The Spring Between Us

Chapter 64: A Night We Shouldn't Have

We carried the stone down the mesa at midnight with eight wolves and a lantern and put it in the hall on the long table, and the whole pack came in to look at it.

Nobody said much. Old Tomas read it and put his hand over his mouth. Sten read it twice and then went out and stood on the porch and did not come back in for a while. Mira read it and sat down on the bench and cried, and Nora sat beside her and held her hand and did not cry at all.

I stood at the head of the table with the stone in front of me and the pact and the rings beside it and the mark on my arm bright, and I said, "The first pair were murdered by a Council man named Silas and his son is the envoy who has been in this canyon for a week. That is on the stone in my mother's hand and it is not going to be argued with. Tomorrow I am going to take this stone and the pact and the tank and the box Ryland took out of Ruth's quarters and I am going to put them in front of the autumn gathering of the Council of Alphas. Not the envoy. Not the clerk. The whole Council, in the capital, in the open hall, with both packs and the town and the doctor and the foreman standing in front of them."

The hall stirred.

"The autumn gathering is in three weeks," Sten said. "It is four hundred miles."

"Then we leave in the morning." I looked at him. "Beta. I want ten warriors and the wagon and provisions for three weeks. I want the stone wrapped in canvas and put in the wagon and the tank left here under guard. And I want the pack to know that whoever stays in this canyon holds it, and whoever goes to the capital speaks for it."

Sten nodded and went out.

The hall emptied slowly. Nora took Mira to her hut. Berik put a guard on the door. Cal was asleep again by the fire with his sandy coat still dusty, and I went and put a blanket over him and he did not wake.

Then I went up the back stairs to the room over the stable and shut the door and sat down on the bed and put my face in my hands.

I do not know how long I sat there. The door opened without a knock and Hank came in with a lantern and set it on the chest and sat down beside me on the bed.

"The pack is fed," he said. "The wagon is loaded. Sten has the warriors. Your mother's stone is wrapped in canvas in the wagon bed and I have put the pact and the rings and the box in a saddlebag and I am sleeping with the saddlebag under my head tonight."

I laughed. It came out of me wrong, too loud, and then it turned into something else and I put my hand over my mouth.

"Derya," Hank said.

"I am all right."

"You are not all right. You have been up for two days and you have held a beam up with your shoulder and you have read a pact at a spring and a stone came out of the water with your grandmother's name on it." He put his hand on my back. "And tomorrow you are going to get on a horse and ride four hundred miles to a Council that has already ruled against you twice."

I took my hand away from my mouth and looked at him.

"I do not know what I am doing," I said. "I have been making this up since the spring house. I have been making it up since the night I went over that border with poison in my pocket. Every time someone asked me what to do I said the first thing that came into my head and then I did it and it worked and I do not know why it worked. I am not my mother. My mother knew the law and the land and the water and she had been doing it for nineteen years. I have been Luna for a month."

"You have been Luna for a month and you have opened a valve that nobody could find for twenty years and you have brought two packs under one roof and you have put a Council envoy in a hall with nothing to say." Hank turned me toward him. "And you have held a boy in your arms while he shifted for the first time and you have read a pact at a spring in front of a canyon. That is not a wolf who is making it up. That is a Luna."

I looked at him.

"Hank," I said. "I am tired. I am so tired."

"Then lie down."

"I do not want to lie down alone."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he got up and blew out the lantern and in the dark I heard him take his boots off and his coat off and then the bed moved and his arm came around me and pulled me down.

"Then you will not lie down alone," he said.

I turned in his arms and put my face against his chest and he held me and the mark on my arm was warm and steady and my wolf came up out of the dark and lay down in me and went quiet.

I do not know how long we lay like that. Long enough for the pack house to go silent and the wind to come across the mesa and the moon to move over the roof. His hand was in my hair and his heart was under my ear and I could smell juniper and dust and woodsmoke and I had not been this warm since the spring.

Then I lifted my head and found his mouth in the dark.

He kissed me back and then he stopped and said, "Derya. You are exhausted. You have been up for two days."

