The Spring Between Us

Chapter 7: My Beta's Smile

Elias stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands.

He was thinner than I remembered. He had been a big man once, broad through the shoulders, with a laugh you could hear across the yard, and my father had kept him at his right hand for nine years. Now his coat hung on him and his brown hair had gone thin and grey at the temples and his hands would not stay still on the brim of his hat. He smelled of woodsmoke and old sweat and something sour underneath, and he looked at me the way a man looks at a door he is afraid to open.

"Luna," he said. His voice had gone rough. "I did not know they would bring me here. They told me it was a Council matter and I was to ride with the rider and say nothing until I was called."

"You are a Gamma of this pack," I said. "You do not need a Council rider to bring you home."

Something moved in his face. He looked at Ruth, one quick glance, and then at the floor.

Silas stood up and set his cup down and picked up his hat. "I think this can wait until morning. The Luna has been up half the night, and Elias has been in the saddle since noon, and I have found that wolves give better answers after breakfast." He came around the table and put his hat on, and he paused beside Elias and said, in the mild way of a man giving helpful advice, "You will want to sleep in the Gamma's quarters. I understand they have been empty since your Alpha died."

Elias flinched. It was a small flinch, a tightening of the shoulders, but I saw it, and I saw Ruth see it too.

The hall emptied. Silas went out to the guest hut and Ruth went with him as far as the porch and stood there talking to him in a low voice for a while, and Elias went out to the Gamma's quarters at the back of the pack house without another word to me. I stood in the hall with the lantern still burning on the table and the ledger closed and my hands dry now and my heart going hard.

Cal came in through the back door. "The plate is in the ore cart under the rock," he said. "Nobody saw me."

"Good. Go to bed. Get some sleep before morning, because I do not think we are going to get much after it."

He hesitated at the door. "Luna. Elias is not himself. You should know that before you talk to him. He has been drinking since your father died. The warriors used to say he was the best Gamma in the canyon and now he cannot hold a cup steady."

"I know."

"I am telling you because he is going to say something to you tomorrow and I do not want you to believe it just because he used to be a good man."

I looked at him. He was nineteen and sandy haired and freckled and he had just put an iron plate under a pile of rocks for me without asking why, and he was telling me not to trust a man I had known since I was a girl. "Go to bed, Cal."

He went. I blew out the lantern and went up to my room and lay on my bed with my boots on and my sleeve pushed up and looked at the mark on my arm in the dark. It was warm. It had been warm all day, a small steady heat, and I had stopped noticing it hours ago, which meant it had become part of me, which was the thing Mira had warned me about. The mark will grow. And the bond will grow with it.

I did not sleep much. When the light came I washed my face in the basin and put on my grey jacket with the crest on the pocket and went down to the hall.

The pack ate breakfast in the hall. It was the custom. The long table was set with bread and dried apples and a great pot of coffee, and the wolves came in from the yard and the warriors' quarters and the kitchen and filled the benches, and the Luna sat at the head of the table under the carved chair with her cup in front of her. My mother had done it every morning of her life. She had said it was the only hour of the day when a pack could not lie to its Luna because they were all too busy eating.

I sat down in the chair and the hall filled up and the noise of it was ordinary and steady, and then it changed.

I heard it before I understood it. The talk at the far end of the table got louder, and then it stopped, and then a woman said something I could not catch and somebody laughed, and then they all turned and looked at the door. I turned too.

Ruth came in with a tray.

That was all. She came in with a tray of bread and a pot of coffee and a plate of the dried apples, and she set it down at the near end of the table and said, "There is more in the kitchen, I will bring it," and smiled. It was not a large smile. It was warm and modest and tired, the smile of a wolf who has been up since before dawn making sure the pack was fed, and every wolf in that hall looked at her and then looked at me sitting at the head of the table with my hands empty in front of me.

I had not ordered the bread. I had not thought about breakfast at all. I had been up half the night in the spring house and in the hall with Silas, and I had come down to the table with my mind on Elias and the iron plate and the Council, and Ruth had done the thing a Luna does, and she had done it in front of everyone.

"Sit down," I said. "You do not need to serve."

"I do not mind it." She set the pot down and straightened her grey jacket, and her grey eyes were calm. "You had a hard night, Derya. Let me take care of the small things."

The wolves at the table ate. Someone said the bread was good. Someone else said the cistern had run all night and they had filled every barrel in the yard. The talk came back, louder than before, and Ruth sat down at the near end of the table in the seat of the Beta, and I watched her take her cup and drink from it and answer a question from old Tomas about the mine, and I watched the warriors turn to her when they wanted to know something, and I felt the small cold thing that had started in me at the spring house get a little colder.

