Chapter One

A Night of Whispers

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Three years later....

"Wolf! Wolf!"

I bolted awake, jerking upright in bed at the scream coming from the sheep pens near our house. I heard the pounding of footsteps downstairs and realized that I hadn't been dreaming and the scream wasn't the playful shriek of Peter, my father's youngest assistant. Rolling out of bed, I stuffed my feet into my leather boots, pulled a jacket on over my shift, and ran downstairs to meet with my father and his lads.

"Margaret!" My father's voice snapped like a whip over my head. I almost didn't acknowledge his rebuke - I hated the name Margaret. "You're not going out, not with a wolf on the farm."

"But, Father-"

"No!"

I growled at him under my breath as I watched three of the four boys he'd hired from the town scramble out the door. I was a shepherd's daughter, and I knew how to watch for wolves - knew better than these foolish boys who hadn't set foot out of the township of Greentree before the age of thirteen. Soft as marshmallow, this lot. But my father refused to let me out of the house after dark. Not after what had happened to my nine brothers. Not after my mother, pregnant with what she was certain would've been a tenth son, drowned in the well at dusk. And since mid of the night had barely passed by, the darkness outside hung heavy against the house, pressing against the doors and windows, locking me in. My father refused to relinquish the keys to my proverbial prison.

Looking around the large room that served as the first floor of our little stone house, I noticed my father's mistress seated before our hearth, staring intently into the flickering flames, ignoring the scream of "Wolf! Help!" She didn't seem to hear the fourth town boy's frightened cries or the snarls and barking of our dogs. She only looked into the fire while she brushed out her long, copper-red hair.

Her name was Lily, and she had murdered my mother. No, I don't mean literally. But the moment she came to our cottage, my mother's spirit, so carefully preserved in my father's heart, was slain.

I ignored her and looked to her left and found her shadow - her son, Wulf. He had come with her when she arrived at our cottage almost three years ago, a half-wild boy with ragged black hair and the clearest blue eyes I'd ever seen. He rarely spoke, and the sheep were frightened of him - the reason he wasn't outside chasing off or killing the wolf with the others.

I sat next to Wulf on the bench against the back wall of the house, eying him. He looked troubled, and he kept rubbing the back of his head with one dirty hand. Though his mother forced him to scrub his hands nearly bloody, they still managed to remain almost perpetually grunge-encrusted. Since he was allowed outside - though not anywhere near the sheep pens or the dogs - and I was forced to remain indoors unless on an errand, I didn't know what he did with himself that made him so dirty. It almost seemed as if he did it strictly to defy Lily and her ban on dirt, but I'd never asked him.

"This is ridiculous," I muttered to Wulf. He glanced at me, shrugged. It was easy to talk to him, even with his mother around. The boy my father insisted on calling my brother may not have spoken more than twenty words to me in the three years he'd lived here, but he always listened to what I had to say.

"Do not complain, Margaret," Lily ordered.

"The child can complain as much as she likes about this ridiculous prohibition." The second woman, who came in as my father's mistress chided me, was my Aunt Clarissa, who had moved in with us a week after my mother's death.

I gritted my teeth, half-waved to Wulf, and went back upstairs.

In my bedroom, I threw off my jacket and kicked off my boots before flinging myself onto my bed. Irritation clawed at my throat. Angry words boiled up, wanting out, but I swallowed them down. In the last three years, I'd never been outside except at noon or on mornings so hot and bright the fire faeries would sweat, and even then, only in need, when all the lads were occupied. When I was a little girl, before all of my brothers had disappeared, I had had sheep-watch in the night with the oldest who had been on hand - usually David or Andrew. The sheep were my friends, and it was spring, lambing season. There were helpless lambs out there with what might be a pack of wolves, with nothing to defend them save my father's dogs and the town boys' slings (and their aim was nothing to boast of). I clenched my fists and rolled onto my belly, chewing my lip, thinking furiously.

I jumped up and stripped. Hauling on my thinnest linen breeches, a faded black that was almost gray, and pulling on a loose black shirt, I slid my feet into my dancing shoes.

As a very, very small child, when we'd lived in town for two years in an attempt to protect my brothers, my mother had insisted that I receive dancing lessons. Her father had been a baker, but at one time his mastery in the art of making subtleties had called him to the castle of the King, where he'd met my grandmother, a court dancer. My grandmother had taught my mother to dance, and my mother and Aunt Clarissa had taught me. My aunt had once been a dance instructor in Greentree before moving out to our cottage.

