Flour for a Name

Mara was scrubbing the big copper stockpot when Nora came in, and the stockpot was already clean.

The kitchen smelled of banked coals and cold fat. Smoke leaked thin and grey from the oven doors where the ash had been raked over for the night. Flour lay in a pale drift across the board where the morning's bread would be shaped. One candle burned on the shelf above the sink, and Mara's shadow scrubbed along with her on the wall.

She didn't turn round. "You should be in bed."

"Elder Ivo found me by the woodstore."

The brush stopped for half a stroke, then went on.

Nora came to the sink. She could still feel the place under her jaw where his fingers had been, dry as paper. The ache in her chest had settled into something she could almost walk around, if she didn't breathe too deeply.

"He looked at my eyes," she said. "Then he said, 'Your mother had those eyes. She didn't know when to stay out of the circle either.'"

She said it exactly, in his flat old voice. She had repeated it all the way from the woodstore so she wouldn't lose a word.

Mara scrubbed. The bristles hissed on copper that was already shining. Her forearms were thick and red to the elbow.

"Mara."

Scrub. Hiss.

Nora reached into the water, took the pot by both handles, and lifted it out of Mara's hands. It was heavier than she expected. Water ran down her sleeves and spattered the flagstones. She set it on the board, in the flour, and the flour went to paste around its base.

Mara looked at the ruined board for a long moment. Then she wiped her hands on her apron, slowly, one finger at a time.

"Shut the door," she said.

Nora shut it. When she turned back, Mara had sat down on the low stool by the coal scuttle, the one she used for plucking birds, and she looked smaller on it than Nora had ever seen her.

"It was winter," Mara said. "Deep in. The pass was closed and nobody came over it, except she did."

Nora didn't move from the door.

"I found her in the root cellar. Came in through the coal chute, if you can believe it. Out to here." Mara held a hand a good way from her own stomach. "Feet wrapped in sacking. She'd been running the whole way. You could see it in how she sat. Back to the wall. Facing the door."

"You said you didn't know her."

"I said I didn't know what she looked like." Mara's mouth twisted. "Which was a lie. I've had twenty-two years to make it sound true."

The candle spat. Above them a floorboard creaked, someone turning over in the servants' loft.

"She had your eyes," Mara said, more quietly. "Grey, with that shine at the back of them, like frost on a window with the lamp behind. I hid her down there eleven days. Fed her what I could carry without Holloway's father counting the loaves. She had you on the twelfth night, and she was gone by morning."

"Gone where?"

Mara looked at her.

Nora understood. She pressed her back against the door and felt the cold of the wood through her wet sleeves.

"Before she went," Mara said, "she made me swear. Held my wrist so hard I had marks for a week. Keep her out of the circle. Whatever happens. And if she ever steps in..." Her thumb rubbed at her own wrist. "If she ever steps in, she has to be gone before the next moon. Before the old man remembers."

"The old man."

"She didn't say which. She didn't have to. There was one old man in Blackpine that winter who'd have known what she was."

"What was she?"

Mara didn't answer. She got up, came to the board, and pushed the stockpot aside. With one blunt finger she wrote in the clean flour beyond the paste.

Four letters. LINNET.

Nora stared at them. They didn't look like a mother. They looked like a bird, small and brown and easy to miss.

Mara let her look for three breaths. Then she swept her palm across the board, and the name was gone, and there was only flour.

"I won't say it in this house," she said. "Walls in a pack-house have ears with teeth in them."

"You let me think I came from nowhere."

"I let you live."

"You let me scrub floors for twenty-two years and be called wolfless by children." Nora heard her voice climbing and dragged it down. "You let me go up that hill tonight not knowing anything."

"I told you not to go in."

"You told me no. You never told me why."

Mara went to the hook by the hearth where her old apron hung, the stained one she wore only for scalding pigs. She took it down and began to pick at the hem with the point of a paring knife, quick and neat, the way she picked stitches out of a trussed bird.

"You'd have walked into that circle at twelve," she said, without looking up. "If I'd told you there was a mother at the end of it. First Moonrise you were tall enough to see over the stones, you'd have stood in the middle and shouted for her. I know you."

Nora opened her mouth. Closed it.

It was true. That was the worst of it. She could see her twelve-year-old self doing exactly that, chin up, braid swinging.

The hem came open. Mara shook something into her palm and held it out.

A disc of bone, no bigger than a thumbnail, yellowed and smooth from years sewn into cloth. Someone had carved an eye into it. A closed eye: one curved line for the lid, three tiny strokes for the lashes. A thread of old leather ran through a hole at the top.

"She was wearing it," Mara said. "Told me to give it to you if the day came. I always hoped it wouldn't."

Nora took it. It was warm, from the fire or from Mara's hand or from something else. The ache under her breastbone gave a small, strange pulse, as if it had noticed.

She closed her fingers over the disc.

"I'm not done being angry with you," she said.

"I'd be worried if you were." Mara put the stockpot back in the sink. "Be angry on the road."

Someone knocked on the back door.

Not the yard door Holloway struck with the flat of his fist. The small one behind the scullery, onto the kitchen garden and the path to the upper wing. Two knocks, soft, as if whoever it was didn't want to be heard knocking.

Nora knew before she reached it. The stone in her chest had turned over and started to burn.

She opened the door.

