Someone Stole My Years, So I Sold What Was Left to the Alpha

The Counting Marek's hand was cold on my throat, and he had already counted me twice. Nobody gets counted twice. He put two fingers under my jaw the way he had every winter since I was nine, and he breathed in, and something happened behind his eyes. Then he did it again. Slower. "Marek." "Quiet." "I've got the depot at eight." "I said quiet, girl." Twenty-six and still girl. His fingers pressed harder, right where the pulse is, and I counted the ticks in his jaw instead of saying anything else. Four. Five. Six. He let go like my skin had gone hot. "Three winters," he said. He said it too loud. That is the part I have never forgiven him for. Not the number. The volume. Forty people in the census hall and every one of them heard a man announce how long I had left, and the hall did the thing halls do, where the noise drops out of it all at once and comes back wrong. I had the depot at eight. That was all I could hold on to. Fifteen years my mother ran the west route and this was the winter they were putting a second driver on it, and I had asked for it in October and they had not said no, and I had been carrying that not-no around for six weeks like something warm in a pocket. Somebody near the stove said, well, there goes the west route. They laughed. Not cruelly. That was the worst part. It was the easy kind of laugh, the kind you give a joke everyone already agrees with, and I stood in my mother's coat and let it go over me. Then Havel from the depot office, who is a decent man, who has known me since I was a child, came over and put his hand on my shoulder and said they could not put three winters on a six-year route, and that I would understand. "I understand," I said. He looked relieved. That is the thing about being reasonable. People are so grateful for it they never ask what it costs. Bee reached for my hand. I moved it and got a cigarette out instead, unlit, because there is no smoking in the census hall and because I needed something to do with my fingers that was not being held. "Ilka." "Don't." "I only meant." "I know what you meant." Twenty-two years old, hood down, hair lifting off her forehead in little pale wires. Full ledger. Marek had counted her in under a second the way he counts everyone, and moved on. Somebody behind us said it then. Not to me. To whoever was next to them, in the voice men use when they think a room is loud enough to cover them. "Short Count Brennan." I have been called it since I was eleven. It followed me through school and into the yard at the depot and it will be on my headstone. Two words. It means she does not add up, and it means do not build anything on her, and the thing that makes it land every single time is that it is not an insult. It is a description. I did not turn round. You never turn round. Turning round is how it gets a second outing. But somebody else did. "Say it to her face, Petrik." Tam Ovic is five foot nothing and drives the ice road and has been my friend since we were both small enough to fit under the depot bench. She came out of the line like a thrown brick, and Petrik went red and looked at his boots, and the hall found something else to be interested in. She came and stood at my shoulder and did not say anything about it, which is the entire reason she is my friend. "Depot at eight," she said. "Not anymore." "Havel?" "Havel." "Havel is a coward, and I will be telling him so at eight." I went back to Marek instead. He was writing in the book and he did not look up, which is how I knew. "You counted me twice." "Line's moving." "Marek." "Step aside, Ilka." "You have never counted anyone twice in your life. I have stood in this hall seventeen years and I have never once seen you go back." His pen stopped. He is sixty-some with a face like a boot, and I watched that face decide something and then decide against it. He turned the page and said next, and his voice came out thin. "What did you see." "Three winters. That's what I saw. That's what I wrote." "That's not what I asked." "Step aside." And here is what I did not know, standing there in my mother's coat being reasonable at a man who would not look at me. Marek had read four thousand wolves in forty years and never once gone back for a second count. Not for the dying, not for the newborn, not for the man with the knife. He went back that morning because the number under my jaw did not sit the way a number sits. It was not short. It was leaving. He wrote three winters in the book because there is no column for what he actually smelled, and he shut the book, and he did not sleep that night, and I found out none of this for a very long time. At the time I just thought he was tired. A hand touched my elbow, lightly, the way you touch a door you are not sure is locked. "You're going to make him cry," the man said. "He's had a long morning." Tall, smiling, coat worth more than our house. Not showing off about it. In the way where he clearly had four more of