One Girl, A Pack Of Beasts novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Bitter Tea

Willa drinks her own tea in front of the tribe and dares Hester to drink her tonic; the chief exiles her anyway, and Tobiah walks out with her.

The gate guard saw me coming through the gray dawn and reached for his spear.

"You can't come in."

"Then stop me."

He looked at my face. Then at the bone knife on my belt.

He opened the gate.

Behind me, at the edge of the pines, a long black shape lay still in the snow.

Kell had come as far as an exile could.

The guard saw him too and went pale.

Tobiah walked at my side with his bloody throat wrapped in my scarf.

The fire ring had never emptied. People stood in the trampled snow in blankets, breath steaming, faces turned toward the speaking stone.

Brannon lay on a fur in front of it.

He was gray.

There was blood in his ash-blond beard.

Every few breaths he coughed, and more came up.

The healer knelt beside him with her bad knees in the snow.

Hester knelt on his other side, holding his hand, crying prettily.

When she saw me, she screamed.

It was a good scream. Two children started crying.

"She's come back to finish it!"

The chief stepped down off the stone.

"Willa Corrick. You were told."

"I was told to do Hester's washing," I said. "I'm here about the tea."

A wolf growled somewhere in the crowd.

Then another.

The Ridge wolves stood closest to the fire, half of them still in fur from the night's howling, ruffs up.

I didn't look at them.

I walked to the hearth and set down my own small pot. I'd carried it from the Hollow wrapped in moss.

"Is there a fire in this tribe," I said, "or do I have to make one?"

Nobody moved.

So I made one.

I crushed four cores on a flat stone with the butt of my knife.

Blue dust.

I added pine needles from my pouch and snow from the ground and set the pot on the coals.

The whole tribe watched me do it.

The smell came up, bitter and green. Every man who'd ever lived in my house knew that smell.

"That's it," Hester sobbed. "That's what she gave them."

"It is," I said.

When it steamed, I poured it into a horn cup.

I held it up so the back rows could see.

Then I drank it.

All of it, hot enough to scald, without stopping.

I turned the cup over. A last drop fell into the snow.

"That's my tea," I said. "Cores and pine. I've drunk it every week for three years, same pot, same cup. I'm not coughing."

The healer was watching me with her old, sharp eyes.

I turned to Hester.

"Now yours."

She went still.

The little cup was still in her hands.

She was never without it.

A sweet smell came off it, honey and something under the honey.

"It's medicine," she said. "It's for the men."

"Then it won't hurt you."

I held my hand out.

She didn't give it to me.

"I'm not sick," she said. "It would be a waste."

"It's one swallow, Hester."

"I don't have to prove anything to a woman nobody wanted."

That got a laugh from the wolves.

It didn't get one from the healer.

The bear pushed out of the crowd.

He'd always moved slowly, my bear, the way a big man moves through a small house.

He'd cut his hair since yesterday.

His throat mark was a gray scar now.

He leaned down over Hester's cup and breathed in.

I watched his nostrils flare.

Then his whole face changed.

"That's nightshade," he said.

The ring went silent.

"Bears smell everything," Hester said quickly. "He's confused. He's been sick too, poor thing."

"I've been sick for a month," the bear said slowly. "Since the first cup."

The healer reached up. "Give it here, girl."

Brannon caught the healer's wrist.

He'd pushed himself up on one elbow, blood on his teeth, and his amber eyes were all wolf.

"Don't touch her," he said. "Hester sat up with me all night. Willa walked out into the snow and left us. Who do you think did this?"

"Brannon," I said. "I just drank it in front of you."

"You drank your own pot. You always know which pot."

He spat red into the snow.

And I saw it on his face.

Not confusion. Not fever.

He knew.

He'd looked at that cup, and at Hester's soft hands on it, and he had decided not to know.

The chief raised his arms.

"Enough. I've heard it."

He stood on the speaking stone with the sun coming up behind him and the whole tribe looking at him.

"Willa Corrick broke her bonds and walked out on a judgment of the fire. She has come back unasked and brought trouble to the sick. I name her exile."

A murmur.

"Any house that feeds her, warms her, or gives her a bed," the chief said, "goes out the gate after her."

Hester bowed her head and dabbed her eyes.

Under her lashes, she was smiling at me.

I picked up my pot.

I didn't hurry.

When I got to the gate, I heard running feet behind me.

Tobiah went past me, and back into the ring, and into the longhouse that had been my father's.

He came out with his patched hawk-feather cloak and a bundle on his back.

His mother cried out from the crowd.

"Toby. Toby, no."

He walked straight back across the ring to me.

He stood beside me with his chin up and his freckles burning red.

Every face in the tribe was on him.

"Then I'm exiled too," he said.

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