Chapter 4: Eleven

The ledger got its second entry three days later.

The runner cut our rations again.

Garth wore a bandage on his left hand at morning muster and told the whole yard a rogue had done it.

I wrote down the bandage and the lie, and who stood close enough to hear it.

That was two.

After that, I stopped needing to look for them.

The schoolteacher told me how the commander had taken her winter coat for "inspection" and kept it until spring.

That was nine.

The quiet tracker told me about a boy from Greyhollow, years before.

He'd been sent out alone on a night patrol and found in the morning in pieces.

That was fourteen.

Edda told me about her friend.

It took her four nights.

She told it a little at a time.

I wrote down every word she gave me.

When she was finished, she took the book out of my hands and read it back to herself twice.

"That's right," she said. "That's what happened."

That was twenty-two through twenty-six.

Garth never called me to his quarters again.

He found other ways.

The worst patrols.

The night watches in the sleet.

Once, he stood behind me in the mess line and said, very low, "My sister sends her love."

I wrote that down too.

The thing about a ledger is that it makes you watch.

And the thing about watching is that you start seeing who stands where when it goes bad.

I learned the ridges.

I learned to run in my wolf's shape for ten miles and change back on my feet without falling.

I learned the rogue packs by scent, the black-and-tans from the east hills and the thin gray ones from the gorge.

I cut my hair short with the cook's shears, because rogues grab hair.

In the second winter, a girl of eighteen came down on the mail truck.

She'd been caught kissing a boy promised to an elder's daughter.

She cried for a week, and then she stopped, and then she was the youngest of us.

Edda put her in the bunk under the hole in the roof.

"New wolf gets the stars," she said, and the girl laughed through her snot, and I thought, that's how I looked.

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