them. "I don't know you." "Emeric." He put his hand out. "Vashti." The name did what names like that do. I felt the room lean. "You're the Alpha's brother." "Half. And only on the days he needs something." He kept his hand out until I shook it. Warm grip. Everything about him warm. "Ilka Brennan." "How do you know that." "Your mother was Anja." I did not say anything. "She ran the west route with my father's men. She once told him, in front of about thirty people, that he had the map upside down." He tipped his head. "He did have the map upside down." Eleven years. Nobody had said her name to me in eleven years, and this stranger in a good coat said it like it was still in use, on the same morning they took her route off me, and I want to be honest that it went into me like a hook and I did not feel the barb. "That's a nice trick," I said. "What is?" "Knowing something about somebody before you want something from them." He laughed. Real, loud, heads turning, and he did not care that heads turned. "You are going to be a problem," he said. "I'm delighted." Behind him, somebody moved. I noticed him before I knew who he was. Back wall, not in the line, not talking to anyone, there long enough that the wall had stopped noticing him. Dark coat. No gloves in a room this cold. He was looking at Marek's book, not at me, and something in the way he stood made me want to check where the exits were. He came off the wall and people moved out of his way without appearing to move. He stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to look up, and he reached out and took the unlit cigarette out of my mouth. Two fingers. He did not ask. Something went through me from the jaw down and kept going. "There's no smoking in here," he said. "It isn't lit." "It's in your mouth." "That's not the same as smoking." "It's the same as intending to." I had a better line than that and it did not arrive. That happens to me perhaps once a year. I stood there with nothing in my hands and nothing in my mouth and my face going hot, and somewhere behind me Petrik laughed, and this time it was at me and it was about this. Ivar Vashti did not notice. He turned to Marek and said, "Read her again." Marek shut the book. "I've read her." "Read her again." "Alpha." There it was. "You went twice. I watched you. Why." And Marek, who has counted every wolf in this territory for forty years, who once told a man his own number while the man had a knife out, looked at the floor. "Cold hands," he said. Ivar stood there holding my cigarette. Not looking at me. Asking about my life over my head like I was a ledger entry, which, technically. I took it back out of his fingers and left. The cold outside took the skin off my face. Twenty steps into the yard, far enough that the hall went flat behind me, and I heard the door and did not turn round. "Brennan." "I'm having a cigarette." "You're holding a cigarette." He came around in front of me. Older in daylight than he had looked against the wall, grey coming in at one temple, hands bare and red and he did not seem to know it. "I want to buy your winters," he said. Snow going sideways between us. "What?" "The three. I want to buy them. However it counts, I'll take the paperwork side." He said it the way you would order timber. "You'd be marked. You'd be Luna. Before the Frost." I laughed at him. I laughed. I need you to understand that I laughed, right in his face, and the cold got into my throat and made me cough, and I bent over with my hands on my knees in the yard of the census hall and laughed at the Alpha of the Vashti pack until my eyes ran. He waited. That was when I stopped. He had not smiled. He had not moved. He was standing in the snow with no gloves on and his mouth was a flat line and he was waiting for me to be finished so he could continue, and I understood, about four seconds too late, that he had not been joking. "You're serious." "The offer stands until the Frost." "Why me." "Because I have until the Frost to be marked, and if I'm not, this pack goes to the man in there who knew your mother's name." No heat in it at all. "And because you didn't flinch." Then he walked past me toward the road. I stood in the yard with a dead cigarette and no route and three winters, and the door banged, and it was Bee. Coat open. No hat. "Ilka. Ilka, wait." "I'm fine." "Three winters," she said. "I know." "No." She got in front of me. Her chin was going. "Ilka. I know." And I saw it. In her face. Not the shock of a girl hearing a number for the first time in a census hall. The face of someone who had been carrying it a while. "How long." She didn't answer. "Bee. How long have you known." Behind her the hall lights were coming on, one by one, yellow in all that white. "Since summer," she said. Three months. My sister had known for three months, and every one of those days she had eaten dinner across from me and asked how work was, and said goodnight, and gone up the stairs, and said nothing. That took a year off me all by itself.