The Spring Between Us

Chapter 13: Hank's Warning

He was not at the border. He was a mile inside my own territory, sitting on a rock above the creek bed with his horse tied in the juniper and his coat off, and when I came around the last bend he stood up and said, "You are late."

"You are on my land."

"I know." He did not move. "Your Beta called a pack meeting tonight and stood in the hall and told them their Luna was sick. I heard it from my scout on the ridge before the moon was up. So I came to find you instead of waiting for you to come to me, because I did not think you would come at all."

I got down off my horse. My legs were not steady and the packet was in my pocket and the letters were inside my jacket against my ribs, and the pull of him at ten paces was so strong that I had to look at the ground for a moment.

"I came to the border," I said.

"You came to the border." He looked at my face. "What happened?"

I told him. I told it badly and out of order, the hall, Ruth's hands, the well, the packet, the second rider, and he stood with his arms folded and his face getting harder and harder in the moonlight, and when I got to the end of it he turned and walked ten paces away and stood with his back to me for a while.

"Tell me you did not take the packet," he said.

"I took it."

"Derya."

"I took it so she would stop watching me." I came after him. "She gave it to me by the well tonight and she will expect me to use it tomorrow. If I had refused it she would have known I was going to the Council instead, and she would have gone to Silas, and Silas would have had me in a cell by morning. So I took it, and I am going to take it to the Council and put it on a table in front of them and say this is what my Beta gave me, and then I am going to tell them about the skid marks and the boot prints and Elias in the well."

Hank turned around. "And who will believe you? A young Luna with a disputed seat and a dead mother, accusing her Beta and a Council envoy of murder, in front of a Council that sent the envoy in the first place. You have a packet of grey powder and a story about boot prints in the dust. Silas will say you poisoned the powder yourself and invented the rest to save your seat, and Ruth will stand up and weep and say she tried to help you, and the Council will write it down and dissolve your pack before the second envoy finishes his breakfast."

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

"Not that." He came back toward me. "Not yet. Silas is a clerk with a seal and a long memory and he has been doing this for thirty years. You do not beat a man like that by standing up in a hall and telling the truth. You beat him by handing him something he cannot explain away."

"Like what?"

"Like the water under the quarry." He stopped in front of me. "Your father's map had a branch torn off the bottom corner. Your mother's letter says the water under the quarry does not belong to the Council. That is the thing Silas has been coming to this canyon for, three times a year, for nine years. Not a spring. Not a plate. The aquifer under that quarry. If you can find it and bring it into the open in front of the whole Council, with proof that he has been diverting it, then no report he writes will save him."

I put my hand into my jacket and brought out the letters and the iron key on its cord, and I held them up in the moonlight. "My mother left me a key. There is a door at the bottom of the old ore shaft and the key opens it. She wrote that I must go there before Ruth does."

Hank looked at the key for a long moment. Then he took my hand, key and all, and turned it over in his, and the mark on my arm came alive and the whole canyon went warm.

"Not alone," he said.

"Hank."

"I mean it. You go down that shaft alone and Ruth will hear of it and you will be found at the bottom of it, and the Council will write down that the young Luna was reckless and fell." He let go of my hand. "I will come with you. Tomorrow night, before the moon is high. My scouts will watch your pack house and your stable and the mesa road, and if anyone follows you I will know before you are down the ladder."

"The border is closed. My warriors will smell you before you are across the creek."

"Then open it." He looked at me. "You are the Luna. Put a warrior on the border and tell him to let the Çöl Alpha through. Tell him it is a water parley. Tell him whatever you like, and then tell him the same thing again the next night so the story holds."

I stood there with the key in my fist and the mark burning and his face close enough that I could see the small scar at the corner of his mouth, and I thought about what it would mean to bring him onto my land with my pack already half convinced I was a sick girl who saw enemies in corners.

"Why?" I said. "You have a pack of your own and a spring to hold and Silas is coming for you next, whatever he does to me. Why go down a shaft for a woman you have known for two weeks?"

Hank was quiet. The wind came up the creek bed and moved the juniper and the dry grass, and in the long pause I could hear his breathing and mine and the small sound of the horses' reins.

"Three months ago at the Council gathering I stood across a hall and watched you laugh at something your mother said," he said. "You had your hair pinned up and a borrowed dress and you were the only wolf in that hall who was not watching the Council." He turned his head slightly. "I have been Alpha for six years. I have made peace with two rival packs and I have buried four warriors and I have kept my mother's spring out of the Council's hands for six years on my own. I do not need a bond to tell me what to do. But I have not been able to stop thinking about that laugh since the night I heard it, and it is not the bond that is doing that to me, Derya. It is you."

The mark was burning now, a steady heat up my forearm, and my wolf had come awake and was pressing against the inside of my skin. I put my hand flat on his chest to hold him off and that was the worst thing I could have done, because the moment my palm touched him the heat went through both of us at once and I felt his breath stop.

"Step back," I said. My voice had gone rough.

"I am not the one who is holding on."

I took my hand off him. The print of his shirt was warm on my palm. I stepped back three paces and stood in the dry grass with my hands at my sides and my heart going like a drum.

"Tomorrow night," I said. "Before the moon is high. There is a wagon track that comes down from the south fence to the old ore shaft. I will leave a lantern on the fence post at the second gate."

"Put your warrior on the border and let him see me come through. If he does not see me come through, then in a week the whole pack will be saying the Çöl Alpha crossed the line in secret and the Council will believe it." He went to his horse and untied the reins. "And Derya. If Silas calls you to the small room between now and then, do not go alone. Take Mira, or take the boy. Take anyone who will swear afterwards what was said."

"I know."

"You do not know. You have been going alone since your mother died, and it is the reason you are standing on the wrong side of your own border at midnight with grey powder in your pocket." He swung up into the saddle. "Bring the boy. He is worth ten of your warriors."

He turned the horse and rode down the creek bed toward the border without looking back. I stood in the dry grass and watched him until the darkness took him, and the mark on my arm cooled slowly, and my wolf went quiet, and somewhere in the pack house a lantern was lit in a window and I knew whose window it was.

I rode home the long way around and came in through the back gate and left my horse in the stable, and on my way up the outside stairs I passed the window of the guest hut, and Silas was sitting at his table with a sheet of paper in front of him and a pen in his hand. He was writing. He had his coat off and his sleeves rolled and he was writing steadily, without stopping, the way a man writes when he knows exactly what he is going to say.

The next morning Ruth found me in the hall and put her hand on my shoulder and said, "Tonight, then. I will have the horses ready after supper and the warriors will be on the south fence. You will not need a lantern."

And I said, "No. I will not need a lantern."

I did not tell her where I was going. I did not tell her about the key. I let her think I was going to poison a spring, and I smiled at her, and her hands did not shake at all.