Chapter 11: Gold

I didn't believe Hoyt until I stood in front of my mother's mirror.

The camp had brought me home in a silent convoy. Nobody had said a word the whole way up the creek road.

Trudy propped the mirror on the dresser and lit three lamps.

I looked at my own face.

It was the same face. The same chestnut hair, the same chin, the same small scar on my lip from a fall when I was seven.

My eyes had been grey-blue my entire life.

They were a clear, burning gold.

"Okay," Trudy said, behind me. "That's new."

"Is it a trick of the lamp?"

"It's not the lamp."

I leaned closer.

Gold, all the way around the pupil. Amber at the edges.

I knew exactly one color of eyes like that.

I had looked into them every morning for two years.

"Only an Alpha's eyes go gold," Hoyt said from the doorway. "Everybody knows that."

"I'm not an Alpha."

"Then somebody should tell your eyes."

There was a knock at the cabin frame.

Hoyt stepped aside, and a very old woman came in on his arm. She was the camp's seer, small and bent, wrapped in two shawls, with milky eyes.

She had delivered half the babies in the camp and buried a good many of the old.

She didn't say anything.

She put one dry hand on each side of my face and held it there a long moment.

"There," she said at last. "That's it."

"That's what?"

"You've been given something, child."

"By whom?"

"I can't tell you that." Her hands dropped. "I can tell you it wasn't taken. It was given. Those are different."

"What was given?"

The seer shook her head.

"I'm only old. I don't know everything. There's a book somewhere that does."

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