The Spring Between Us

Chapter 6: Water and Blood

The envoy's name was Silas, and he spent the first day doing nothing at all.

That was the thing about him that I could not get out of my head. He did not call a meeting or demand the pack records or walk the border. He sat in the hall with a cup of tea and talked to Ruth for an hour, and then he came out into the yard and helped old Tomas carry a crate of ore samples to the storehouse, and then he sat on the porch with two of the warriors and asked them about the mine and listened to their answers the way a man listens to a story he already knows the ending of. By evening half the pack had decided he was a decent fellow. That is what he was doing. He was being decent at them.

I stood through all of it with my sleeve down and my heart going too fast. My mother had sat through two inquiries. She had said the trick was to give them nothing to write about. Now I knew what she meant. Silas was not looking for evidence. He was building a picture of a young Luna who let her pack carry crates while she stood around with her hands in her pockets.

I did not go near him. I spent the day in the hall with the pack, doing the ordinary things a Luna does, and every hour or so I would find an excuse to walk past the cistern and look at the gauge. Down another quarter inch. Down another. The pack went to bed late, and Silas went to bed later, and when the lamps in the hall had been blown out and the yard was dark I went down to the stable with a lantern in one hand and my boots unlaced.

Cal was already there. He had saddled two horses and left the third tied behind the stable where nobody would count it, and he had a coil of rope over his shoulder and his jacket buttoned to the throat.

"You did not have to do that," I said.

"You told me not to ask why. I am not asking why. I am bringing rope." He handed me a pry bar wrapped in a scrap of sacking. "In case the spring house door is rusted shut."

It was a half hour's ride up the mesa to the spring house, along a track that had been worn into the rock by two hundred years of hooves and cartwheels, and the moon was down so we rode by the lantern and by the horses, who knew the way better than we did. The spring house itself was a squat stone building no bigger than Mira's hut, with a sod roof that had gone to weeds in the dry years and a door that had not been barred in my lifetime. Inside, the pipe came up out of a fitted stone basin where the water welled, and ran out through the wall and down the long iron line to the cistern behind the pack house.

I had been in it a hundred times. I had climbed on those walls as a girl. My mother had brought me up here the summer I turned twelve and made me follow the pipe from the basin to the cistern and back again, and she had said, "Learn this line, Derya. A pack is only as strong as its water."

The lantern light went around the walls and the pipe and the basin, and everything looked exactly as it had looked in June.

I knelt by the basin and put my hand in. The water was cold and shallow and still. The welling hole at the bottom was there, a round mouth no wider than my two fists together, and out of it came a slow trickle that was barely a trickle. I watched it for a long time. Then I rolled up my sleeve and put my whole arm down into the water, up to the elbow, and felt around the mouth of the hole.

There was a disc across it. I felt it with my fingers, a smooth flat thing, an iron plate with a hole drilled through the middle and a wooden handle on the back, sitting over the welling hole like a lid. The trickle was coming through the drilled hole. The rest of the spring was behind the plate, pushing against it.

I sat back on my heels with my arm dripping and my heart going like a hammer.

"What?" Cal said.

"Somebody put a plate over the spring." I got up and picked up the pry bar. "Somebody put a plate over our spring and drilled a hole in it so we would get a trickle and think it was a drought."

Cal came and looked. He crouched by the basin and put his arm in the water and felt the plate, and when he came up his face had gone pale under the freckles. "How long?"

"Since the spring thaw, at least. Eleven inches since the thaw is what my mother measured, and she measured it wrong, because she was measuring a trickle and calling it a drought. She was up here every week." I got the bar into the basin and hooked the end of it into the hole in the plate and pulled. "Cal. Get the other side."

We pulled. The plate was set hard with rust and grit and it took us four tries and a great deal of swearing, and on the fifth try it came up out of the water with a sucking sound, and the spring came up after it. It came up fast and cold and it went over the rim of the basin and across the floor of the spring house, and Cal sat down in it with a shout and I stood in the middle of it with the plate in my hands and the water running over my boots.

