This Time, I Won't Beg for His Mark novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Cup

Hester brings a fresh cup of tea and Agnes smells what is in it; the council gives Valerie three days to leave.

I packed one bag before the sun came up.

My cottage sat at the far end of the compound, past the garages, where the pack put the people it was fond of and didn't need to see.

I had lived there since I was eighteen.

It took me twenty minutes to fill the bag, because I owned less than I'd thought.

Two pairs of boots. A drawer of ledgers I had kept for the pack. My mother's recipe cards.

The stitches pulled every time I bent, and I swore at each one.

Somebody knocked, three soft taps I'd known my whole life.

"Val, honey, it's me."

I opened the door.

Hester Ellington stood on my step in her good wool coat, with a covered dish in one hand and a thermos in the other.

Her eyes were red.

"I didn't sleep either," she said. "May I come in?"

I let her in.

She put the dish on my table and looked at the bag by the door, and her mouth went small.

"Oh, sweetheart. Lucan didn't mean it. He gets proud in front of people. He's been up all night pacing the hall."

"He laughed at me, Hester."

"I know." She squeezed my arm. "I know he did. I told him it was cruel. Sit, sit. You shouldn't be on your feet."

She poured from the thermos into the lid and put it in my hands.

The smell reached me before the heat did.

Honey, and something bitter under it.

"Last night's cup went down on a bleeding side and an empty stomach," she said. "It won't have taken. A half dose is worse than none, Val. Drink while it's hot."

I had drunk that cup at every full moon for fourteen years.

Last night I had walked out of my claim, and for the first time in my life something inside me had growled.

I didn't know what that meant.

I knew I wasn't going to swallow it.

Hester turned to the shelf to look for my first aid tin, still talking about Lucan's temper.

I tipped the lid over the fern on the windowsill.

Then I tilted the empty lid up toward her, so she'd see it when she turned.

"There," I said.

She didn't look closely.

She smiled, took the lid, and patted my cheek the way she had when I was ten.

"Good. Now. You'll stay put for a few days and let him come to you. You'll see. He'll make it right."

She set the lid-cup in her coat pocket and nodded at the thermos.

"Keep that. Finish it later."

She left a few minutes later.

I stood at the window and watched her cross the snow to the big house, a small figure in a good coat.

Someone knocked again, harder this time.

Agnes Holt let herself in without waiting.

She was seventy-four, no taller than my shoulder, with a white braid down her back and thick glasses.

She had been the pack healer since before Lucan was born.

She'd taught me every herb I knew.

"Let me see that side, Valerie Wray," she said. "I heard you walked out on it."

I sat on the edge of the bed and lifted my shirt.

She unwrapped the dressing and went quiet at the sight of the wound.

"Clean. No rot. It's closing faster than silver should let it."

"Is that bad?"

"It's interesting."

She pressed a thumb beside the stitches, and I hissed.

"Who was here before me?" she asked.

"Hester. She brought breakfast and her tea."

Agnes's head came up.

"Her tea."

"The one she brings every full moon. She says the night's cup didn't take, so she brought another. I didn't drink it."

Agnes looked at the thermos on my table.

She didn't touch it.

She unscrewed the stopper and held the open mouth of it out to me.

"You tell me," she said. "What did I teach you about a smell?"

I took it.

A brown skin of tea still clung to the inside of the neck.

I breathed in slowly, the way she'd drilled into me over a hundred drying racks.

Burnt honey first. Honey cooked too long, to cover something.

Under it, green and bitter and a little like cold iron.

"Monkshood," I said.

My voice sounded wrong to me.

"Keep going."

"And something sweet and heavy, like a closed room. Poppy."

"Moon poppy. It's how you hide monkshood from the nose." She took a clean spoon from her bag, tipped a drop from the thermos onto the back of her own hand, and waited.

A minute later she rubbed the skin with her thumb.

"Tingling," she said flatly. "Numb at the edges. One drop on the skin is all I'll risk on it, and it's all I need."

She wiped her hand hard on her coat.

"Child, this is a sleeping draught for wolves."

My side stopped hurting. It was hard to feel anything else.

"It's for cramps," I said. "She told me since I was twelve."

"A healer's mix for cramps. Yes. She told me that too."

I stared at her.

"She came to my stores every month," Agnes said. "She signed my book for the monkshood, for her liniments. The poppy, for her sleeping. The cohosh, for women's complaints. Three honest herbs, three honest lines. She never brewed it in front of me and I never saw it in a cup." Her mouth shook. "It was the Alpha's house, Val. I did not ask what the Alpha's house did in its own kitchen. I wondered why your wolf never came. I let her tell me it was grief."

She sat down hard on my one chair.

"No wolf drinks this unless somebody wants her wolf asleep."

I looked at the fern.

The soil around its roots was dark and wet, and the bitter smell had already crept up off it. I would be carrying that pot out to the snow before I left.

"How much would a person have to drink," I asked, "for it to keep a wolf asleep for good?"

"Every full moon for fourteen years would do it."

Neither of us said anything.

Then boots hit the steps outside, heavy ones, and a fist pounded on the door.

"Wray!" Doyle Brask called, Lucan's Beta. "Council notice. Open up."

I opened it.

He held out a sheet of paper with the elders' seal on it and didn't quite meet my eyes.

"You're unplaced as of last night. Three days to leave pack lands." He cleared his throat. "After that, you're treated as a rogue."

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