The Spring Between Us

Chapter 4: The Mark on My Wrist

Mira's hut sat behind the pack house where the ground sloped down toward the old well, a low square building of stone and juniper beams with a crooked stovepipe and a smell of dried sage that reached me ten feet from the door.

I did not go straight there. I made myself walk the yard first, because a Luna who comes home at sunrise and goes running to the healer without a word is a Luna who has something to hide, and half the pack had already seen me ride in with Ruth. So I stopped by the gate and asked Cal about the night watch in a voice I hoped sounded ordinary, and I let old Tomas tell me about his grandson's fever, and I stood in the morning sun and listened to two warriors argue about a broken axle on the ore cart. My wrist was burning now. It had gone from a coal to a small steady fire that crept up my forearm and settled in the crook of my elbow, and every time the wind came across the yard it carried a faint echo of juniper and dust and something underneath, and my knees went weak.

Mira's door was open. She was standing at her table with her back to me, grinding something in a stone bowl, and she did not turn around when I came in.

"Shut it," she said.

I shut it. The hut was dim and warm and smelled of the sage and of the beeswax she used on her instruments, and there was a pot of water on the stove with steam coming off it. Mira set down the bowl and wiped her hands on her apron and turned, and her round face was grey. She looked at me for a long moment and then she looked at my left arm, where I had my right hand wrapped around it, and she said, "Show me."

"Mira, I do not even know what it is."

"Show me."

I let go of my arm and pushed the sleeve up past my elbow. The mark had changed since dawn. It was no longer a pale curve. It ran from the base of my thumb up along the inside of my forearm, a thin line of silver that seemed to be lit from under the skin, and where it reached the crook of my elbow it forked into two smaller lines that faded before they reached the joint. It did not look like a scar or a burn. It looked like something written.

Mira came close and took my wrist in both her hands. Her fingers were cool and dry and they shook a little. She turned my arm toward the window and bent her head and looked at the mark the way she looked at a wound, from every side, and then she let go and stepped back and put both hands on the table.

"Who?" she said.

"I do not know what you mean."

"I have been the healer of this pack for thirty years and I have seen this mark twice. Once on your mother. Once on a woman from the Çöl pack who came to me in the night with her arm wrapped in cloth because she was afraid to show it to anyone." Mira's voice was steady and her face was not. "So I will ask you again, Derya, and you will tell me the truth because there is no time in this hut for anything else. Who?"

The stove hissed. Out in the yard somebody laughed.

"Hank," I said. "The Alpha of the Çöl pack."

Mira closed her eyes. She stood there with her hands on the table and her eyes shut and her lips moving, and I could not hear what she was saying, and then she opened them and pulled out a stool and sat down heavily and gestured at the other one.

"Sit. You look like a wolf that has been run all night."

"I have been run all night."

"Then sit, and drink that, and do not argue with me." She poured hot water into a cup and put something in it from a jar and pushed it across the table. It tasted of mint and something bitter, and it steadied my hands.

"How much do you know?" I asked.

"About the mark? More than I want to." Mira wrapped her apron around her fingers and unwrapped it again. "It is old. Older than the Council, the old women used to say. When two wolves are made for each other the bond puts a mark on the skin the first time they touch, and from that hour they are tied. They can feel each other across a canyon. They can find each other in the dark. If one of them dies, the other feels it go out like a lamp."

I put the cup down. "My mother had one."

"Your mother had one." Mira looked at the table. "She never told me whose. She came to me with her arm wrapped in cloth and asked me what I knew, and I told her what I have just told you, and she sat where you are sitting and did not say a word for a long while. Then she asked me to keep it quiet and I did."

"Was it my father?"

Mira's mouth tightened. "Your father died when you were six. I do not know whose mark your mother carried and I never asked her and now I cannot. But I will tell you what I do know, and you will not like it." She leaned forward. "A bond between two wolves of the same pack is a good thing. It makes the pair stronger and it makes the pack stronger. But a bond between two wolves of rival packs is a different animal. The old law calls it a truce bond. It means the two packs are bound through their Alphas, and no war can be declared between them without breaking something sacred. The Council hates it. They have hated it for as long as there has been a Council, because a truce bond takes power out of their hands and puts it into the hands of two wolves they cannot control."

