The Bonded Servants

The first thing I noticed about Wattle Creek was the smell of hot dust and old blood.

I had been on the road for three days, through country that made my wolf restless and my skin gritty, and the station boundary came up on me faster than I expected. A line of white-painted posts ran east to west across the red earth, and beyond them a track of rutted clay led toward a cluster of iron roofs and a water tank that caught the afternoon sun. Somewhere out past the yards, cattle lowed and a dog barked. A crow sat on the gate post with its beak open, too hot to move.

I stopped the truck, got out, and shook the dust from my coat. My knees ached from the drive. The Council had given me a folder two inches thick and a week to make my judgment, and I had read the folder twice before I left Darwin, which meant I already knew what the report said. The Warrigal pack, called Wattle Creek by everyone who lived on it, was accused of keeping bonded human servants. The accusation came from a rogue who had been caught poaching on the western boundary. That was the whole of the evidence: one poacher, one story, and a Council report written by a clerk who had never set foot north of the Daly.

I had come to close the case. That was what I told myself as I walked up the track toward the gate, and I was still telling myself that when the woman stepped out from behind the water tank.

She was tall, and she did not hurry. Her hair was honey blonde, long and wavy, and it moved in the hot wind. Her eyes were a warm light brown, and her eyebrows were pale gold, and her skin was as fair as a child's, though there was nothing childlike in the way she looked at me. She wore a plain cotton dress with a leather belt at the waist and boots that had been mended more than once. Her arms were brown from the sun. I noticed the crescent pendant at her throat before I noticed anything else about her, a small silver moon on a thin chain.

"Council?" she said.

"Enforcer," I said. "Owen. I am here about the complaint."

"I know why you are here." She folded her arms. "You took your time."

"The roads took their time. I left as soon as the summons came."

She looked me over from my boots to my hair, and I felt it, that slow appraisal, and something in my chest turned over like a dog finding a warm spot. My wolf had been quiet for three days, sulking through the long drive and the strange country, and now he lifted his head and sniffed. I told him to settle. He did not settle.

"You are younger than the last one," she said.

"The last one retired."

"The last one died. His heart gave out in the Council office in Darwin, and nobody thought to tell us for a month." She turned and walked toward the yard. "Come on. You will want the ledger."

I followed her. The station yard was a wide square of packed earth with a shed on one side and a long low house on the other, and beyond the house the paddocks ran out flat and pale toward the horizon. A windmill creaked somewhere. Two children were chasing a hen around the shed, and a woman with red hair stood at the cookhouse door with a wooden spoon in her hand, watching me with open suspicion.

The woman with the honey hair stopped at a table under the veranda, where a ledger lay open with a stone on one corner to keep the pages from lifting. "Here," she said. "The licensing records. Every bonded servant on this station, with the date of their bond and the name of the wolf who held it."

I sat down on the bench and pulled the ledger toward me. The pages were old, the ink brown at the edges, and the first entry was dated thirty-one years back. I read the first name. Then the second. Then the third. They were ordinary names, the kind you would find in any parish register, and each one had a silver mark beside it in the margin, a tiny crescent drawn in a different ink.

"Who keeps this ledger?" I asked.

"I do," she said. "I am Nila. Gamma of this pack."

I looked up at her. "The Alpha's daughter?"

"The Alpha's Gamma. Bram is my father, but rank does not pass by blood here, and he did not choose me because of it." She sat down across from me, and the bench creaked. "You will want to speak to him, and you will want to speak to the workers. I have arranged both. Dinner is at seven, and you will eat with the pack."

"I do not need to eat with the pack."

"You will eat with the pack," she said again, in the same flat voice, and I understood that she was not offering.

I turned back to the ledger. There was a pattern in the entries that I recognized from the Council files, a notation beside each name that I had seen in a different hand in Darwin. I could not place it. I read a few more pages and the pattern held, and my wolf, who had no interest in ledgers, kept turning toward the woman across the table, sniffing at the air, and I had to press my knee against the table leg to keep from leaning closer to her.

"You are staring," she said.

"I am reading."

"You are reading the same page you read five minutes ago."

I closed the ledger. "Where did these pages come from? The original licensing records are held in Darwin."

"These are copies," she said. "Made by the clerk who kept the originals. He sent them to us before he retired."

"Which clerk?"

"His name was Silas. He is still alive, as far as I know. He lives in Darwin, in a room above a bakery, and he does not answer letters."

I made a note on my pad. The pencil was blunt and I sharpened it with my knife, and she watched me do it. There was something in the way she watched, patient and unblinking, that made me want to explain myself, and I did not like wanting that.

"Your workers," I said. "The ones with the marks. They are human?"

"Some of them."

"And the others?"

"Some of them are wolves who lost their bond and could not shift again." She said it plainly, as if she were telling me the price of feed. "The marks hold them. Without the mark they would die."

I had read that in the file. I had read it in the dry language of the Council report, in a paragraph that described bonded servants as a category of labor, and I had thought at the time that the report was written by someone who had never met one. Now I was sitting across from a woman who had, and the paragraph in my folder seemed very small.

"How many?" I asked.

"Twenty-two. Nine of them human, thirteen of them wolves. Most have been here longer than I have."

"And the licenses are valid?"

