The Spring Between Us

Chapter 12: Sand in the Wound

The second rider did not bring a second envoy. He brought a letter saying that the Council had received a complaint about the Kızıltaş succession and that the second envoy would arrive within the month, and then he ate three plates of food and slept in the guest hut and rode out again at dawn. By then the whole pack had heard about the complaint, and by then the whole pack had heard about the hall, and by then Ruth had made her move.

She made it that evening.

The pack gathered in the hall after supper, which was not usual. Ruth called them. She stood at the near end of the table with a candle in her hand and her grey jacket buttoned and her auburn hair pinned up, and she said, "I want to say something about the Luna's mother, and I want to say it in front of everyone, because there have been whispers in this pack for three weeks and I will not have them go on any longer."

I was at the head of the table. I had not called the meeting. I had not known about it until the benches were full.

Ruth set the candle down. "I served the Luna's mother for eleven years. She was the best Alpha this pack has had in my lifetime, and I loved her, and I will not sit in this hall and listen to anyone say she was weak or careless on a horse. She rode that south track a hundred times. She knew it better than the road to the well. If her horse went over that rim, then something spooked it, and that is all, and the pack should let her rest."

The hall murmured. Old Tomas wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. A woman at the far end said, "That is right," and someone else said, "The Beta speaks true."

"And there is a second thing I want to say," Ruth went on, "and it is harder. I have watched the Luna these three weeks. She is young and she is grieving and she has been given a heavy seat at a bad time, and I have tried to help her and I will go on trying. But the pack should know that she has been riding out at night without telling me, and she has been asking questions about her mother's death, and she has been to the Çöl border more than once." She turned her head and looked at me, and her grey eyes were soft. "Luna, I say this with love. You are not well. You have not slept and you have not eaten and you see enemies in every corner of this hall. Let the pack carry some of this. Let me carry some of it. Let the Council inquire and let us get back to our water and our mine and our dead."

The hall was silent. Then somebody said, "Let the Beta carry it," and somebody else said, "Aye," and old Tomas nodded, and I sat at the head of the table under my mother's carved chair with my hands flat on the wood and felt the whole pack turn away from me like a tide.

I looked at Ruth's hands. They were folded on the table in front of her, and they were steady, and they did not shake at all. Mira's hands shook when she spoke of my mother's body. Mine shook when I came down off the south rim. Ruth's hands lay on that table like two stones in a river, and she talked about a dead woman she had loved and she did not shake.

That was the thing that told me she had done it. Not the boot prints. Not the mare. The hands.

The pack filed out. I stayed in my mother's chair with the candle burning down and the benches emptying and Cal standing at the back with his arms crossed, and when the last wolf had gone I got up and went out the back way to the well.

Ruth was there. She was standing by the well with her back to me and her arms folded, looking down into the dark, and she did not turn around when she heard me.

"You did that on purpose," I said.

"Yes." She turned. The moonlight was on her face and her auburn hair had come loose at the temple. "I did. And I would do it again. You stood in this hall this morning and asked me where I was the night your mother died in front of the warriors. You made me a suspect in my own pack. Did you think I would not answer?"

"I think you pushed her horse over that rim."

Ruth looked at me for a long moment. Then she sighed and shook her head and said, "No, Derya. I did not. And you have no proof that I did, and you will not find any, because there is none. What you have is a bad night and a bad road and a young Luna who is looking for a monster because the truth is worse."

"What truth?"

"That your mother was not killed by a rival. She was killed by her own plan." Ruth came closer. "She went up to that spring house every week for two months with her gauge and her notebook and she found the plate. She found the plate and she knew who put it there and she wrote to him and she told him she would take it to the Council. Four days later she was dead. That is the truth. It is ugly and it has no villain in it that you can fight, and so you have decided that I am the villain because I am close enough to hit."

My hands had curled. "Who put the plate there?"

"I do not know."

"You are lying."

"I am not." Ruth's voice was quiet. "I do not know who put the plate there. I know it was not a Kızıltaş wolf and it was not a Çöl wolf. I know it had a mark on it that I have seen before, in a Council file, years ago, and I could not tell you what it was called. And I know that the man who is most likely to know is standing in the guest hut fifty feet from us with a silver hair and a pleasant voice, and that if you go at him the way you came at me this morning, he will eat you alive and this pack will be dissolved before the second envoy gets here."

The well was dark and cold and Elias had gone into it head first with a bruise on his brow. I looked at Ruth and thought about her hands on the table.

"The tincture," she said. "You poured it out. I know you did not. I know you gave it to Hank. I do not care. There is more in my stores and you can have it tonight, and this time I will help you carry it. Three pinches in the Çöl spring house and the inquiry ends. The Council will see a pack that has solved its own water problem without a war, and Silas will have nothing to write down, and you will have a full cistern and a strong seat and a pack that loves you again."

"You want me to poison the spring."

"I want you to be Luna." Ruth's grey eyes were steady. "I have been Beta for eleven years and I have no wish to be Luna. I am not made for it. I am made for the work behind the chair. But I will not watch this pack die of thirst while a Council man writes a report, and I will not watch a girl I helped raise tear herself apart looking for a killer who is not in this yard."

The night wind came across the well and brought the smell of dust and sage and, faintly, from the direction of the border, juniper and woodsmoke. My mark warmed under my sleeve.

"Give me the tincture," I said.

Ruth's face changed. It was a small change, a loosening around the mouth, and she reached into her jacket and brought out a wax paper packet and put it in my hand. "Tomorrow night. Not tonight. The moon is wrong tonight and the warriors will be out."

"Tomorrow night."

She nodded and went back toward the pack house, and I stood by the well with the packet in my hand and watched her go. When she was inside I opened the packet and looked at what was in it. It was grey powder with a bitter smell, and I wrapped it up again and put it in my pocket.

Then I went to the stable and saddled my horse and rode out the back gate and down the long slope in the dark, and my mark was warm and steady and pulling, and I did not stop until I saw the lantern on the Çöl side of the border line.