"I know. I am not asking you to do anything. I am asking you not to stop."

He did not stop.

It was slow and it was quiet and it was not like the first night in his pack house in the storm. That night had been a fire in a cold room. This was different. This was two wolves who had been holding a canyon up between them for a month putting it down for an hour. He got my shirt off and I got his and the room was dark and the mark on my arm lit the dark a little, and I put my hand over his heart and felt it going, and he put his hand over mine and held it there.

"Tell me what you want," he said.

"I want you to not let go."

He did not let go. He turned me over onto my back and came down over me and kissed me from my mouth to my throat to the mark on my arm, and where his mouth touched the mark it went from warm to hot to a steady bright heat that ran up my arm and into my chest and down my spine, and my wolf came up and stayed up and did not push and did not fight. She was awake and she was not wild. She was there the way a wolf is there when it is running with the pack.

I got my hands into his hair and pulled him up and kissed him and he came up over me and then there was no more talking for a while.

I will not put all of it down. Some of it belongs to the two of us and to a small dark room over a stable on the night before a long ride. But I will say that he was patient and I was not, and that when it was over and I was lying against his chest with the blanket pulled up and my mark bright on his skin where my arm lay across him, I felt my wolf settle in a way she had never settled before. She had been a wild thing in the dark for a month and she had fought me every step and she lay down in me that night and put her head on her paws and went to sleep.

"How is your wolf?" Hank said.

"She is asleep."

"Good."

I lifted my head. "Hank. Your chest."

"What?"

I sat up in the dark and pulled the blanket down and turned his shoulder toward the lantern I had relit. There was a mark on his chest. It was silver and it lay over his heart and it was a crescent with the horns turned up.

"You have a mark," I said.

"I have had it since the spring house. It came the night you touched me at the pipe."

"You did not tell me."

"I told you at the pack house. The night after the storm. I showed you my arm and you showed me yours." He looked down at his chest. "It has grown since then. It was small and it is not small now."

I put my hand over it. It was warm under my palm and it matched the mark on my arm exactly and it lay over his heart like a seal on a letter.

"The pact says the pair shall be known by the marks on their arms," I said. "It does not say on their arms and their chests."

"Then the pact did not know everything." Hank pulled me back down. "Sleep. We ride at dawn."

I lay down against him. The mark on my arm was bright and his chest was warm and the room was dark and the pack house was quiet.

"Derya," he said, after a while.

"What?"

"There is a thing I have been thinking about since the spring house and I am going to say it now because it is dark and because you are too tired to argue with me. When this is over, when the Council has ruled and the water is settled and the canyon is ours, I am not going back to my side of the border."

I did not say anything for a moment.

"Neither am I," I said.

He laughed, low, in the dark. Then he put his hand on the back of my head and held me there.

We slept. At dawn the pack house woke and the wagon was in the yard and the horses were saddled and the stone was wrapped in canvas in the wagon bed and Sten was at the gate with ten warriors. I came down the back stairs with my boots on and my jacket on and the key around my neck and the mark on my arm bright, and the whole pack was in the yard to see us off.

And at the gate, with a lantern in her hand, Mira was waiting.

"Luna," she said. "There is a rider come up the mesa road in the dark and he is at the gate now. He is a Council rider and he has a letter with the Council seal on it and he says he is to give it into your hand and no one else's and then wait for an answer."

I took the letter. It was heavy paper and it had the Council seal pressed into it and it was addressed to the Luna of the Kızıltaş pack.

I opened it and read it.

"Luna?" Sten said.

"The Council of Alphas has heard the petition of the Council envoy Silas," I said. "And it has ordered the two packs of this canyon to appear before the autumn gathering in three weeks, and to bring the pact and the rings and the stone and the ledgers and the pair." I looked up. "And it says the Council has ordered that until the autumn gathering, the envoy Silas is suspended from his duties and is to remain in this canyon under the guard of the two packs."

The yard was silent.

Silas was sitting in the Council hall at the quarry, three miles down the mesa road, with four soldiers and a clerk and a radium tank in the yard.