him to stop." He looked at me for a long moment. "Elara. What did you do to make an enforcer of the Council of Alphas hunt you for three years?"

The wind came off the loch and pulled at my hair, and somewhere down in the glen a dog barked twice and fell silent. I looked at the man holding my brother, at the silver knife at his belt, and I made the only choice left to me.

"I survived," I said.