Chapter 12: The Second Bottle

Caleb read the apothecary's page standing up, in his own study, with the dawn coming grey through the window.

Joss had ridden me up to the Alpha's house himself, and nobody had stopped us.

The two elders watching Maud had stared at the book, and then stepped aside.

"Three seasons of root," Caleb said. "Bought in the spring."

"Before Lenora ever came home," Joss said. "Before anyone in this pack knew she'd run."

"So it wasn't for her."

"Or it was for a good many other people."

Caleb put the page down on his desk very carefully.

His wrapped hand had left a faint stain on the corner of it.

"Maud has kept this house's accounts since my mother died," he said, half to himself. "Flour, wood, wages. Every ledger since I was sixteen."

He turned to the bookshelf behind the desk.

There were a dozen of them in a row, brown cloth spines with the years inked on them.

He pulled out the last one and opened it on the blotter.

I stood behind his chair with my arms folded, and I did not touch the desk.

He turned pages.

Wood delivered. A broken axle. The new boiler.

Then the neat column of figures stopped, and the pages that followed were not in the same hand.

The ink was darker, the letters smaller, packed tight.

It was still Maud's handwriting, but it was not written for any household.

"What's this?" Joss said.

Caleb ran his finger down the first column.

It was headed with a single letter, and then a date, and the same short line repeated again and again in a dozen small entries.

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