Rhys stood on the step with snow on his shoulders. He'd shed the ceremonial coat for a plain dark one, buttoned wrong at the collar, as if he'd done it in the dark. His face had the scraped look of a man who'd been sick and hadn't told anyone.

The pull came in like a tide. Heat under the bone. All of her leaning, wanting one step forward onto the step with him. The voice in her chest didn't speak this time. It didn't need to.

She kept her hand on the door frame.

"Nora." He looked past her once, at Mara, then back. "Can I have a moment?"

"You've had several tonight."

He took that. She watched it land, watched him decide not to defend himself, and couldn't tell whether that was better or worse.

"I heard Holloway has you on the Harrow cart," he said.

"Holloway's had me on a list since I was nine. He's finally got a reason."

"I didn't..." He stopped. Started again, lower. "The Sedge Hollow pack owes us. Their alpha's mate keeps a house on the lake, south of here. Quiet. Nobody would know you. I've arranged a stipend out of my own share, not the pack's. Enough that you wouldn't have to work. Enough that you're not on a mill cart carrying sacks for humans until your back goes."

His right hand had come up to his chest, the ring under his thumb. She waited for it to turn.

It didn't. His fingers closed round it and stayed, white at the knuckles, as though it were the only fixed thing on the hill.

He meant it. Every word.

That was what made her want to say yes. The pull wanted him to have done something kind so it could forgive him, so it could stop hurting. It tugged at her like a child at a sleeve.

She looked at his hand on the ring, and then at his face.

"No," she said.

"Nora..."

"You stood in front of the whole pack and threw me back like a fish too small to keep." The words came out level. She was proud of that. "And now it hurts. I know it does. I can feel it hurting. So you've come down to the kitchen in the middle of the night to pay me to be somewhere you won't have to think about."

"That's not..."

"A lake house. A stipend." She shook her head. "You chose the ache, Rhys. You don't get to buy your way out of it with me."

For a moment, before he could stop it, his face simply came open. She saw all of it. The sickness and the shame, the boy told what to want since he could walk, and under it something raw that looked at her as though she'd shut a door on his hand.

Then it closed. The heir came back. He straightened, and his grip on the ring loosened.

"If I could take it back," he said, so low the snow nearly had it.

"You can't. You said the words."

He stood a moment longer, snow gathering in his hair. Then he turned and went up the garden path, shoulders held too square, until the dark took him round the corner of the upper wing.

The pull went with him. It dragged through her chest like a hook through cloth, and she put her hand flat on her sternum and did not follow.

Behind her, Mara had already started.

She didn't speak. She wrapped the round loaf from the morning batch in a cloth. Then the heel of the cheese. Then a small horn-handled knife from the drawer where she kept the good ones the scullery boys weren't allowed to touch. She folded them into a square of sacking and tied the corners.

Then she took her own shawl from the peg. Grey wool, heavy, darned at one corner in a brown that didn't match. She'd worn it every winter Nora could remember. It smelled of yeast and woodsmoke and her.

She put it round Nora's shoulders and tied it at the front, hard, the way she'd once tied Nora's boots.

"Mara, if he finds out you hid her..."

"Then he finds out." Mara pulled the knot tighter. "I'm old and I make the best bread on this mountain. Let him try to replace me."

"That's not funny."

"No." Her hands stayed on the knot. "Go out by the woodstore. Holloway's men will be watching the gate, not the fence."

Nora wanted to say something big enough to cover twenty-two years and a cellar and a name written in flour. Nothing came.

So she hugged her instead, quick and hard, and Mara held on longer than she let go.

The woodstore corridor was still cold. The lantern had gone out.

Nora went through the low door at the end into the yard, and the snow took her ankles. The sky over the eastern ridge had begun to thin. By the main gate, lanterns swung on poles above Holloway's cart, two heavy horses steaming in the traces. Men were loading grain sacks for the mill and the travel chests of the servants being sent with it. Someone swore at a horse.

Holloway stood on the step of the cart with his list held up to the lamplight, lips moving as he counted.

Nora kept to the shadow of the fence. The bone disc hung round her neck now, under her dress, lying against her skin exactly over the ache.

She found the gap where the boards had rotted, the one the kitchen boys used to sneak down to the human town. The rough wood caught at Mara's shawl, and she worked it free carefully, because it was the only thing she owned that someone had chosen to give her.

The track ran down through the pines. She followed it by the pale of the snow and the black of the trunks, and it took her the better part of an hour to reach the valley floor and the boundary stone.

It was old, waist high and leaning, the Blackpine mark cut into its face and worn half away. Beyond it, the track split.

To the left, the Harrow road wound along the river. Back up the slope she could see the cart lanterns, small and gold through the trees. At first light the cart would stop at this stone to count heads, and her name would be on the list.

To the right there was no road at all. Just a gap in the trees where the snow lay smoother, running north into the borderlands, unclaimed ground where nobody kept the paths and nobody came looking.

The wind came off it, sharp and clean, smelling of nothing she knew.

Nora stood at the stone with the bundle in one hand. With the other she found the end of her braid and wound it round her fingers, once, twice.

Up the slope, a horse whinnied. The lanterns had begun to move.

The ache in her chest pulled south, back toward the hill, toward Rhys. The bone disc lay quiet against her skin, and the north wind lifted the fringe of Mara's shawl.

She let go of her braid.