Chapter 7: North Ridge

Rosalind ran that night for the first time in a month.

She slipped out through the clinic garden with her clothes rolled under one arm, and she shifted behind the old apple wall where no one could see.

It hurt the way it always did, and then it didn't.

Her wolf was a long, lean red-gold animal with a gray blaze at the muzzle.

She went up the north ridge at full stretch, and the cold air poured through her fur and washed the day out of her bones.

At the top she stopped, panting, under a sky full of stars.

Someone was already there.

A big sandy-brown wolf lay on the flat rock with his chin on his paws.

She knew him by the gray eyes.

He lifted his head and let his tongue loll in what could only be a grin.

She huffed at him, and he rolled onto his back.

She wanted very badly to laugh, and that frightened her more than anything else that week.

They shifted back behind separate boulders.

When she stepped out, wrapped in the long wool shirt from her bundle, Hamish was already dressed in jeans, bare to the waist, with his hair damp.

He looked her over once.

"You ran like someone chasing a thing she wanted to catch," he said.

"I was running off the day. The whole hall bowed to me this afternoon."

"I heard."

"Everyone heard."

"They should have bowed twice." He tipped his head. "Jessamy looked like she'd swallowed her own circlet."

Rosalind pressed her lips together, and a laugh broke out anyway.

It was the first real one in weeks.

He watched her laugh with a look on his face she had not seen on any man in a very long time.

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