Chapter 7: What It Held

Rafe screamed once, and the sound hit the stone roof and came back down on all of us.

Two Hollin captains ran from the benches and dropped to their knees beside him.

"Alpha! Rafe, where are you hit?"

He could not answer.

His fingers dug into the floor, and his whole body shook.

Joss was across the Hall in four strides with a knife out of his boot.

"Hold him still," he said. "I'm cutting the shirt."

The wool parted from the collar down.

Somebody behind me made a small sick noise.

Across Rafe's back from shoulder to hip ran a sheet of raw burn, red and weeping.

The skin had lifted in blisters and cracked open between them.

It was not healed, and it was not old.

It was fresh.

I knew the shape.

I had lain on my belly for a month with the same shape salved and bound.

I had felt every edge of it each time my shirt dragged.

"That's mine," I heard myself say.

The keeper did not rise from her chair.

"It was never yours," she said.

A hundred wolves had gone silent.

"Most marks only bind two people," she said. "A very few were made to carry."

She turned a page in her book, though she did not need to read it.

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