Chapter 4: The Frame

"The Moot will ask who built Greyfell's wards," Ronan said that night. "Can you prove it was you?"

We were standing on the north wall, and his breath showed white in the dark.

"Everyone in Greyfell knows who built them."

"Everyone in Greyfell will say what their Alpha tells them to say."

I looked down at my palms.

The thread scars crossed them in pale lines, and each one had a winter behind it.

"Then I'll show the Moot," I said.

"Show it to me first."

I turned to look at him.

"Highwater's wards are thirty years old," he said. "The hunters took two of my scouts last month and walked through a gap I didn't know was there."

"You want me to weave your wall."

"I want to see whether the exile can do what she says."

That was an insult, and an honest one.

I liked him a little for it.

"I need a frame," I said. "A big one. Seven feet at least. And all the grey thread you have."

By noon the next day the yard was full.

Two carpenters had built the frame out of the old gate beams, and Hester had counted the thread and sworn at it.

Half the hold had come to watch.

Ronan stood at the edge with his arms folded, in no hurry at all.

I stripped off my coat and rolled my sleeves.

"Don't stand behind me," I told a boy who crept close. "Thread bites."

He backed up three steps.

I began.

I had learned to weave wards at nine years old, in my father's cold workroom, with a hunter's whistle going on the ridge.

The first rows are slow, and the rest are fast.

By the second hour the thread sang under my fingers, a thin high note that carried across the yard.

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