"Then it is a good thing," I said. "If the Council hates it."

"It is a thing that gets people killed." Mira's voice had gone flat. "There has not been a truce bond in this canyon in two generations. The last pair were two Lunas. Both of them died in the same year, and the story the packs tell is that they died of a fever. The old women told a different story. They said the Council sent men."

The mark on my arm gave a low throb, as if it had heard her.

"Who knows?" Mira asked. "About you and Hank."

"Nobody. Ruth saw me at the spring house but she did not see the mark. Hank's scouts saw me cross the border, and somebody in this pack told the Council before I even crossed, because there was a letter waiting for Ruth last night." I set the cup down. "Do you know anything about that letter?"

Mira's face went carefully blank. "I know that Ruth came to my door three nights ago and asked me whether your mother's body had shown anything unusual. I told her no, as I told you. She looked at me for a long moment and then she thanked me and left, and the next morning a Council rider came up the mesa road."

"Three nights ago," I said. "And the letter arrived last night."

"I am telling you what I saw. I do not know what it means."

We sat in the dim hut and the mint tea went cold in my cup. Outside, a door banged and someone called for Cal, and I heard him answer from the yard. My arm was warm under my sleeve and the warmth had stopped being painful somewhere in the last hour, and that frightened me more than the pain had. My mother used to say that a wolf in pain is a wolf that can still fight.

"There is something else," Mira said. "Something I should have told you before you went over that border, and I did not, because I am a coward and because I did not want to be the one who put it in your head."

"What?"

"Your mother came to me four days before she died and asked me about wolfsbane. You know that. What I did not tell you is that she asked me one other thing. She asked me whether the mark on her arm could be cut out." Mira's hands were still on the table. "I told her no. I told her it would kill her to try. And she sat here and looked at her arm and said, 'Then I will have to find another way.'"

The hut felt very small. "Another way to do what?"

"I do not know. I have thought about it every night for three weeks. Another way to break a bond, or another way to hide one, or another way to live with one. She did not tell me." Mira reached across the table and took my hand, and her fingers were still cool and still shaking. "Derya. Listen to me. If the Council learns that the new Luna of the Kızıltaş pack carries a truce bond with the Alpha of the Çöl pack, they will not come here to talk. They will come here to end it, and they will not care which of you they end it through. Your mother knew that. That is why she carried her mark in secret for nineteen years."

I pulled my hand away. "You are telling me to hide it."

"I am telling you to be careful. There is a difference."

I stood up. The stool scraped on the floor and Mira winced, and I did not care. I had been awake for a day and a night and my mother had asked a healer how to cut a bond out of her own arm, and somewhere out in the canyon a man with black hair and amber eyes was standing by a warm pipe waiting for me to come back with a paper.

"Who else knows about the old pair?" I said. "The two Lunas who died of the fever. Who else in this canyon knows the other story?"

Mira hesitated. She looked at the stove and then at the window and then at me. "Nora," she said. "Hank's mother. She was a girl when it happened, and her own mother was one of the two. She does not speak of it. But she remembers."

"Then I will go and ask her."

"You will do no such thing. The border is closed to you now, and if Ruth sees you cross it again she will have something better than a letter to send to the Council."

"She will not see me."

"Derya." Mira caught my sleeve, and her voice had gone low and quick. "There is one more thing. The mark on your wrist. It is not finished."

I looked down at my arm. The silver lines were exactly as they had been, thin and pale and lit from under the skin. "What do you mean, not finished?"

"The mark I saw on your mother's arm ran from her wrist to her elbow, and it had a shape at the end of it, like a crescent, and she told me once, when she was tired and not watching her words, that it had grown into that shape over years. A new bond is not like that. A new bond keeps changing." Mira let go of my sleeve and stepped back. "The mark will grow. And the bond will grow with it, whether you want it to or not, and it will pull at you harder every day. If you mean to keep this secret from Ruth and from the Council, you have less time than you think."

I was at the door before she finished speaking. I had my hand on the latch when the knock came, three quick raps on the boards, and then Ruth's voice through the wood, mild and patient and loud enough to carry to the yard.

"Derya. I know you are in there. The pack is waiting in the hall, and they have heard about the letter, and there is something else. A Council rider came up the road ten minutes ago. He says the envoy is not coming within the week."