I Was Never Their First Choice novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Returned to Sender

The three earlier trial wolves show Solveig the letters her father sent back unopened. She writes to her sister, and finds a page in the Alpha's ledger with her name on it.

She crossed the hall and hugged me so hard my feet left the floor.

"They said you were dead," I said into her shoulder. "They held a funeral for you."

"They held a funeral?" She set me down and laughed, but her eyes were wet. "That's more than they did for the other two."

The two young men at her table stood up.

One was lean and sunburned from the snow, the other short and square with a shaved head.

They had been sent north in the two winters before her.

My pack had told the whole of Silverbrook that nobody came back from the trial.

"We were never going to come back," the lean one said. "Not after the first month. The food's better here."

"The work's honest," the shaved one said.

"The Alpha doesn't scream," said the girl.

I sat down because my knees had stopped working.

Bram put a bowl of stew in front of me, a hunk of bread on top of it, and stood there until I took a bite.

"You wrote home," I said. "Didn't you? When you got here?"

The three of them looked at each other.

"Every month," the girl said. "Mine went to my mother."

"Mine went to my brother," said the lean one.

"Not one of them was answered," the shaved one said. "We figured that was your pack's way of telling us to stay gone."

"Nobody told us you thought we were dead," the girl said.

"Show her the letters," Bram said, very quietly.

The girl got up and went to a cabinet by the fire.

She came back with a box and put it in front of me.

It was full of folded paper, sealed with red wax, each one stamped RETURNED across the front in black ink.

I turned one over.

It was addressed in a round, careful hand to a woman at Silverbrook who lived two streets from our bakery.

The wax was still whole.

"These never reached her," I said.

"They got as far as your father's office," the girl said. "Every one of them came back with his seal on it."

My mouth went dry.

"The Hold pays your pack in grain and iron for each of us," the lean one said. "Your Alpha keeps the money when we stay quiet."

"Four years a wolf," the shaved one said. "Eleven wagons each."

I put the letter down very carefully.

Every winter I had watched my father choose the name from the bowl.

Every winter my mother had cried and said the North was cruel.

I thought about the tag on my bag, in his handwriting.

"I need paper," I said.

Bram laughed, softly, and pushed a pen and a sheet across the table.

"Who is it for?" the girl asked.

"My sister," I said. "She believes what the pack says too."

I wrote four lines.

I told her I was alive and warm and had been fed.

I told her the three of them were alive and fed as well.

I did not say one word about what I thought of her, because I did not know yet.

When I had folded it, a shadow fell across the table.

Kjell had come in without a sound and stood at the end of it, reading the box, then me.

"That won't be answered," he said.

"I know."

"Send it anyway," he said, and took it from me.

He held it a moment longer than he needed to.

Then he turned and carried it out of the hall himself, and nobody at the table said anything until his steps had faded.

"He doesn't carry mail," the girl whispered.

"He doesn't carry anything," Bram said. "Not for years."

I finished the stew.

The three of them showed me the way to the bath house, and where the washing hung, and which stairs were icy by morning.

They talked over each other and teased me, and I could not remember a table that had ever made room for me that fast.

Late that night I could not sleep.

I walked back down the corridor toward the kitchen to look at where the gate key hung, because Kjell had said I was allowed to look.

I did not take it.

On the way back, a door stood open at the end of the passage, and a lamp burned inside.

It was the Alpha's study.

Kjell was not in it.

On the long table lay a ledger, open flat, as big as the one the envoy carried.

I told myself I would not go in.

I went in.

The page on the left carried a single word at the top in heavy ink.

SILVERBROOK.

It was the only heading on the page.

Under it, in his hand, were two lines, and the second began with my name.

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