The Cursed Blood novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Line

Conall walks Isla up the mountain and shows her the ground drinking the black from her veins; the elders need someone to vouch for her, and he won't.

I didn't take his hand.

"Warden blood is a story they tell pups," I said. "So they eat their carrots."

"Do they eat them?"

"Mostly."

"Good story, then." He put his hand back in his coat pocket. "You can stand in the snow and argue with me, or you can walk. The rot doesn't care which."

Another wave came up my arms.

I bent double and spat red on his boots.

"Walk," he said.

I walked.

The ridge road turned to a deer path past the marker, and the deer path turned to rock.

He went first and never once looked back to check I was following.

"How did you know where I'd be?" I said.

"I didn't. I've been waiting at that marker on feast nights for eight years."

"Why?"

"Because your mother asked me to."

I stopped.

He kept walking, so I had to keep walking too, or lose him in the dark.

"She asked you that before she died?"

"She asked me that when you were six and you bit the Alpha's nephew."

"He took my bread."

"That's what she said." The corner of his mouth moved again. "She was proud of you for a week."

My eyes went hot. I blamed the cold.

The pines thinned out near the top.

The wind came over the ridge with nothing in its way, and it smelled of stone and frost and old smoke.

Then I saw them.

Standing stones, taller than a man, running along the spine of the mountain in a crooked line until the dark ate them.

My wolf moved inside me for the first time since the hall.

She'd gone so quiet after the rejection that I'd thought the rot had killed her already.

Now she lifted her head and whined.

"The Line," Conall said. "Old border of the Greywater. Your mother held a stretch of it."

"My mother picked mushrooms."

"Every Thursday. All year." He glanced back. "Even in January."

Every Thursday, all my life, she'd come home at dark with an empty basket and mud to the knee, and I'd never once asked where the mushrooms were.

He stopped beside the nearest stone and crouched.

"Sit," he said. "On the ground. Hands flat."

"I'm not a dog."

"Dogs don't sit with their hands flat. That's the difference."

I laughed. It hurt.

Then I sat down in the snow between two stones and pressed my palms into the frozen dirt.

Nothing happened.

"Wait," he said.

The cold went into my hands.

Then something under the cold.

It felt like the moment you step into a hot bath and every muscle you own lets go at once.

I looked down.

The black in my wrists was moving.

It ran backward, down my forearms, into my palms, out of my fingertips.

Where my hands touched the ground, the snow went gray, then dark, then soaked away into the dirt.

The pain under my breastbone loosened its fist.

I could breathe all the way down.

My wolf stretched inside me and rolled over.

"Oh," I said.

Conall sat back on his heels and watched my face instead of my hands.

"The ground drinks poison out of a warden," he said. "Snakebite. Wolfsbane. Silver. Rot."

"And down in the valley?"

"Two generations ago the Mardells salted every field in that valley with grave dirt and iron. So no warden could stand on it and feel anything." He shrugged. "Your mother lived on salted ground for twenty years. Came up here every Thursday to breathe."

"For me," I said.

"For you. You were a Mardell pup. Mardell pups don't get born on the mountain."

I curled my fingers into the dirt.

Under them, faint as a heartbeat through a wall, I felt something else.

Hooves. Old ones. A fox crossing yesterday. Somebody's blood, long ago, soaked in and gone sweet.

I snatched my hands back.

The rot crept straight back up my wrists.

"Hands down," he said. "You can be scared with your hands down."

I put them down.

The black went out again.

"I can feel things," I said. "In the dirt."

"You'll feel more."

"Is that what she could do?"

"She could tell you what a hill had for breakfast in the year it was born." He stood. "Can you walk?"

I could.

That was the strange part. Ten minutes ago I'd been spitting blood. Now my legs felt like mine again.

We went along the Line to a long stone house with a turf roof, low and half sunk into the ridge.

Inside, a fire, and three very old wolves at a table.

Two women and a man, white-haired, wrapped in blankets, with ward lines inked on every knuckle.

They looked at me.

"Fenner's girl," the old man said.

"Fenner's girl," Conall said.

"She has the look." One of the women leaned forward and sniffed. "And the rot. Whose?"

"The Mardell heir's."

The other woman snorted into her tea.

"Of course it is."

"She wants to enter the Trials," Conall said.

The old man folded his inked hands.

"She's no warden yet, captain. She's a Mardell omega who walked off her pack an hour ago. A packless wolf enters the Trials one way. A warden-blooded wolf vouches for her, by name, at the stones, at dawn."

All three of them looked at Conall.

He was the one who'd walked me up the mountain.

He took his coat off and hung it on a peg by the fire.

"No," he said. "I won't vouch for her."

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