The founding anniversary fell on a Saturday.
Four hundred and thirteen years of Ironmoon Pack, four hundred and thirteen years of this mountain and this territory and the particular accumulated life of wolves who had decided, in Year One, that this was where they belonged and had not moved from that decision through wars and losses and the full weight of everything four centuries could put on a pack that intended to survive it.
Selene had read about the founding in the archive room.
The first Alpha had been a man named Edric Cole, which she had known, but what the archive had given her beyond the name was the specific quality of the founding, not a formal establishment but a decision made by forty wolves standing on a ridge in winter looking at a mountain and choosing it. The record of
