Chapter 78: THE TRACKER
The pipe told him the man was staying, and the man was staying because somebody was coming to meet him.
From the gully, Aiden could see that meeting. He could not hear a word of it.
So he moved closer in the night.
"How close?" the boy said.
"The dead trees. Between us and the ditch."
"That’s thirty paces from the men."
"Thirty from the ditch. Sixty from the men."
"There’s a dead hound in the ditch."
"I know what’s in the ditch."
The boy pulled his coat around him and said nothing else. Aiden took it as agreement. In the small hours, from a twelve-year-old, it was close enough.
They went up the gully on their bellies and into the burned trees before the moon came up.
Aiden put the boy against the base of the widest trunk and the kit bag beside him. Miasma went flat under the bag.
The cat pressed itself into the boy’s side and stayed there. Nyx went into the dark around Aiden’s collar and stayed there.
Aiden lay down between two trunks and put his coat over his boots.
Thirty paces. If it comes to it, I can’t outrun a wolf across open ash.
Then it had better not come to it.
He slept an hour. Maybe less.
At first grey, the pipe came back.
The fourth man had let it go out sometime in the night and lit it again at dawn. The little red point sat at the base of the stake. The man had sat there all night, and his hands were still steady enough to strike a flint first go.
Patient men are the dangerous ones. Marsh taught me that, and Marsh is one of them.
The tracker came late in the morning.
I gave them two days.
They took nineteen hours.
He came up the cut path from the east. He walked it like he was doing them a favour.
His coat was Vane charter, cut long at the back and short at the front. His boots were wrong for a road. Thick soles, laced high past the ankle, mud dried grey in the seams. Boots for ground nobody had cleared yet.
Behind him came the wolf.
Bigger than the Cinderhound had been. Grey through the coat, so pale it went white at the tips. Where it walked, the ash under its feet stiffened and stayed pale for a breath after it had passed.
One patch at the front of its throat was the white of new bone.
It walked at his heel with nothing on it. No collar, no lead.
Nothing that size walks to heel unless something taught it to.
And you don’t teach a thing that size with a leash.
The wolf went past the stake without a glance. It went over the path first, then the row, then the open ground between. It was slow about all three.
Aiden watched it work. His mouth had gone dry.
It’s working the ground. Perimeter, approach, then the den. Same order I’d take it.
Whoever trained that is better than the proctor. Better than the senior.
The fourth man stood up off the stake. He pointed south, down the slope, at the ditch.
The tracker looked where he pointed, then the two of them walked south, over the stakes and down the slope. The wolf came with them.
Thirty paces from the trees.
Aiden put his face in the ash and made his breathing long and flat. Beside him, the boy did the same. He’d drilled the boy on it half the night. The boy had it right. Best news all morning.
The wolf stopped at the edge of the ditch. It put its nose down, went along the length above the edge, and stopped at the north end where the loose dirt was.
It sat down there.
It sat with its nose over the spot and waited for the men. Aiden lay with his cheek in the ash and did not move.
Any dog would find the dirt. That wolf found it and didn’t dig, didn’t bark, didn’t move. It just sat down and waited to be asked.
The tracker came down into the ditch. He was in there for a while. When he came up, he had ash on both knees and empty hands.
"Hound," he said. "Hand of dirt over it. Throat cut, done properly. Buried in a hurry by someone who never buried a body before."
"Off charter," the fourth man said.
"That’s off charter, and you knew it. You were right to leave it."
"Do we sweep it?" the fourth man said.
"With four men and no hound? No." The tracker looked south, past the ditch, at the burned trees. "He’s three days gone, or he’s watching us right now. Either way, I’m not walking my wolf into cover after a man who can kill a hound."
Aiden held his breath until his chest ached.
Look at the trees. Look at the trees and see black poles and nothing else.
Please.
The tracker turned away and walked back up the slope.
Aiden let the air out of his chest slowly.
Beside him, very quietly, the boy said: "I thought he saw us."
"So did I."
"You didn’t look like you did."
"That’s the job."
They came back up to the stake row. The wolf came with them.
"That’s a Snow Wolf," the fourth man said. Not a question.
"Kennel-bred. Runt of the line. The Baron keeps the full-blood for himself, and you don’t want to see its size."
Snow Wolf. And a bigger one.
Only then did the tracker look into the square, at the roots on the slope where the den was.
He stopped.
He crouched at the inside of the stake line, put two fingers into a print Aiden could not see from the trees, and stayed down.
He stood up slower than he’d gone down.
"That’s her," the tracker said.
The fourth man came up beside him and followed his eyes. "That’s an Ember Wolf, sir. There’s a hundred of them in the marches."
"That one’s the Baron’s. It went over the kennel wall in the spring. The registry struck her from the House rolls the same week."
"For escaping?"
"For dropping to E. Once a beast falls that far, the House stops counting it." The tracker hadn’t stopped looking at the roots. "No beast comes back from E. That one was bred D."
The fourth man was quiet for a moment. "You’re telling me they dropped it a full grade."
"I’m telling you they put it in the cold to take it down far enough to re-bond clean, and they held it there too long."
"That’s not a training. That’s ruining a beast."
"That’s what I said at the time." The tracker wiped his fingers on his coat. "Then it went over the wall half-dead, came out here, and whelped on the Baron’s own charter ground."
He made a short sound through his nose.
"Why out here, sir? There’s forty miles of country."
"Because it was warm here once."
Aiden lay with his heart going hard against the ground.
They froze her. In a room. Until she dropped a grade and stopped being worth what she was written down as.
And she crawled out and came back to the only warm ground she remembered.
He thought about a den in a root mass with three pups in it, one of them with legs that didn’t work.
"And the pups?" the fourth man said.
"Whelped out here. Nothing to feed them on, and no fire left in her to keep them warm." The tracker was already turning toward the path. "They won’t last the week."
"So he wants her before they go."
"He wants her out of the world. She’s what a cold room does when it’s left running too long, and she’s walking around on his own ground where anybody can look at her." The tracker’s voice did not change at all. "Set the iron."
Two men came up the cut path with a long shape between them on a pole, wrapped in oil-cloth.
They set it down and unwrapped one end.
Under the cloth was iron. Pale, and bloomed white along its length like the inside of a window in winter.
The air above it turned to mist.
The ground under it went white. The mist rolled downslope and reached him a moment later, thin and wet, cold enough to make his teeth ache.
The two men wrapped it again before it reached their hands.
It pulls the heat out of the ground.
She’s made of heat.
One of the gloved men kicked the wrap straight with his boot. The other one laughed. Neither of them looked up at the roots.
The Snow Wolf sat where the tracker had left it and watched them handle the iron.
Aiden watched the Snow Wolf watch it.
It’s seen that thing used. It’s seen it used on something.
The tracker snapped his fingers once without turning round. The wolf got up, went to his heel, and sat.
Aiden looked at the coil of treated line on the man’s hip. Then at the grey coat over the wolf’s shoulders, where the hair grew wrong, in short raised lines over mended skin.
No word. No lead. Just a snap, and it knows.
Under the kit bag, Miasma shifted her weight against Aiden’s ankle. She hadn’t moved all morning. She moved now.
He put two fingers on her back and left them there until she settled.
His eyes met hers, and something in his chest let go.
You’ll never learn that. Not from me. Not ever.
The cry came off the roots in the middle of the afternoon.
It was lower than the previous days. Closer to a sound that got out on its own.
The boy heard it first. He froze.
The cat sat up.
Across the slope, the mother came out to the mouth of the roots.
She had the third pup in her jaw.