What the Cold Knows

Wren woke before dawn in a room that smelled of cedar. For a moment she didn't know where she was. The ceiling was raw timber. A quilt she didn't own was tucked to her chin. Then the night came back — the snowbank, the truck, the great room full of warm watching faces — and she lay still and listened to the house. It was not quiet. That surprised her. Somewhere below, a door opened and closed. Footsteps crossed a floor, light and quick, more than one set. And outside, faint, carried on the dying wind, came a sound that lifted every hair on her arms. A howl. Long, rising, answered by another, and then a third. Wolves on the ridge. Of course there were wolves on the ridge. She told herself that, lying in the dark, and almost believed it. She got up, wrapped the quilt around her shoulders, and went to the window. The storm had thinned to a few drifting flakes. The world below was blue-white and enormous, the trees bowed under their weight of snow, and the moon — still up, low and huge over the far peaks — laid a path of light across all of it. There were shapes moving in the snow at the treeline. Wren counted them the way she'd counted the people in the great room. Five. Six. Large, low, fast, pouring between the trees in a loose joyful pack, and they were not the gaunt grey shadows she'd half expected. They were huge. They moved like the snow was nothing. One of them stopped at the edge of the open ground and turned its great head and looked up — not at the house, she would have sworn, but at her window. At her. Its eyes caught the moonlight and held it, two flat coins of light. Wren did not step back from the window. She wanted to. Some sensible animal part of her wanted to very badly. But she stood there with the quilt clutched at her throat and looked back at the wolf, and the wolf looked at her, and neither of them moved, and the moment stretched out long and silver and impossible. Then the wolf turned and was gone into the trees, and the others flowed after it, and the snow was just snow again. A floorboard creaked behind her. She turned. Elias stood in the doorway with two mugs of coffee, and his hair was wet, and there was snow melting on the shoulders of his shirt. He had been outside. Just now. In the cold he didn't feel. "You saw," he said. Not a question. Nothing this family said was ever quite a question. Wren's mouth was dry. "I saw wolves," she said carefully. "On the ridge." "You saw the pack." He came in, set one mug on the dresser within her reach, and kept the other. He didn't crowd her. He stayed by the door, giving her the whole room and the open way out of it, and she understood that this was deliberate, that he had thought about how a woman alone in a strange house at dawn would want the door clear. "We don't usually let people stay overnight, Wren. Maren made an exception. I made an exception. Do you want to know why?" "I'm not sure I do," she said, and meant it. "That's fair." He drank his coffee. The steam rose between them. "Then I'll tell you the small true thing instead, and you can do what you want with it. The lines aren't down. I asked my mother to say they were." The cold came back into the room, even though the room was warm. "Why," Wren said. "Because if I'd told you the truth — that you could call a tow and be gone by noon — you'd have gone." Elias looked at her over the mug, and there was nothing bored in his face now, nothing patient. There was something that looked almost like fear, on a man she could not imagine being afraid of anything. "And I have spent a long time, Wren, being very sure I would know the right thing when it walked in out of the snow. And then it did. And now I find I would rather lie to my mother and to you both than watch it drive away." Wren stood very still in the cold-warm room with a stranger's quilt around her shoulders and a stranger's coffee going cold on the dresser, and the howl came again from the white ridge, far away and unbearably clear. "You'd better," she said, when she could speak, "tell me the large true thing now." And Elias, to his credit, did.