They Sold Me as a Brood Bride, So I Enrolled in the Boys' Alpha College novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Twenty Words

A silent quarry son's bare palm over her mouth stops her cry when a Penhallow son jumps her, and both wolves know.

I did the stupid thing.

I picked up the token and pushed it back at him across the blanket.

"I don't know what you think this is," I said, in my low voice.

"Gwyn Treharne," Cadoc said. "A cousin of the northern valley."

"Yes."

"The northern valley has no Treharnes, and it never has."

He sat on the edge of the next bunk, a broad shadow in the dark, and the iron frame creaked.

The two other first-years did not stir.

"I'll tell you what I smelled this morning," he said, very quietly. "A boy with no rank, who smelled of nothing."

"Yes."

"I've never smelled a wolf who smelled of nothing. It's like a room with no air in it."

He let that sit.

"And under it, there was you."

I held very still.

"I haven't told anyone," he said. "I want you to know that. I won't."

"Why not?"

"I haven't decided yet."

He stood and picked up his token and hung it back on its cord.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Eat something."

He went out the way he had come.

I lay in the dark with my pulse in my ears.

One wolf knew.

The blocker had lasted a morning against him.

I did not sleep.

The bathhouse at Craig Cadarn is a long slate shed behind the east wing, and the new boys wash last.

I had the last slot, after midnight, and I waited until the corridor lamps were low before I went.

I had a plan.

I would go in, wash in the dark, and be out before the older boys finished their cards.

I got as far as the bathhouse door.

A hand came out of the dark and dragged me sideways into the gap between two buttresses.

I opened my mouth to shout.

The palm that closed over it was bare.

It was hard and dry, and it smelled of cut stone and cold water.

Scarred, I noticed, with a rough ridge across the heel of it.

"Don't," said a very low voice at my ear.

I could not have moved if I had wanted to.

The weight behind me was long and lean and absolutely still.

Footsteps went by on the gravel on the other side of the buttress.

Two of them, one heavier.

"He came this way," the older Penhallow said. "The little cousin. I want to see what he smells like in the dark."

"He's gone to the baths," the younger one said.

"Then we'll wait."

They stood on the other side of the stone, ten feet from us, breathing.

I did not breathe at all.

The hand on my mouth never shifted.

Its owner was so quiet that I could hear his heart go, slow and steady, against my back.

When the Penhallows had gone, the hand came away.

I turned.

He was a lean boy of twenty or twenty-one with dark hair over his eyes, grey-black eyes and a mouth that did not look made for talking.

He wore a plain quarry jacket with a rip in one sleeve and chalk on the cuff.

I had seen him in the Hall at supper, sitting at the end of the third-year bench.

Everyone passed him the salt without looking at him.

"Merrick," he said.

That was all.

"Thank you," I said.

He studied me.

His eyes went to my throat, and then, slowly, to my hair, and then, even more slowly, to the place on my chest where Cadoc's hand had been.

His nostrils moved.

His eyes went black.

I saw it happen, the pupil swallowing the grey.

"Oh," said Iolo Merrick.

It was a very small word.

I saw him lower his head, like a man at a door, and I saw him decide.

He put two fingers to the cord at his own collar and drew it out.

A slate token hung on the end of it.

Grey-blue, thumb-sized, with a nick in one corner.

It was exactly the same as Cadoc's.

I stared at it.

He looked at it too, as if he had never seen it before.

"I won't tell," he said.

"You scented me," I said. "Both of you, in one day. Isn't that impossible?"

He considered it.

"Yes," he said.

He turned and went into the dark of the buttress, and I leaned against the cold stone, shaking.

Two wolves.

One blocker.

One bitter flask that had lasted exactly as long as the first breath.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and could still feel his palm there.

"Which of us do you tell first?" said a voice from the end of the passage.

I turned my head.

Cadoc Vaughan was leaning against the corner of the bathhouse, with his arms folded across his chest and his gold hair wet from the night.

He looked at the place where Iolo had stood.

He looked at me.

"Because I think," Cadoc said slowly, "that he knows too."

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