One Girl, A Pack Of Beasts novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Hollow

Kell sees Gray Knife's face for the first time, and the two make a pact to win the Long Night Hunt, until Tobiah arrives bleeding with news that Willa is accused of poisoning Brannon.

"Late," I said. "I just cut three men off my wrist in front of two hundred people."

"I saw the torches." Kell stood up out of the drift and brushed snow off his cloak. "I assumed it was a wedding."

"It was the opposite of a wedding."

"Even better."

He looked at me for a long moment.

For two years I'd met him in the dark with a gray felt hood over my head and my voice pitched low.

He had never once asked to see under it.

Now there was nothing between us but falling snow.

"You're a woman," he said.

"You knew that."

"I knew that." His pale gold eyes went over my face, slow, like he was tracking. "I didn't know about the scar."

I touched my chin without meaning to.

"A lynx, when I was eleven. My father's fault. He said it was asleep."

"Was it?"

"It was not."

His mouth moved at one corner.

"Come on," he said.

"You'll freeze, and then I'll have to carry you, and I'm in no shape to carry anything."

The Hollow was a cleft in the rock east of the ridge, hidden behind a curtain of frozen roots.

Kell had lived in it since the tribe threw him out at nineteen.

Inside it was warmer than I expected.

A fire burned low in a ring of stones.

Furs covered a ledge of rock at the back.

My spare hood hung on a peg by the door, where I always left it, next to my second knife and my rope.

And under the third stone from the hearth, where only the two of us knew to look, was my cache.

I knelt and lifted the stone.

Thirty-one cores glowed blue in the dark.

"You gave them forty," Kell said behind me.

"I gave them forty."

"That was most of a winter."

"It was the price of not being Hester's washerwoman."

He sat down by the fire, and I saw how carefully he did it.

His hands were white at the knuckles.

There was frost in his eyelashes, though we were inside.

When he reached for a stick to feed the fire, his fingers closed on it a beat too late.

"It's worse," I said.

"It's the dark month."

"It's worse than last winter."

He didn't answer.

He held his hands to the flames, and the frost on his lashes melted into water and ran down his cheek like he was crying.

He wasn't.

I took his hands between mine.

They were as cold as river stones.

"Your hands are hot," he said, surprised.

"I'm a woman. We run hot. It's why the tribe keeps us."

"I thought it was for the cooking."

"That too."

I rubbed his fingers until the color came back into them.

He let me.

He watched me do it with an odd, careful look.

"Twenty-eight winters," he said quietly. "The healer said I'd see maybe thirty."

"The healer is an old woman with bad knees who's never been out of the palisade."

"She's also right about most things."

I let go of his hands and sat back on my heels.

"There's a cure," I said.

"Old Frost's heartstone." He said it flat, the way people say the name of a dead relative. "Everyone in the Wildlands knows there's a cure, Gray Knife."

"Then let's go get it."

"Old Frost is the size of a hut."

"Old Frost is a pig."

"A pig that has killed eleven hunters in thirty years."

"Then he's a pig who's due."

Kell stared at me.

The Long Night Hunt came every midwinter.

Teams from every tribe paid their fee at the Hunters' Hall in Saltmarket.

When the white boar came down, they went up into the high valley after him.

Whoever killed him took his heartstone.

And whoever killed him took the Free Charter.

One writ, signed by the guild.

The holder could never be bonded by any tribe's order, never given, never handed off to a chief's daughter's house to do the washing.

"Forty days," I said. "Entry is a hundred cores a team."

"We have thirty-one."

"We have forty days."

"We also have a problem," Kell said. "Women can't register at the Hall."

"Gray Knife can."

He looked at the hood on its peg. Then at me.

"You're serious."

"I just walked out of my own house in a snowstorm, Kell. I'm very serious tonight."

Something moved in his face.

He held out his hand. It was still cold, but it was steady.

"Team," he said.

I took it.

"Team."

Far away, back toward the ridge, the wolves began to howl.

It was the long, rising call the Ridge wolves sang when a pack claimed new ground.

I knew Brannon's voice in it.

I had heard it every full moon for three years from the wrong side of a door.

They were singing over my father's house.

Kell's grip tightened.

"Let them sing," he said.

Then the root curtain tore open.

Something red and ragged tumbled in out of the snow, all feathers and flailing wings, and hit the floor as a boy.

Tobiah rolled onto his knees, gasping.

His throat was bleeding. Someone had grabbed him by his mark hard enough to tear the skin.

"Willa." He coughed snow. "Willa, you have to come back."

"Toby, what happened?"

"Brannon's coughing blood." His eyes were huge. "He fell down at the fire. The healer can't stop it."

He swallowed.

"And Hester's telling everyone you poisoned him."

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend