Chapter 17: The Well

The well stood in the kitchen yard under a slate roof, with a bucket on a rope.

Every wolf at Ironwood drank from it, and had for a hundred years.

I leaned over the stone rim and breathed in, and my stomach turned.

It was faint, thin and cold, with sugar under it.

"That's the bottle," I said.

"I know." Fenn's voice cracked. "I made the morning tea from it.

"I tasted metal, Elowen, and I thought it was the kettle."

Behind us, in the yard, a line of wolves had formed at the kitchen door.

They were holding their stomachs.

A woman from the laundry sat down on the cobbles and put her head between her knees.

Two men from the gate went by, leaning on each other, gray in the face.

"How many drank it?" Dashiell said.

He had come across the yard at a run, with Aldous behind him.

"Everyone who ate breakfast," Fenn said. "Two hundred, give or take."

"And the dose?"

The herbwife had a cup of the water in her hand, and she was holding it up to the light.

"Small," she said. "Not enough to kill anyone.

"Enough to put every wolf in this lodge to sleep inside itself for a week or two."

"A week or two," I said slowly.

Then I understood it, and I saw Dashiell understand it too.

"The Moot is in twelve days," he said.

"If Ironwood's wolves can't shift," Aldous said, "Ironwood cannot stand for her. It cannot stand for anyone."

"No pack that sleeps can swear an oath before the moon," said the herbwife. "That's the old law."

I looked at the line of coughing wolves.

"She's not trying to poison us," I said. "She's trying to make us look weak in front of every pack."

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