Chapter 17: What It Costs

The healer came up my back stairs at midnight with her braids undone and a cloth bag of herbs.

I had called her from the floor of the garden.

Torin lay on my sofa above the shop with a wet cloth on his forehead, and the twins slept in the next room with the door open a hand's width.

She looked at him for a long time without touching him.

"How long since the nosebleed?" she asked.

"Four hours."

"And your hands?"

"Cold," Torin said.

He tried to smile.

"I've never had cold hands in my life."

"No," she said.

"Yours have always been warm. Hers were the cold ones, and now you've traded."

She sat at my kitchen table and turned her tea cup in her fingers.

"I will say it plainly," she said, "because I owe you both that."

"The wolf is hers. It always was."

"It knows its owner now, and it is calling her. Every day she stands close to it, it pulls harder."

"Then why is he on my sofa?" I said.

"Because it was in him for twenty years. It is woven in, and it cannot come out in a rush. It tears."

I sat down across from her.

My hands lay in my lap and glowed faintly in the dark.

"What happens if we do nothing?"

"The wolf finds its own way back. Perhaps in a week, perhaps a month."

She looked at Torin.

"He would not survive the tearing."

The room went still.

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