The Spring Between Us

Chapter 9: One Night at the Border

I gave Ruth the map.

That is the part I have to live with. I stood in the attic with the lantern light on her auburn hair and her neat grey jacket and Elias beside me shaking, and I looked at her for a long moment, and then I held out the rolled paper and said, "Take it to Silas. Tell him I found it in my father's crates. Tell him I want it back when the inquiry is finished."

She took it. Her fingers closed around the paper and she smiled and said, "Of course. I will tell him you have been helpful."

Elias made a sound beside me. I did not look at him. I watched Ruth go down the ladder with the map in her hand and the lantern swinging, and when the stable door had shut behind her and her boots had crossed the yard, I turned to Elias and said, "What was the name?"

His face was grey. "Derya. The map."

"She has one map. My father drew a dozen. There are four crates here and she does not know how many there were supposed to be." I knelt down and opened the crate again and took out a folded sheet of hide from the bottom, one that had been under the others, one that was not the canyon map. It was smaller, and older, and drawn in a different hand, and I had put it back before Ruth came up the ladder because it had looked to me like a thing worth hiding. "Now. The name."

Elias put his hand over his mouth. He was quiet for so long that I thought he was going to refuse, and then he said, "I do not know his name. I only know what he looks like and what he calls himself, and I know your father was afraid of him. He came to the mine three times a year for nine years and every time he came your father would go quiet for a week. He wore a dark coat. He had silver hair." Elias looked at me. "I never saw him again after your father died. Not until this morning, in the record room, when he sat down at the table and folded his hands and asked me questions about the spring."

The attic was hot and my mouth had gone dry.

"Silas," I said.

"The Council man." Elias's voice was very small. "Your mother wrote to him last month. I saw the letter on her desk. She wrote to him and she said she knew what he had done to the spring and she was going to bring it before the Council of Alphas. Four days later she went over the south rim."

I sat down on a trunk. The lantern was low and the attic was full of shadows and the smell of hay and dust, and my arm was warm under my sleeve where the mark was, and I thought about a man in a dark coat who had come to my father's mine three times a year for nine years and who had folded his hands at my mother's table and smiled at me and said, "Luna. There you are."

I did not sleep that night either.

I lay on my bed with my boots off and the hide map under my pillow and listened to the pack house settle, and at some point after midnight I got up and put on my jacket and went out the back way past the kitchen and down to the stable and saddled my horse in the dark.

I do not know why I went to the border. I told myself I needed to know what Hank thought of Silas, and that he had asked me for the terms in three days, and that three days was up tomorrow. I told myself I was going to warn him. But it was not three days yet, and I rode out of the yard in the dark with the hide map under my jacket and my heart going hard, and I knew exactly why I was going.

The creek bed was dry again. Of course it was. The plate was back on the spring, or a new plate was, and the water had run for one night and then stopped, and the pack had filled its barrels and drunk it and gone to bed happy. I rode down the long slope with the moon gone and the stars out and the canyon black on either side, and the horse picked its way along the dry stones and I did not hurry. I had three hours until dawn.

He was waiting at the border.

I do not know how long he had been there. He was sitting on a flat rock on the Çöl side of the line, with his coat off and his sleeves rolled, and he had a lantern at his feet and a canteen in his hand, and when he heard the hooves he looked up and did not move.

"Derya," he said.

I got down off the horse. My legs were unsteady and I put my hand on the saddle to steady them.

"The water stopped," Hank said. "I sent a wolf up the rim at sundown to look at your cistern. There is no water in it. There was water in it last night, and now there is none. What happened?"

"Somebody took the plate."

He set the canteen down and stood up. "Who?"

"I do not know. Maybe Ruth. Maybe Silas. Maybe the warrior who put it there in the first place." I came around the horse and walked toward him and then stopped, because six paces away I could smell him again, juniper and dust and woodsmoke, and the mark on my arm came alive and the pull of it went through me like a current and my knees went soft. I had been away from him for two days and I had forgotten how strong it was. "Hank. You have to stay on your side of the line."

"I am on my side."

"I am not." I stood there with my hand out to keep from moving. "I came here to tell you something and then I am going to get back on my horse and ride home and we are not going to do this."

"Do what?"

"You know what."

He looked at me across the six paces. His face was not calm now. It had gone still in a way I had not seen before, and his jaw was set and his hands had curled at his sides, and I could hear his breathing across the dark.

"All right," he said. "Tell me."

"Silas is the man who came to my father's mine three times a year for nine years and frightened him into silence." I told him everything, then. The plate, the mark on it, the map my father had drawn with the branch under the quarry torn off, my mother's letter, the four days, the south rim. I told it fast and flat and I did not stop until I had finished, and when I was done Hank had not moved.

"How did your mother die?" he asked.

"She went over the south rim. The pack says her horse spooked. Mira says there were rope burns on her wrists and her neck was broken before the fall."

Hank turned and walked away from me along the border line for ten paces and then turned and came back. His face was terrible in the lantern light. "And you have been in that pack house for three weeks with Silas under your roof."

"I did not know until this morning."

"You know now." He stopped. "Derya. Your Beta is the one who gave you the poison and the one who took the plate and the one who carried the map to Silas. Your Beta is his hand in your pack. She has been his hand for years, I would wager my pack on it, and your mother found out and died for it. What are you going to do?"

"I am going to find out what is under the quarry, and I am going to bring it to the Council of Alphas with proof that Silas is a murderer." My voice came out too loud in the dark canyon and I did not care. "But I cannot do it alone, and the only wolf in this canyon who is not in Silas's pocket is standing on the other side of a border line, and my pack would tear me apart if they knew I was here."

"They would tear you apart if they knew you were here for any reason other than to ask for water."

"Yes."

We stood there. The pull had gotten worse. The mark was hot and steady and it had begun to spread, thin lines creeping up my forearm, and I could feel his side of it too, I realized, I could feel something from him across the dark, a low hot ache that matched mine, and it had nothing to do with what I wanted.

"You should go home," he said.

"I know."

"Take the horse and ride south and do not come back here until you have something that can keep you alive."

"I know." I did not move. "Hank. The bond is getting stronger. Mira says it grows."

"It does."

"And you feel it too."

"Every hour." He said it flatly. "I feel it when you are tired. I felt it when Silas came up that road. I have not slept in two nights." He took a step toward me and stopped at the line. "Derya, I am going to say a thing and then I am going to walk back to my spring house and not come out until morning. We have two packs on a knife edge and a Council man who kills Lunas, and if we give him the bond he will use it to hang us both. So we do not. You go home and find your proof and I will do what I can from this side, and we do not touch and we do not meet unless it is on purpose and with a plan." He looked at me. "And when this is over, if we are both still standing, you and I are going to have a conversation that I have been putting off for three months."

I got back on my horse. My hands were shaking and the mark on my arm was burning and every part of me that was a wolf was screaming at me to go to him, and I turned the horse's head and rode up the creek bed without looking back.

I was half a mile up the slope when the howl came.

It came from the north, from the direction of the Kızıltaş pack house, and it was long and thin and it went up and then broke off, and then a second wolf answered it from lower down, and then a third. I pulled the horse up and sat there in the dark and listened.

That was the pack howl. That was the howl for a death in the pack.

I turned the horse and rode for home, and I came over the last rise above the pack house at a gallop with the sky going grey behind me, and the yard was full of wolves and lanterns, and Mira was on the porch steps with her arms wrapped around herself, and Cal was running up the path toward me.

"Luna," he said. He caught the bridle and I swung down and my legs nearly gave. "It is Elias. He went out to the well after midnight to get water and he fell in. He is dead, Luna. He is dead in the well."