They Called My Father a Traitor, So I Learned Every Secret They Buried novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Kennel Wolves Know Her Name

I handed Hadley the steaming bowl and pointed Kestrel toward the injured wolf. 'Sit beside him. You are not a prisoner here.'

Kestrel studied me over the rim of his glasses. The kennel loft had gone still around us, full of patrol wolves, hanging harness, and the sharp smell of boiled mint.

'You have a generous interpretation of authority,' he said.

'You have a poor interpretation of patients. Sit.'

He sat.

The wolf on the pallet was Senn, his left shoulder held low beneath his coat. He had come in with his teeth clenched and one hand pressed against the joint. Hadley had already cut the sleeve away.

'He says it is the old injury,' Hadley told me. 'He also says he can walk, which is how we know he is lying.'

Senn looked at her. 'I can walk.'

'You can fall upright. That is different.'

I set my satchel beside the pallet and touched the torn muscle. Senn's shoulder jumped under my palm.

Silver lines spread from the wound.

They ran beneath his skin in branching paths, bright enough to catch on the faces gathered around us. The marks crossed the shoulder blade, bent under the joint, and ended in three narrow points near the spine.

Kestrel leaned closer. His attention moved over every line, careful and exact.

'From behind,' he said.

'Yes.'

'Twisted after the blade entered.'

'Yes.'

Senn's fingers tightened around the edge of the pallet. 'The report says a fall against rock.'

'Rock does not leave three separate entry points.' I pressed along the lowest branch. 'Neither does a border raider who wants you alive.'

No one spoke for a moment.

Hadley reached over Kestrel and took the bowl from the stool. 'Drink that before you start being useful. Wynn gets unpleasant when people bleed on her clean work.'

'I have bled on her clean work before,' Kestrel said. 'Her standards appear flexible when the patient is interesting.'

'Her standards are flexible when the patient is dying,' Hadley replied. 'You were both, depending on the hour.'

I cleaned the wound and packed it with crushed yarrow. Senn watched the silver fade beneath my fingers. He had seen it before. Kestrel had not.

The difference showed in the way he looked at me afterward. He was not staring at my hands. He was measuring what they meant.

I did not give him an answer.

Hadley had moved my mother's bedding before I brought Kestrel upstairs. The warm kennel room now held two fresh coal sacks, a narrow cot, and the small iron stove from the loft below. My mother had been sleeping there since dusk, away from the damp wall beside our assigned room.

The coal allotment was marked against the patrol claim board. Twelve stamped tokens rested beneath the names that had bought it.

Kestrel glanced at them while I tied off Senn's bandage. 'Those tokens were issued to patrol wolves.'

'They still are.'

'And yet they are paying for your mother's room.'

'Your powers of observation are wasted on me.'

Hadley leaned against a post. 'They are paying for whatever Wynn says needs paying for. The office can send a clerk to argue with all twelve of us if it wants the coal back.'

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