The Alpha Hunts the Exiles, So I Let Him Catch Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Sheep Count
Nahia is brought to the elm with a dead man's bell, gives a false name in front of the whole valley and is locked in the Alpha's tower.
My little brother caught me at the border stone, and he did not know my face.
That was the first thing I had counted on, and it hurt more than I had planned for.
The second thing was in my right fist, a dented lead-ewe bell on a cracked leather strap.
It had belonged to an old man the Alpha's wardens burned alive in his hut in January.
I had walked eleven hours in the dark to put it in the Alpha's hand.
"Name," Aritz said.
He was twenty now, and tall, in the green jacket of a warden.
He had our father's jaw.
He had been fifteen the last time I saw him.
He had cried at the foot of the stone while the eldest cut my braid off with shearing shears.
"Walk," he said, when I gave him nothing.
He took my arm above the elbow and his grip was hard.
I understood that the hardness was for the other warden.
I walked.
They brought me down through the beech woods and over the last pasture.
The whole valley came up to meet us in sound.
It was the last Sunday of October, the Sheep Count.
Every flock in Haizpea had come down from the summer mountain.
Every house had hung its bell by its door for the morning.
Seven bells, and I knew each of them in my sleep.
I had not heard them in five years.
I stopped on the road for one breath, and Aritz pulled me on.
Under the elm in front of the church, two hundred people stood among ewes and dogs and trestle tables.
Nobody there had seen my face since I was twenty-two.
Then I had a braid to my waist and no scar.
Now I had cropped hair and a wool cape.
I had a burn that ran from my left cheekbone down my neck and under my collar.
People looked at it and looked away.
At the gate to the common fold stood the Alpha.
Unai Mendiboure was counting the Mendiboure ewes through the gate, his lips moving.
He had always counted.
Bat, bi, hiru.
He looked up to see what the crowd had gone quiet for, and he stopped at three.
I watched my mate know me.
It went through him from the feet up.
His hand came off the gate and his shoulders went square.
The black wolf that lived in him stood up behind his eyes, in front of two hundred people.
My own wolf, who had lain down in me in January and had not moved since, lifted her head.
I had told myself for five years that I hated him.
I had come to stand in front of him with a dead man's bell and say so.
I had not planned for my knees.
"A trespasser at the stone, Alpha," the other warden said. "Came over alone, at first light."
Behind the table with the Batzar's book sat Beñat Mendiboure, the Bell-keeper, with his silver watch chain and his glass of cider.
He was sixty-two now and white-haired and pink with good living.
He smiled at me and spread his hands.
"Well," he said, in the warm voice that had read my sentence out five years ago, "who's this, then?"
Nobody answered.
"The law asks one thing first," Beñat said, kindly, to the whole square. "Is the woman of this valley?"
That was the question.
If I was of this valley, I was an exile come home, and an exile who comes home is killed at the elm.
No Alpha in four hundred years had failed to see it done.
Unai's jaw moved, and he did not speak.
He was going to answer.
I could see him choosing which way to break.
So I made the choice before he could.
I pulled out of Aritz's hand, and Aritz let me go.
I walked across the grass to the man my wolf had picked.
I stopped close enough to feel the heat of him.
I held out Txomin's bell.
He took it, because he could not do anything else.
I closed his fingers over it with both my hands.
His palm was dry and rough and it shook.
The shaking went up my arms and settled low in my belly, where I did not want it.
"My name is Ane Etxart," I said, loud enough for the back row.
I put Txomin's Roncal in my vowels.
"I'm from over the stone. Txomin was my mother's cousin, and your wardens burned him in his bed. I came to give you his bell."
A sound went through the square.
Beñat set his glass down.
"Roncal blood," he said gently, "in the Alpha's own square. Nephew, the elm is the law for raiders."
Unai did not look at his uncle.
He was looking at my mouth, and my scar, and my hands on his hand.
"A foreign trespasser is held in the tower until Candlemas," he said.
His voice came out quiet and exact.
"Until her people pay three ewes for her. That is the law too, uncle."
"She's a raider's kin," Beñat said.
"She's a woman with a bell," Unai said.
He took his hand out of mine, slowly, and kept the bell.
"The tower," Unai said.
Two wardens took my arms, and Aritz did not look at me once.
I walked across the square with two hundred people parting for me, and I held my head up.
I had just lied to the man I was born to, in front of everyone I knew.
He had let it stand.
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