The Werewolf King's Regret: Punishing the Wrong Daughter novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Cinder Row
Barely alive beyond the Silver Line, Linnet is taken in by an old healer and decides to go back; the king's Beta rides in to say the king's palm will not close and the boy has stopped speaking.
The Silver Line is a ditch with silver posts every ten paces, and I crossed it on my knees.
The sky was going grey behind me.
Every post hummed against my skin.
A wolf with silver in her back has no business walking among silver, but the only way out of Hartmoor was through it.
On the far side the ground turned to ash and stunted heather.
The Barrens.
I made it forty steps before my legs quit.
I lay on my stomach in the cold dirt, because I could not lie any other way, trying only to keep breathing.
After a long while, a hand turned me over.
"Don't," I said, and screamed.
"Hush, then. You're worse than a gutted pig."
The woman who owned the hand was old, with a face like a dried apple and a lantern she held up to my eyes.
She looked at my back, and she whistled through her teeth.
"Silver chain. Twenty, by the look of it. Who did you rob?"
"Nobody," I said.
"That's what they all say, love. Up you get."
She did not wait for me to get up.
She and a boy, who could not have been ten, hauled me between them down a path to a cluster of huts with smoke coming out of the roofs.
This was Cinder Row, the place wolves go when no pack will have them.
I knew the name.
At Marwood we used it to frighten children.
The old woman laid me on a pallet in a hut that stank of vinegar and wet wool.
She poured water over my back, and I bit through the strap she gave me.
"Silver wounds don't close," she said. "Not on our kind. Not by themselves."
"I know."
"Then you know what I'm for."
She packed the cuts with cloth woven of iron thread, which draws the silver out slowly and badly.
By the time she finished, I could not feel my hands.
She gave me broth and told me to sleep on my stomach, and I did not sleep.
I lay in the dark and listened to the Row waking up.
Pots rang.
A baby cried and was hushed.
The boy who had helped carry me sat by the door with a rag around his right hand, and every time he moved it he sucked in his breath.
"What happened to your hand?" I asked.
"Pot of lye water," he said. "Yesterday. Granny says it'll scar."
"Come here."
"Granny says you aren't to get up."
"I'm not getting up. You're coming over here."
He came, and sat down by my pallet with his arm held out stiffly.
I peeled the rag back.
The skin underneath was red and shining and blistered across the palm.
I put my own hands around it, the scarred palms over his burn.
And without deciding to, I hummed.
Three falling notes, the tune my mother hummed over the stove.
The heat went out of his hand and into mine, and for a breath it was almost sweet.
The blisters flattened.
The red faded to pink.
The boy stared at his palm, and then at me.
"Granny!" he yelled.
The old woman came in with a ladle in her fist, looked at his hand and said nothing for a while.
"That's a healer's gift," she said at last. "I saw the ring mark on your finger. Healers like that died out with your mother's mother."
"I'm no Marwood now."
"And you've kept it hidden how long?"
"All my life," I said. "Nobody ever wanted to hear it."
She sat down on a stool and looked at me for a long time.
My back was still open.
Each cut was dribbling through her iron cloth, and none of it was my gift's to mend.
I had eased a child's lye burn in a breath, and I could do nothing for myself.
The king had done that.
He had not asked me one question, and then he had stood in the yard like a man made of rock while the chain came down.
I thought about the boy in the great hall, grey-lipped, with charcoal on his teeth.
I thought about Odessa with her gloved hands folded.
I was not going to lie in this hut until the silver ate me through.
"Granny," I said. "How long before I can walk?"
"A week, if you're a fool. Two, if you're not."
"I'll be a fool, then."
"What for?"
"I'm going back," I said. "And when I do, they're going to say it out loud, all of them. What she did, what he did."
She grunted, which in Cinder Row is applause.
The boy had not stopped looking at his hand.
Three nights later hoofbeats came down the Barrens road, a single horse, ridden hard.
The old woman went to the door with her ladle.
A tall thin man swung down from the saddle with red-brown hair and a beard to match.
He wore the king's black wool with the silver pin of the Beta.
He saw me through the open door and went white.
"Linnet Marwood," he said.
"What's left of her."
He took a breath.
"The king's palm has been bleeding for three days, and the healers cannot close it."
I said nothing.
"Ewan has not said a word to anyone since you left," said the Beta. "Last night he whispered the only thing he's said, and it was your name."
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