She did not answer at once. She looked past me, toward the paddocks, and her jaw moved as if she were chewing something she did not like the taste of. "The licenses are on the page," she said. "That is all I can tell you."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the answer I have."

I put the pencil down. My wolf was pacing now, uneasy, and I could feel the heat of the afternoon pressing on the back of my neck. "Gamma Nila. I am not here to trick you. If the licenses are valid, I will say so in my report, and the Council will leave you alone. If they are not valid, I need to know before I write a single word, because the penalty for a false license falls on the pack, not on the servant."

She looked at me then, and her eyes were steady and very tired. "You are an honest man," she said. "That is a problem."

Before I could ask what she meant, she reached across the table and took the ledger from under my hand, and her fingers brushed mine.

The world went white.

I have heard other wolves describe the mate bond. They say it is like a bell struck in an empty room, or a door opening in a house you thought was empty. It was neither of those things for me. It was heat, sudden and total, running up my arm and into my chest and settling somewhere behind my ribs, and my wolf howled once, a long note of recognition that shook me to the soles of my boots. I saw her face change. Her eyes widened and her lips parted, and the silver pendant at her throat caught the light as she pulled her hand back as if the table had burned her.

"No," she said.

I could not speak. My throat had closed. The bond was there between us, a taut line in the air, and I could feel her at the other end of it, feel the rapid beat of her heart and the fear coming off her like heat off a stove.

"No," she said again, and this time her voice cracked. "No, not you. Not a Council man."

"Nila." The red-haired woman had come out from the cookhouse and was standing at the bottom of the veranda steps, her spoon still in her hand. "What happened?"

Nila did not answer her. She was looking at me, and I was looking at her, and the whole station had gone quiet around us, the windmill creaking, the hen scratching in the dust, the children stopped in the middle of their game with their mouths open.

"I felt it too," I said.

"I know you did." She set the ledger down on the table with great care, as if it might break. "That is the trouble."

The red-haired woman came up the steps. She was shorter than Nila, and her hair was the color of a rusted nail, and there was flour on her apron. She looked from Nila to me and back again, and her face changed. "Oh," she said. "Oh, that is a mess."

"Ruth," Nila said. "Go and tell my father the enforcer is here."

Ruth did not move. "And the other thing?"

"Tell him the other thing too."

Ruth went. I heard her boots on the boards of the veranda and then on the earth of the yard, and then the sound of a screen door banging shut. Nila stood where she was, one hand on the back of the chair, and she would not look at me.

"Whatever this is," she said, "it changes nothing. You are here to judge my pack. I am here to keep it alive. We will do our work and you will write your report and then you will leave."

"I cannot leave."

"You can. Wolves leave all the time."

"Not when the bond is new. You know that."

Her hand tightened on the chair. "I know what the bond is supposed to mean," she said. "I also know what happens to a pack when a Council man takes an interest in it. I have seen the reclamation orders. I have seen the trucks come in the night. I have buried the people who did not get on them." She turned and looked at me then, and there was a hardness in her face that had not been there before. "So you will forgive me if I do not fall into your arms, Enforcer. I have a station to run."

She walked away across the yard, and I sat on the bench with the ledger in front of me and the bond pulling at my chest like a hook, and I did not move for a long time. The sun went down behind the paddocks and the sky turned the color of the inside of a shell, and somewhere out past the boundary a wolf howled, one long note that faded into the dark.

Ruth came back at dusk with a lamp and set it on the table. She looked at me and shook her head. "You have picked a bad week for this," she said. "We have a reclamation notice coming. Nila has been writing letters to the Council for six months and no one has answered one."

"The summons came," I said. "That is an answer."

"The summons came because she wrote it herself." Ruth wiped her hands on her apron. "She forged the Council seal and sent it to Darwin, and you are the first enforcer foolish enough to believe it."

The lamp flame guttered in the wind. I looked at the ledger, at the silver marks in the margins, at the name of a bonded servant dated thirty-one years back, and I thought about the folder in my truck and the clerk who had written it and the cold office in Darwin where I had sworn my oath.

"Show me the workers," I said.

Ruth picked up the lamp. "Come on, then. But I am telling you now, Enforcer, you will not like what you see, and you will like what Nila did to get you here even less."

She led me across the yard toward the long low building where the servants slept, and behind us, at the edge of the paddock, a figure stood in the dark and watched us go. I did not need to turn my head to know who it was. The bond told me. It had been telling me since the moment her fingers touched mine, and it would keep telling me, whether either of us wanted it or not.

The servants' quarters were a long iron building with a tin roof and a row of doors along one side, and every door had a number painted on it in white. Ruth held the lamp up at the first door and knocked twice with her knuckles, and a woman's voice said to come in.

Her name was Mabel. She was somewhere past sixty, with grey hair pinned up and hands that had been worked hard for a long time, and she sat on the edge of her bed with a shawl around her shoulders and a tin mug of tea going cold beside her. When she saw me she stood up, and her face closed like a door.

"Council," she said.

"Enforcer," I said. "My name is Owen. I am here about the licenses."

"I know what you are here about." She sat back down. "Ask your questions."

I asked them. How long have you been here. Where were you born. Who holds your license. She answered each one in as few words as she could manage, and while she talked I watched her hands, and I saw the mark on the inside of her lef