The smile, barely there in the first place, died away. “There wasn’t much left of him when I found him—hide, bones, and determination. He had this girl … this woman with him, who was in worse shape. He was half-delirious and mostly incoherent, and it didn’t help matters that I was still more wolf than man. Much of what he said made no sense to me, and so I did not make an effort to remember it.
“More than a hundred people dead, he said. Of those he’d escaped with, the majority were women and children.” Bran shook his head. “He’d somehow managed to kill or subdue whatever was killing them or holding them—though he wasn’t clear on either of those points. I understood it had something to do with music and wild magic. The woman who was dying was the last of the group of people he’d initially managed to save. I found the bodies of the rest later—children, mostly. A couple of babies looked to be very nearly newborn. After all the rest died, when Leah was the last survivor, Sherwood decided that she would live whether she wanted to or not. I think he was probably half-mad by then. He wasn’t a healer like your brother, but he had power. I had the impression that he’d drained himself to the edge of death trying to save the others, and that affected his reason, too. Bereft of other, better choices, he Changed her—and then held her to life with his magic when the Change didn’t seem like it had taken. It was killing him.”
Charles sucked in a breath at the awful parallel. A stranger held to life by magic that was killing someone Bran loved. Just as Charles had killed Blue Jay Woman.
“I am not the mage he was,” Bran said. “Even if the wolf had not been so near, I could not break into the spell he’d worked. I—the wolf I was—determined the only way to save Sherwood was to save the woman also. I needed to form a pack again, to pull one of them into my pack so I could feed them strength.”
Bran had been running without a pack for a long time by that point, Charles knew, since long before he and Samuel had left Europe for the New World. Neither his da nor his brother had ever told him why, and Charles had never asked.
“Sherwood was too far gone, and too bound to the woman. If I tried to make him pack and he chose to fight, and I had reason to believe that he might, he would die.” Bran almost smiled again. “So, for that matter, might I have done. Instead, I performed the blood and flesh exchange with her. With Leah.”
He paused, his eyes on the map in front of him but his mind obviously on that long-ago day. His voice carried a note of wonder Charles was fairly certain his da didn’t know was there.
His voice a bare whisper, Bran murmured, “Of all of those people, she was the last survivor, Charles. When I bound her to my pack, the first of all that pack, I understood why. Her spirit … so strong.” He half closed his eyes and breathed in as if he were still in that desperate moment. Under the lowered eyelids, Charles could see the glimmer of gold. “Such determination, so much fight in her.” He let out a breath and smoothed a fold in the map with a flattened palm. “But not, alas, enough strength to allow her to survive without help. And making her pack was not enough. She’d been ill for a long time, and fighting for her life through the Change for several days.”
Surviving the Change was not something one usually did for days—or even hours. In Charles’s experience, the Change from human to werewolf happened in under an hour or it didn’t happen at all. He imagined the agony of it, to be hung suspended in the middle of a Change from human to wolf, neither one nor the other. The confusion would make the pain all that much worse.
“I think if I had been less broken,” Bran said, “or less moonstruck, I would have made other choices, but I cannot know that. I could simply have let her die. I could have helped her along. Sherwood would have died, too—but that was a choice he had made.”
His voice trailed off and his body went very still. “I have done a lot of things I am ashamed of,” Bran said. “This was not the worst.”
“You bound her as your mate,” said Charles, who had seen where this was leading—had grown up with the result of that decision. “But you couldn’t have done it without her consent.”
He knew that, remembered the tension of waiting to see if Anna would accept him. A person could be forced into the Change. Could be forced into a pack. But the mating bond could not be forced—it required acceptance by both parties.
“Could I not?” asked Bran, his mouth twisting. “She had been forcibly Changed, left in agony, then forcibly bound to a pack. I don’t think she was capable of giving consent.”
Bran shrugged his shoulders as if he were trying to shed some burden. “I knew it then, and I know it now. I am not proud of what I did. I bound her wolf to mine by force. She was dying. She was dying and taking Sherwood with her.” He met Charles’s eyes. “I could not bear it, not after Blue Jay Woman. My wolf spirit was looking for surcease, and Leah’s was trying to survive.” He paused, then said, “I do not regret taking Leah as my mate, only that I did it without giving her an alternative.”
Charles gave him a formal nod, though both of them could hear the lie in Bran’s voice. Leah was not Blue Jay Woman, who had been fierce—but from all accounts also brilliant and charming. Leah was cold and methodical.
Charles remembered the cold-eyed, brittle woman his da had brought home and thought of her, for perhaps the first time, from his adult perspective instead of the perspective of the child he had been. He considered that woman now in the light of his da’s revelations—a survivor. A victim. Not a jealous woman, perhaps, so much as a broken one. He could see it. No wonder his da had been so protective of her; guilt could drive a person harder than love.
“As soon as the mate bond fell into place …” Bran hesitated only a bare moment and continued, “Sherwood’s magic fell away and I was able to pull her all the way into the Change. They both survived.”
Bran took up a pencil and touched it to the map at the edge of the silver line marking Leah’s lands. “I think they were somewhere in here when I came upon them. It was a clearing on the shoulder of a mountain. Sherwood didn’t tell me much, but I got the impression he had dragged his little group of survivors as far as they could travel before stopping.
“We buried the dead while Leah recovered enough to travel.” He hesitated. “She never said, but I am quite sure one of the children we buried was hers. After the first day, after Sherwood recovered his senses, he would not say a word about what he had fought, about why he worried when Leah sang. He told me only that it was dangerous to speak of. I believed him, believe him still. Leah told me once that she remembers that time in her life in snapshots of memories.” He paused. “She remembers some faces, a few moments. But nothing concrete. She thinks Sherwood made her forget.”
“And now something is happening and we can’t ask Sherwood,” said Charles. “Because Sherwood doesn’t remember anything before the day the Emerald City Pack found him in the witch’s cage, and Leah doesn’t remember anything because of Sherwood.”
“And I can’t send him with you because he belongs to Hauptman now,” agreed Bran. “Though I’ve got half a mind to make him go anyway. Maybe something about the trip would jog his memory loose.”