The sound was enormous. It was like a room full of people all speaking at once. I had not known how quiet the canyon had been for three months until I heard the spring again.

"Luna," Cal said. He was still sitting in the water. "The cistern is full by morning. The whole line, the whole pack, they will see it before dawn."

"Let them see it." I turned the plate over in my hands. The handle on the back was a stub of blackened wood, and stamped into the iron on the underside, where nobody would see it while it was in the water, was a mark I did not recognize. It was a small neat thing, a crescent with a line through it, and I did not know what it meant. I put the plate down on the floor and knelt and turned it and turned it again.

"That is not a Kızıltaş mark," Cal said. "And it is not a Çöl mark. I have seen their iron, it has a sun on it."

"Somebody from outside the canyon, then. Or somebody who does not want a pack mark on their work." I stood up. "Cal. I want you to go back to the stable and take a hammer and a chisel and put this plate in the ore cart and cover it with rock. Do not show it to anyone. Do not tell Mira, do not tell Ruth, do not tell Tomas. In the morning we will see who comes up this road to look at the water."

"You think they will come?"

"I think a wolf who puts a plate over a spring is a wolf who will come back to check on it." I picked up the lantern. "Go. I will follow."

He went. I stood in the spring house for a moment with the water running and the smell of wet stone all around me, and I thought about my mother coming up this road every week with her gauge and her cup of coffee and her notebook, and I thought about her measuring a trickle and writing it down as drought. And I thought about who would have put a plate over a spring on her own land, and why, and I found that I was shaking.

I came down the road behind Cal with the lantern swinging, and the cistern in the yard was already louder than it had been in three months, a steady soft sound of running water, and I tied my horse and went up the steps and into the hall, and stopped.

The hall was lit. Silas was sitting at the long table with a cup of tea and the pack ledger open in front of him. Ruth was beside him with her grey jacket still on. They were not talking. They were looking at the door.

"Derya," Silas said. He had a pleasant, low voice. "It is very late."

"I was at the spring house."

"So I understand." He closed the ledger. "Your Beta and I have been talking about the water. She tells me the drought is natural, a thing that happens in the canyon, and that she has begun to ask the Council for a mercy share. I was just about to write it down."

"Write this down instead." I came into the hall and put the lantern on the table, and my hands were still wet from the spring, and I saw Silas's pale blue eyes go to my hands and then to my face. "The drought is not natural. Someone put an iron plate over the welling hole in our spring and drilled one hole in it. The spring runs again. It ran like that all evening."

Ruth's head turned toward me. I watched her face and I saw it do something small and quick that I had never seen it do before.

Silas did not look at Ruth. He looked at me and he smiled, and it was the smile of a man who has just been handed a gift he did not expect, and he said, "An iron plate. On the Kızıltaş spring. Do you have it?"

"Yes."

"Then in the morning I would like to see it," he said. "And in the morning I would also like to see the spring house for myself, and I would like to bring my own healer, and I would like to bring one other person. It seems to me that if a plate was put over your spring, then someone on your land put it there, and if someone on your land put it there, then this is no longer an inquiry into a border crossing, Luna. It is an inquiry into a pack."

He said it pleasantly. He said it the way a man says a thing he has been waiting to say for a long time, and I stood there with the water dripping off my fingers and the mark on my arm warm under my sleeve and my mother's chair at the head of the table behind him, and I understood that I had done exactly what he wanted and I did not yet know why.

"One other person," I said. "Who?"

"The Council of Alphas is sending a witness for the inquiry," Silas said. "He is not from this canyon and he has no pack here and no reason to lie for anyone. He rode in while you were up at the spring."

The hall door opened behind me. I heard boots on the boards and the door shut again, and Silas's eyes went past me to whoever had come in, and his mouth curved.

"Ah," he said. "There he is. Luna of the Kızıltaş, meet the witness the Council has appointed to hear this matter. His name is Elias. I understand he used to be a Gamma in this pack."