She had known about the plate. I could not prove it and I did not know it, but something in the way she had said the tincture should be buried, something in the way she had asked to see my arm at the door of Mira's hut, something in the way she had stood on the porch with Silas in the dark, had begun to fit together in a shape I did not like.

The outer door opened and Silas came in with his hat in his hand and Elias behind him.

The hall went quiet again. Silas smiled around at them all and said, "Good morning. I am sorry to interrupt your breakfast. I only want to borrow the Luna and her Beta for an hour, and Elias here, and the healer. We will be in the small room at the back, and anyone who wishes to speak to me can come to me this afternoon. I am here to listen."

The small room at the back was where the pack kept its records. It had a table and four chairs and a shelf of ledgers and a window that looked out at the cistern. Silas sat at the head of the table and put his hat down and folded his hands, and I sat opposite him with Ruth at my shoulder and Mira by the door, and Elias sat down at the far end with his hat on his knee and his eyes on the table.

"I will begin with the simple thing," Silas said. "The plate. The Luna tells me there was an iron plate over the welling hole in your spring, and that she removed it last night and the water ran again. Is that true?"

"It is true," I said.

"Do you have the plate?"

"Yes."

"I will want to see it." He turned to Mira. "You are the pack healer. Did you know the spring had been tampered with?"

"No," Mira said. "I am a healer. I know about wolves and wounds. I do not know about pipes."

"Fair enough." Silas turned to Ruth. "And you are the Beta. Your Luna has told me the drought was manufactured. Did you know?"

Ruth did not look at me. She looked at Silas and folded her hands on the table and said, "I did not know. I have been asking the Council for a mercy share since the gauge dropped below the mark. I thought it was the dry years come back."

"Thank you." Silas turned to Elias. "And you. You were the Gamma of this pack for nine years, under the Luna's father. You know the spring house and the pipe line better than anyone here. In your time, did you ever see a plate put over the welling hole?"

Elias did not look up. He sat there with his hat on his knee and his shoulders hunched and his hands still, and for a long moment I thought he was not going to answer at all. Then he said, in a voice so low I had to lean forward to hear it, "I want to speak to the Luna alone."

Silas's pale blue eyes moved from Elias to me and back again. "That is not how an inquiry works."

"I do not care how an inquiry works." Elias lifted his head. His eyes were red rimmed and his face was grey and he looked at me and not at Silas, and there was something in his look that was almost like fear. "I was the Gamma of this pack for nine years and I served her father and I served her mother, and I will speak to the Luna alone or I will not speak at all. I have kept my mouth shut for eleven years and I can keep it shut for eleven more. It is a thing I am good at."

The room went very quiet. Ruth's hand was on the table and her fingers had curled, just slightly, and I saw it, and I saw Silas see it, and I saw him decide something behind his pleasant face.

"Very well," Silas said. "I will step out. The Beta too. I will be on the porch, and I will expect a full account of what was said." He stood and put on his hat and opened the door. "Elias. You should know that whatever you say to the Luna will be in my report. The Council does not care for private conversations between wolves and their Alphas."

He went out. Ruth followed him, and at the door she turned and looked at me, and she smiled.

It was a small smile. It was the smile she had given the hall when she brought the bread, warm and tired and modest, and it stayed on her face as she closed the door behind her, and I sat there in the record room with the ledger shelf and the window and my father's old Gamma across the table, and I thought, she is not worried. Whatever Elias is about to say, Ruth is not worried at all.

Elias leaned across the table and caught my wrist in his shaking hand. His palm was over the mark, and the heat of it went up my arm like a struck match, and he felt it and his eyes went wide and he let go of me as if my arm had been red hot iron.

"Derya," he whispered. "Your mother asked me to keep a thing for her. Eleven years ago she gave it to me and she made me swear I would give it to no one but her daughter, and then she died, and I did not know what to do, so I drank." He put his hand over his mouth and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he said, "The men who put that plate on your spring are still here in this pack. I know one of them. I saw him do it, three years ago, and I said nothing, and your mother found out last month and she was going to say something and then she went over that rim. So I will tell you now, and then I want you to tell me what you are going to do about it, because I have been waiting eleven years to say this and I am so tired, Derya. I am so tired."

He reached inside his coat and brought out a packet wrapped in oiled cloth, and put it on the table between us.

"Who?" I said. "Who put the plate on the spring?"

Elias opened his mouth. The door of the record room banged open behind me, and I turned, and it was Cal, out of breath, with his hand on the frame.

"Luna," he said. "The ore cart. The plate. Somebody has taken it."