My Mate Cut My Brand Off, So the Outcast Wolf Claimed Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Answering
Cade cuts Marit's brand before two hundred people and the valley turns its back; the one outcast stands for her and she puts her bleeding wrist in his hand.
Cade Reinholt took the knife from his father and cut through the brand on my wrist in front of two hundred people.
The brand was eight days old.
An old woman had burned it into my left wrist with a small iron, a bar and a dot.
It was still pink and raised.
The blade crossed it in one pull and the blood came up fast.
"Nothing took," Cade said, loud enough to carry to the back of the fence. "I won't stand here and pretend it did."
Behind us the calves were bawling in the corral, and the branding fire popped and smoked.
Nobody said a word.
This is how it is done in our valley.
A pair is called in April and burned with the iron.
A week later, at the spring branding, each of them says "I hold," or the mate cuts the brand.
I had seen two cuts in my life.
Both times the valley's faces went flat, and they were going flat now.
Cade's father stood beside him in his good hat with the Book open in one hand.
Einar Reinholt had chaired the Upper Green Stock Association for thirty years, and the Book was his to keep.
"The brand is cut," Einar said. "Marit Halvorsen is off the Book."
The women along the fence looked at their boots.
My own neighbors, who had eaten at my father's table, turned their backs one at a time, without a word.
An old woman near the rail said, not unkindly, "You should have held on, honey. It takes time."
Everybody says that.
Blood ran down my wrist into my palm and dripped off my thumb into the dust.
Einar cleared his throat and put on his friendly voice, the one that carried across a sale ring.
"Now, friends, you all know the law. A wolf off the Book loses her hand-rights and her grazing permit at sundown."
He let that settle.
"Unless an adult wolf stands for her at this fire."
He looked slowly down the fence.
"Anyone?"
Nobody moved.
Nobody had stood for a cut wolf in twenty years, and I knew why.
A stand-for meant a year and a day under a stranger's roof, and no one wanted the valley's eyes on that.
I did the sums the way I had every winter since my father died.
I had a hundred and forty mother cows and a note at the bank.
The Forest permit was the only thing that made my six hundred and forty acres pay.
By sundown I would be a woman with a mortgage and no summer grass.
Cade finally looked at me, and I saw something in his face I hadn't expected.
He was proud of himself.
He thought saying it out loud had been brave.
"I felt nothing either," I said.
My voice came out steady and louder than I meant it.
"Write that down too, Einar. Your son isn't the only one who stood at that fire and felt nothing."
Two hundred people went still.
Cade's face went red to the collar.
"Marit," he started.
"You cut it, Cade," I said. "You don't get to talk."
Einar shut the Book with one hand.
"Girl, I'll make allowances for the hour," he said. "But the law is the law."
"I stand."
The voice came from the back of the yard, by the water tank, where the hired men stood and the people nobody invited.
I knew it before I turned around.
Roderick Reimer had not been spoken to at an Association function in fifteen years.
His family had been kept off the Book since 1962, and people in the valley crossed the road to avoid his truck.
He came through the crowd with his hat in his hand, and the crowd opened for him without a sound.
He was six foot three and wide through the shoulders.
A horse had broken his nose once, and his sandy hair was going gray at the temples.
His dog came behind him and sat down in the dust.
"Roderick, you're not on the Book," Einar said, "and you know why."
"The law says an adult wolf," Rod said. "It doesn't say a booked one. I've read it."
His voice was flat and slow, and he did not look at Einar once.
"A year and a day under your roof," Einar said. "Until the Fall Gather."
"Then the Association decides," Rod said. "She can walk any night and the stand holds. Nothing else is owed. That's the law, and that's mine."
At the front of the crowd sat the Caller, the old woman who burned the brands, with her iron roll in her lap.
She was not looking at his face.
She was looking at his hands.
I could have said no.
I could have sold the cows and driven out of the valley with my truck and my father's saddle, and been nobody's.
Instead I looked at the two hundred people with their backs half turned, and at Cade.
Then I looked at the man who had walked across a yard nobody had ever let him cross.
I held out my wrist, bleeding, in front of every neighbor who had just turned away from me.
I put it in his open hand.
His hand was big and hot and rough, and it did not flinch from the blood.
His thumb settled on my pulse and stayed there.
It was the first touch in eight days that hadn't pulled away from me.
I walked out of the Reinholt yard beside him with my back to the fire, and nobody called my name.
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