Chosen Twice

The last petrol station before the valley had a hand-lettered sign taped inside the window that said NO CARDS TILL TUESDAY, and Ilva Rask paid cash for a coffee she did not drink and stood in the forecourt for four minutes with the engine ticking behind her, because four minutes was what she had budgeted for hesitating.

Five hours of road. She had done the drive in daylight on purpose, the whole flat grey ribbon of it, three podcasts about surgical technique and one about a murder, and somewhere in the last forty minutes the world had stopped being a country of retail parks and started being pines. They came up out of the shoulder of the road in a black wall, close-planted, older than the tarmac, and the air coming through the vent had changed with them — resin and wet stone and the cold mineral breath off snowmelt, a smell that got in under the ribs and did something to her pulse she had spent seven years training out of herself.

Her wolf lifted her head. Not dramatically. Just the small internal shift of an animal recognising a room.

Not a room, Ilva told her. A week.

She got back in the car.

The go-bag was on the passenger seat where it had been since the city: seven days of clothes rolled tight, a suit for the fellowship interview in case she had to drive back for it and change in a car park, boots, a coat that was wrong for the valley and right for hospital car parks in February. Behind it, in the footwell, the black roll-case that never left her. Her own suture kit. Needle drivers she had bought with her first consultant's salary and had not let a nurse touch since, Adson forceps, curved Mayos, three sizes of monofilament, a tourniquet, an iodine bottle with the label worn to nothing. Nobody in the valley had ever asked her why she travelled with it. Nobody in the valley had ever asked her much at all.

And in the door pocket, folded in half, the leave form she had printed at the hospital because it made it real: eight days out, the eighth morning, the five hours north again before the light went. Seven days of banked leave. She had signed for them in a corridor between a laparotomy and a handover, and Fen at the desk had said a whole week, doctor, what will you do with yourself, and Ilva had said go home, and had heard how it sounded only afterwards.

Her phone had given up two bends ago, which she had known it would. Before it went she had read the last message four times at a passing place with the handbrake on: the fellowship secretary, confirming a date and a room number and asking her to bring two hard copies of her logbook. Trauma fellowship, twelve months, eight applicants for two posts, the thing she had been building towards since the year she left. She had typed confirmed, and then deleted it, and then typed it again and sent it, and put the phone face down on the passenger seat like something that might get up.

The valley road narrowed. Passing places every hundred metres, a burn running white and loud on the left, and then the first of the hold's fences — old post and wire, straightened stobs, somebody's careful summer work. The turf beyond it had been cut short. There were lights strung between the alders. A rite-week valley, dressed for company.

She took the last bend at twenty and the Sorne hold came up in front of her exactly as it had every time she had ever come home from anywhere, and the ache that went through her was so old and so stupid she almost laughed.

The hold sat at the valley head where the pines came down to meet it: the long hall with its turf roof and its new tin gutters, the byres, the two rows of stone houses along the track, and above all of it the mountain going up in black and green, and up in the black of it the clearing where the standing stones were, forty minutes' walk if you were fit and did not stop. Smoke off three chimneys. Trestle tables in the yard under tarpaulins, and men shifting beer barrels, and somebody's children running the length of the track in a screaming knot with a dog.

She parked on the grass by the Rask house, next to a flatbed loaded with cut birch, and turned the engine off, and sat.

Thirty seconds. That was all she allowed herself.

Then the passenger door was wrenched open and her sister was half inside the car, arms around her neck at an angle no vertebral column enjoyed, saying her name into her hair.

"You came. You actually came, you absolute — I had money on you, Solvi had money against you, she owes me twenty—"

"Dag." Ilva got a hand up, got hold of the back of her sister's head, and held on. Warm scent, familiar as her own hands: hearth-smoke and sheep grease and the same coiled hair, worn loose where Ilva wore hers braided flat and off her neck because that was what the scrub cap wanted. "You're crushing my trachea."

"You're a doctor. Fix it." Dagny pulled back far enough to look at her, and her eyes were wet, and she did not bother to do anything about it. Rounder than Ilva, shorter than Ilva, the same brown skin gone ruddy across the cheeks from a week of outdoor work. Twenty-seven and about to be mated and radiant with it. "God, you look tired."

"That's the look. That's the whole look. I've cultivated it."

"You've got a scar." Dagny's thumb went towards her eyebrow and Ilva let it, because refusing would have made it a thing.

"Three years old. A gentleman with a broken bottle didn't want a chest drain."

"Did he get one?"

"He got two."

Dagny laughed, wet and delighted, and hauled her out of the car by the wrist.

Because then came the list.

"—so the garments need airing tonight because the shed's damp, and Gran wants you at the hall before dark, before, Ilva, not around, and Rurik's mother has made a thing about the mead which you will taste and say is good, and I need you for the flour on Monday because Astrid can't lift, and there's the fire tonight—" Dagny had her arm and was steering her across the grass past the flatbed, talking fast enough that the sentences overlapped, "—and don't fight with Gran in the first hour, I'm asking for me, not for her, and there's a thing about the witnesses I want to tell you before she does—"

"What thing about the witnesses?"

