The Spring Between Us

Chapter 10: The Envoy Arrives

Elias was laid out in the small room at the back with a sheet over him and two candles at his head, and Mira would not let anyone else touch him.

I stood in the doorway and watched her work. The well was old and deep and the water in it was cold and dirty, and Elias had gone down head first, and Mira had spent an hour on the body before she would let the pack see it. Now she was on her knees beside him with a bowl of water and a cloth and her mouth set in a hard line.

"Luna," she said, without turning around. "Shut the door."

I shut it. The small room had been the record room three days ago. The ledger shelf was still there, and Silas's chair, and the table where Elias had put his packet of oiled cloth. The packet was gone now, of course.

"Well," Mira said. "What do you want first?"

"What killed him."

"He drowned. That much is true." She lifted the sheet from his face and I made myself look. His thin grey hair was wet and flat and his mouth was open and there was a mark on his forehead, a dark bruise low over the brow. "But he did not fall. A wolf who falls into a well hits the water and fights, and there is a shape to the fighting. Water in the lungs, yes, but also water in the mouth, water in the nose, torn nails, bruises on the arms. Elias has none of that. He has a bruise on the forehead and wet clothes and his nails are whole."

"Then how did he drown?"

"He was knocked on the head and put in the well." Mira said it flatly. "The bruise is from something narrow and hard, a bar or a stick, and it was given from behind, because it is on the brow and not on the crown. He was dead or near enough when he went into the water, and I would say that whoever did it knew the well was deep and did not care how the body looked so long as it was found in the water."

I held onto the door frame. "He was going to give me a packet. Oiled cloth. He had it in the record room and he put it on the table and then Cal came in and I left him."

"Then whoever killed him has the packet."

"Yes."

Mira pulled the sheet back over his face. "There is a thing I have to tell you before you go back out there, and I want you to listen to me. This morning, before dawn, I went down to the stable to see about the horses because they were making a noise, and Ruth was in the yard with Silas and two of the warriors. They were talking quietly. I did not hear all of it. But I heard Silas say the word inquiry, and I heard Ruth say, 'She will not last another week.'"

I stood very still. "And what did Silas say?"

"He laughed." Mira got up and wiped her hands on her apron. "It was not a loud laugh. It was the way a man laughs when the joke is not a joke."

The pack buried Elias that afternoon, because in the canyon in August you do not wait. I stood at the grave with my hands folded and the sun on the back of my neck and watched them put the red earth in, and the whole pack was there, and Ruth stood at my right shoulder in her grey jacket with her hands folded too and her face grave, and Silas stood at the back with his hat in his hands and a look of quiet sorrow that would have fooled me if I had not known what I knew.

When it was done and the wolves were drifting back toward the pack house, Silas came up beside me on the path.

"Luna," he said. "I am sorry. I know he was your father's Gamma for many years."

"He was."

"An accident, the healer tells me." He walked beside me with his hat in his hand and his head slightly bowed. "A well in the dark is a dangerous thing for a man who has been drinking. I have seen it before in packs that have had a hard year."

"Have you."

"I have." He was quiet for a few paces. "I have also seen what a hard year does to a pack's faith in its Luna, and I am sorry to say that this is what I have been sent to write down. I want you to understand that I am not your enemy, Derya. I am a clerk. The Council sends a clerk when a pack is in trouble, and the clerk writes down what he sees, and the Council decides. If the pack is strong and the Luna is honest, the report is short and the matter is closed. If the pack is weak and the Luna is hiding things, the report is long, and the matter is not closed."

"I have nothing to hide."

He stopped on the path. The sun was behind him and his silver hair was bright and his pale blue eyes were calm, and he looked at me the way a man looks at a page he is about to write on.

"Then you will not mind if I ask you a question," he said. "It is a question the Council asks in every inquiry of this kind, and it has nothing to do with wells or plates or maps, and I would like you to answer it plainly. Where were you last night?"

The path was full of wolves going back to the pack house. Cal was ahead of us and had stopped to wait, and Ruth was behind us and had not, and I could feel her at my back the way you feel a cold wind.

"In my bed," I said.

"All night?"

"All night."

Silas looked at me for a moment. Then he smiled, a small pleasant smile, and put his hat on. "Thank you, Luna. That is all I needed. The Council will be pleased to hear it."

He walked on ahead of me up the path toward the pack house, and I stood in the sun with the dirt of Elias's grave still on my boots and the mark burning under my sleeve.

Cal came back for me. "Luna. What did he want?"

"He wanted to know where I was last night."

Cal's freckled face went pale. "And what did you tell him?"

"That I was in my bed." I started walking. "Cal. My horse. The sweat on the saddle and the dust on the hooves. Someone will have seen it. Someone always sees it. I need you to take the horse to the far pasture and tell anyone who asks that you rode him last night because he was lame and needed exercise."

Cal looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded and went.

I did not go into the pack house. I went around the back and up the outside stairs to my mother's room and I sat down on the floor by her bed with my back against the wall, and I sat there until the light through the window went from gold to red. I had told Silas a lie and Ruth had told Silas the truth, and I did not know which of them he believed and I did not know what he would do with either.

What I did know was that Elias had been killed the same night I went to the border, and that whoever killed him had known he was going to talk. Only three wolves had been in the record room when Elias said he would speak to me alone. Silas, Ruth, Mira and me. And Elias himself.

Ruth had taken my mother's map. Ruth had taken my plate. Ruth had said in the yard before dawn that I would not last another week.

I got up off the floor and went to my mother's cupboard and opened it and looked at the shelves inside. Thread. Buttons. A tin of pins. My mother had kept a sewing cupboard and I had looked in it a hundred times. But my father's key had been on a nail behind the tack shelf for eleven years and nobody had moved it, and my mother had said the old maps in the attic, not the ones in the office, and there had been four crates and I had only opened three.

I went back to the stable in the dark with a lantern and climbed into the attic and opened the fourth crate.

It was not maps. It was a wooden box with a lock on it, and the lock was old and small and I broke it with the pry bar, and inside the box there was a bundle of letters tied with string and a small iron key on a leather cord.

The letters were in my mother's hand. The top one was addressed to me.

Derya. If you are reading this, then I am dead and you have found the box, and there are two things you need to know before you do anything else. The first is that the water under the quarry does not belong to the Council. The second is that the key in this box opens the door at the bottom of the old ore shaft, and you must go there before Ruth does.

There was a sound on the ladder behind me. I turned with the letter in my hand and the lantern swinging, and Ruth came up through the hatch with her grey jacket on and her face very calm.

"Luna," she said. "What have you found?"