Chapter 5: Home

The garrison truck dropped us at the bottom of the Great House drive and turned around.

Nobody had told the driver to take us any farther.

So we walked.

Eleven of us, in a line, up a quarter mile of raked gravel between the old pines.

The Great House stood at the top with every window lit for the rite.

I'd left it two years ago in a party dress.

I came back in a garrison coat with the elbows out and my hair cut short as a boy's.

There was a pale seam down my jaw from my ear to my chin.

I was twenty-four.

I felt about a hundred.

"It's very big," said the youngest.

"It's very ugly," said the left twin.

"Both can be true," said the schoolteacher.

Edda walked at my shoulder, a half step back.

The cook carried the duffel with the ledger in it.

He'd insisted.

"If anybody wants that book," he'd said on the truck, "they can take it off me."

Nobody wanted to try taking anything off the cook.

Wolves came out onto the porches of the lodge houses as we passed.

I knew most of them.

The baker's daughters. The elder's grandson. The boy on the gate who used to ride on Cale's shoulders at the solstice fires.

They knew me too.

I watched them catch my scent, frown, and then catch the rest of it.

Ash. Old blood. Rogue.

A mother pulled her little boy back inside by his collar.

Somebody on the left said, "Is that Sorrel?" and somebody shushed her.

Morwenna was waiting on the top step.

Two years hadn't touched her.

She wore her silver-blonde hair in its smooth knot, with pearls and a cream wool coat.

Her hands were folded in front of her.

She didn't look at my face.

She looked at the squad.

"Garrison wolves don't come up the front drive," she said.

"We were summoned," I said. "By name."

"To swear. Not to sleep in the Great House." She turned to the wolf on the door. "Put them in the kennel barns. There's straw."

The kennel barns were where the pack kept its hunting dogs.

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