Chapter 12: Counted

Yvaine's POV

"Trade me for what?" I said again.

Nobody answered.

The old man stared at his boots.

Hamish had gone very still on the step, with his hands open on his knees.

"Say it," I said. "One of you. Now."

The old Healer lifted his head.

"Miss," he said. "I am sorry. I should have said something twenty years ago."

"Say it now."

He told me.

He told it plainly, in the same dry voice he might have used for a bad harvest.

The night of that fever, my father had wept with relief, and then stopped weeping and begun to count.

"He came back," the old man said. "Three years later.

"He had been made an elder, and he'd found a way to use what he knew."

"How?"

"He said the Alpha of Cedarvale had a son with a thin wolf.

"He said he had a daughter who might make that son strong. He asked me if it was possible."

"If what was possible?"

"If a healing wolf's betrothal mark could feed the man she was bound to."

My mouth was dry.

"You told him yes."

"I said it might.

"I said the bond would pull from her whatever the husband lacked."

His eyes were wet.

"I did not think he would do it to a child."

"I was five," I said.

"Yes."

"Tobias and I were betrothed when I was twenty-two."

"The first marks are laid when the girl is grown. But a family may agree early."

He hung his head.

"I think your father agreed when you were five."

I sat down on the porch step, because my legs had gone out.

For nineteen years the men who loved my sister had been counting me.

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