The Luna He Failed to Protect novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Field Book

Garth assaults Sorrel and she bites his hand to the bone, no one above her will listen, and she starts the ledger in her father's field book.

Edda was off her bunk before the runner finished talking.

"She's not going anywhere alone," she said.

The runner didn't even look at her.

"Then nobody in bunkhouse two eats this month," he said. "Commander's orders. Half rations already, so you do the sums."

The cook had stood up by the stove.

The twins were sitting very straight.

Nobody said anything, but I could smell it on all of them.

Hunger is a scent, if you live with it long enough.

These wolves had lived with it a long time.

"I'll go," I said.

"Sorrel," Edda said.

"He's Morwenna's brother," I said. "He wants to scare me. Let him try."

I was twenty-two, and I still thought the worst thing that could happen to me had happened in a dining hall.

Edda walked me as far as the yard.

The runner tried to stop her, and she showed him her teeth, and he let it go.

At the porch steps she leaned close.

"Keep your back to the door," she said. "Keep your wolf close. I'll be right here."

"I'll be ten minutes."

"I'll be right here," she said again.

Garth's quarters were warm and smelled of whiskey and gun oil.

He was sitting by the fire in his shirtsleeves, with Morwenna's pale blue letter open on his knee.

"Lock the door, Sorrel," he said.

"I'd rather not."

He got up.

He was slow about it.

He locked the door himself.

I'm not going to tell what he did after that.

It was violence, and nothing else, and it ended when I got my teeth into his left hand.

I didn't bite like a girl.

I bit like a wolf.

My jaw half-changed in the middle of it.

I felt my teeth go through the meat of his hand and grind on bone.

I held on while he screamed.

He hit me twice in the head before I let go.

When I did, his hand was a crescent of red holes from the thumb to the outside edge.

He stared at it.

I stared at him.

Then I unlocked the door myself and walked out.

I don't remember the porch steps.

I remember Edda's face.

She was sitting on the bottom step, exactly where she'd said.

She stood up when she saw me, and every bit of color left her.

"Get me inside," I said.

She did.

She didn't make me say anything until I was ready.

She put me on her own bunk and wrapped her coat around me and sat on the floor beside it.

The cook put the kettle on without being asked.

Nobody else in bunkhouse two said a word.

The twins sat with their backs to the door.

After an hour, I told Edda.

Not all of it.

Enough.

She listened with her jaw locked, and when I was done she went outside, and I heard her throw up against the wall.

When she came back in she wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

"You bit him," she said.

"To the bone."

"Left hand?"

"Left."

She sat down hard on the floor.

"Nobody ever bit him," she said. "My friend didn't. She was too scared."

"I'm going to report him."

The schoolteacher made a small noise in the dark.

Edda didn't laugh at me.

That was almost worse.

"Who to?" she asked.

I told her.

The garrison's healer.

The garrison's second.

The pack elder, by letter.

The Alpha himself, by letter.

She shook her head at each one.

"The healer drinks with him," she said. "The second owes him his rank. Every letter out of this place goes across his desk, and every letter in. That's how he gets his sister's."

"Then I'll walk north."

"It's ten hours by truck. You'd be shot for desertion before the river." She rubbed her face. "And then she'd write him another letter about the next girl."

I tried anyway.

In the morning, I went to the healer with my split lip and the bruise coming up on my temple.

She looked at the bruise.

She looked at the door.

"You fell," she said, and gave me a jar of salve.

I went to the garrison's second, a gray-faced wolf who never stood in the sun.

He listened to two sentences and then raised his hand.

"I'll stop you there, Ravelston," he said. "I didn't hear the rest. Neither did you."

I wrote to the pack elder anyway.

I wrote to Alder.

I didn't write to Cale.

I gave both letters to the mail truck.

That evening the runner came to the bunkhouse door and dropped them on the floor in front of me, still sealed.

On the front of each one, in thick black pencil, someone had written: RETURN TO SENDER.

The left twin picked them up and handed them to me.

"Sorry," he said.

He meant it.

That was the strangest part of the day.

The only apology I got was from a boy I'd met the night before.

That night, the cook made soup I couldn't eat.

Edda sat on the end of my bunk and cleaned her nails with a knife.

Nobody went to sleep before I did.

I didn't sleep.

Around two in the morning, I took my father's field book out of my coat.

It was an old canvas-covered thing, swollen from rain, with his notes from fourteen years on this same hill.

Rogue crossings. Weather. The names of wolves who held the wall with him.

Half the pages were still blank.

I'd always thought I would fill them with something nice.

I uncapped the pencil he'd kept in the spine.

My hand was shaking, so I held it with the other one.

On the first blank page, I wrote the date.

Then I wrote: Commander Garth Coldwater. His quarters, after midnight. Door locked by him.

Witness to my state after: Sgt. E. Kestrel.

Bite mark, left hand, thumb to outer edge. He'll carry it.

I underlined the last line twice.

Then I wrote a number in the margin.

One.

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