Now, I put on my oldest slippers that still fit to my feet. Though thin, they were light and made my footsteps soundless. So dressed, I got back into bed and closed my eyes, waiting for the sound of my father's return.

Minutes ticked by. Night waned. The frigid darkness of an early spring night deepened until it seemed as if tenebrous fingers scraped at my window, hissing at me to let in the shadows. The dark hated me, and I hated it, but my heart told me the lambs needed someone to protect them. It sounded stupid, but the sheep were our livelihood and wolves had already killed over a score of them since the beginning of the new year. Darkness or none, I would go out there.

Down below, the door burst open, and I heard my father's voice say, "They carried off that little lamb, the runt, and the one with the twisted foot. And Bandit had to be put down."

Tears stung my eyes. Bandit had been my mother's sheep dog. The savagery of the wolves around our home was becoming worse, if one of our dogs had been so badly injured that death was the only recourse.

I heard Aunt Clarissa's gasp of shock, and Lily's indifferent voice. On the stairs, I heard Wulf coming. He had the bedroom opposite mine. My father had moved himself to a pallet before the fire since the third wolf attack in winter. This was not good - I had to sneak past him, unless I wanted to climb down the side of the cottage. I had done so once before, and fallen, spraining an ankle. In the darkness of my room, I waited, snuggling under the covers as if cold, although I was sweating from the heat. My heart pounded in my ears. The boys tramped in and retired to bed. They'd left Peter, the youngest town boy, out in the field. If I knew him, he'd either fall asleep again, or just wouldn't see me. The test was my father. Could I get past him?

Suddenly a shiver went up my spine, and I had the sudden urge to hide under my blankets. The night outside seemed to scream silently at me. My blood turned to ice. What was going on?

Finally, everyone was in bed. Shivering, I got up and crept to my door, quietly opening it a crack to listen for movement downstairs. I heard my father's heavy snoring, and sighed. Opening the door wider, I slipped out and tiptoed to the stairs.

Then I heard her voice.

"Don't encourage that girl." It was Lily. "She's far too wild. I left her too long to her brothers before I came here. I took far too long removing them."

My heart froze. Shocked, I sank to the floor and peered through the rails to see Lily stirring the fire in the hearth, Wulf watching her from his position on the bench. I hadn't heard him come back downstairs. My mind reeled. I took far too long removing them. My brothers. Matthew, Henry, Jonathon, Christopher, Marcus, Jacob, Armand, David, and Andrew. She... she had been the one to kidnap them? How? How was that even possible?

I heard a mumbled reply from Wulf, and Lily's knife-edged voice snarled, "Don't be stupid! Of course I kept the shadow cakes. If I destroyed the blasted things, those brats' shadows would simply return to them. I want the shadow - and thus, the spirit - separate from the body long enough for those wretched boys to lose what humanity they might still have. And no, I do not have them here, in this hovel. Any of those wretched sheep boys might devour one and release the spirit within."

My temples were beginning to pound. Shadow cakes? Shadows? Spirits? Separate from the body? I had no idea what she was talking about, but I knew it had something to do with my brothers, and it was very, very bad.

"But, Mother, can't Margaret break the-"

SLAP!

"Do not call me Mother. I am not your mother. I told you, I found you on my doorstep long ago, after your idiot mother presumably died. And yes, Margaret could break the spell, if she knew how. But she doesn't. The little fool knows nothing of anything except sheep, sugar, and dancing shoes."

A hot flush flooded my face. Sheep, sugar, and dancing shoes? I was a shepherd's daughter with a love of dancing, and my mother had taught me as a little girl to make subtleties, though nothing more intricate than a daisy. It was, for all intents and purposes, a parlor trick. Those were the things I was good at. I had no other real skills. I couldn't even read. And so I knew nothing of anything, did I?

Well, this much I knew. There was a spell on my brothers. Lily had cast it, but I could break it. I could bring my brothers back.

Breathing as shallowly as possible, I strained my ears to catch more. I could break the spell, apparently, but I didn't know how. I had to find out.

Suddenly, a buzzing filled my ears and pain lanced my skull. Down below, Lily gasped in outrage. Panic hit my blood like poison, and I pulled away from the edge of the stairs as the woman who had enchanted my brothers opened her mouth to say I knew not what - a spell, a scream, a summoning. But the night was rent with the shriek of "WOLF!!!"

And in the pounding rush of men and dogs and my aunt that followed, I slipped back into my room and fell into my bed, pretending as if I had been there all along.