"Later. Not in the yard."

"Dagny."

"I said later." Her sister smiled at her, sunny and immovable — the exact expression their mother had used to end conversations, and Ilva felt the door shut. "Say hello to people. Some of them have been rehearsing."

They had.

It took her forty minutes to cross a yard that was ninety feet wide. Old Astrid Ness came out of the byre wiping her hands and said, "Well," and looked her up and down for a long moment, and then, "You'll have brought a coat that's no use," which was affection, and was also completely accurate. Halvor from the low houses shook her hand and did not meet her eyes and said the weather had been fine. Two of the young ones she had last seen as toddlers stared at her openly, because she was the story they had grown up on: the Rask girl who went. Somebody's grandmother said, loudly, to somebody else, "That's her," in the tone reserved for weather events.

And running under all of it, in every greeting, in the pause before every hello, the thing she could actually smell — because the joke of coming home was that here everyone's feelings were public — the flat green tang of disapproval, careful and communal, laid over a genuine and grudging pleasure that she had turned up at all. They were glad. They were also collecting. She had walked out of this yard the night before her claiming with a bag on her shoulder and had never written to explain herself, and the valley had been keeping the account open, and now she had parked in it.

One of the running children came past her at speed with his fist wrapped in a rag, and Ilva had him by the wrist before she had decided to do it. She turned the hand over. A flap laceration across the base of the thumb, an hour old at most, dirty, edges clean enough — a barbed-wire injury, or a bad job with a knife on birch bark.

"Who did this for you?"

"Did it myself," the boy said, with pride.

"I meant the rag." She thumbed the skin below the cut, watched the colour come back into the nail bed, flexed the thumb through its arc while he squirmed. No tendon involvement. No numbness on the radial side. "Come to the clinic before you eat. It needs washing out properly and two stitches, and if it's left it'll go septic and you'll be no use for the week, and then everyone will be very angry with you and not with me."

"Are you doing it?"

"Somebody is."

He ran off before she could get a tetanus history out of him, and she stood there with her hands open and empty in front of her and became aware of Halvor watching her from the byre door with an expression she could not read and had no intention of asking about.

She smiled and shook hands and asked after hips and lambs and roofs, and let none of it touch her, and her hands stayed loose at her sides, and she was aware of them the whole time — a surgeon's habit, knowing where your hands are, keeping them off fences and gateposts and anything with a splinter in it.

Nobody said his name.

That was the thing. That was the whole afternoon in one absence. Twenty people spoke to her and not one of them said Kolvar, or the alpha, or himself, or anything at all, and the not-saying moved ahead of her across the yard like a bow wave. Astrid nearly did it — got as far as "You'll be seeing—" and then stopped and said, "—the hall's been reroofed," and Ilva said, "It looks well," and both of them stood in the wreckage of the sentence for a second and then moved on.

She could smell that too. Pine and iron, faint, old, everywhere. On the gatepost of the long hall where a hand had rested a hundred times. In the yard air. Weeks of it, months of it, laid down and layered the way a scent goes into wood, the ordinary track of a man who lived here and worked here and touched things.

Her wolf turned over inside her like something waking under ice, and then it was not the wolf at all, it was the body: a low hot drag that started at the base of her skull and went down the spine and out through her hips, her mouth filling, her heart dropping a beat the way a wheel drops into a rut. Old scent. Cold wood. Four seconds, and seven years of trained-out reflex came off her like a dressing. She stood in the middle of the yard with her face still doing the polite thing and the ground quietly moving under her, and thought, without having asked herself to: there he is. He was not in the valley. She had not laid eyes on him. It made no difference whatsoever.

Ilva breathed out through her mouth for six paces, a trick she had learned in a trauma bay and had never expected to need at home, and thought, with great clarity: seven days.

The Rask house smelled of woodsmoke and drying rosemary and dog. Her grandmother's coat was on the hook. Ilva put her go-bag down at the foot of the stairs, in the hall, not in the room — a distinction she was aware of making and made anyway — and set the black roll-case on top of it.

Dagny watched her do it. Dagny had always been the observant one and had never been given credit for it.

"You're not unpacking."

"I'm not staying."

"You're staying seven days."

"That's what I said." Ilva straightened. Through the window, out in the yard, the men had got the second row of trestles up and were arguing about the tarpaulin, and beyond them the mountain went up black into a sky that was already going the colour of a bruise, and somewhere up in the pines were the stones she had not looked at once since she got out of the car. "Dag. What thing about the witnesses?"

Her sister leaned against the doorframe and folded her arms and looked at her with enormous, uncomplicated love.

"Before dark," Dagny said. "At the hall. She'll tell you herself."

"That's not an answer."

"No," Dagny agreed, "it isn't," and went to put the kettle on.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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