Chapter 4: The Fire

I went down the loft ladder without touching a rung.

The barn roof was already burning from end to end, and the Fen wolves stood in a line passing buckets from the well.

Hetta was in the middle of them in her nightgown, shouting at an old man to quit coughing and pass the next one.

I snatched a bucket, threw it on the door, and kicked the door open.

Three horses and an ancient mule screamed inside.

I shifted halfway, claws and shoulders, and tore their stall bars off the wall one by one.

Smoke filled my mouth.

I drove all four animals out into the yard and fell after them onto my hands.

Behind me the roof came down in a long red shower.

"Is the page safe?" I croaked.

Hetta thumped her skirt.

"Sewn in tight," she said. "Never mind that, get your face in the water."

By dawn the barn was black beams and the Fen had lost all its winter hay.

Nobody was dead.

I walked the mud around the byre with a lantern still lit.

The cot where the lame rider had slept was ash.

His horse was gone from the post and the lame leg had been a lie.

In the soft ground behind the wall I found one clear print.

A heel with an iron crescent set into it.

I knew that print, because every Kestrel wolf wore it.

I had stitched the first dozen pair of those boots myself in my first winter as Luna.

The prints ran east along the causeway toward the Ridge.

I told Hetta where I was going.

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