The Spring Between Us

Chapter 15: The Meeting in Secret

Nora.

I sat on the edge of my bed with the paper in my hand and said the name out loud twice, and Cal stood in the doorway and watched me do it.

"The former Luna of the Çöl pack," he said. "Hank's mother."

"Yes." I read the letter again. It was three lines, formal, with the Council seal pressed in the corner. The Council of Alphas presented its compliments to the Luna of the Kızıltaş pack and informed her that the second envoy to the inquiry would be the former Luna Nora of the Çöl pack, arriving at noon on the following day. "Cal. Did the rider say anything else? Anything at all?"

"He said she had come a long way and that she was not to be kept waiting at the gate." Cal shifted his weight. "Luna, why would the Council send the Çöl pack's old Luna to inquire into the Kızıltaş succession? She is a rival. She is his mother."

"Because Silas is clever." I folded the letter. "If the Council sends a Council wolf, the pack says he is a stranger with a pen and no love for us. If the Council sends Nora, the pack says here is a wolf who knows this canyon and has no reason to lie, and the report she writes will be believed by everyone." I stood up. "And if Nora finds against me, Hank cannot defend me without being seen to defend his own mother's inquiry, and if she finds for me, the Council can say the former Çöl Luna was always soft on the Kızıltaş. Either way Silas wins."

Cal's face had gone grim. "What do we do?"

"We go down the shaft tonight, before she gets here, and we bring back something the whole Council has to look at." I picked up my jacket. "Tell nobody. Not Mira, not Tomas. Go down to the second gate and put a lantern on the fence post and wait for Hank. I will meet you there."

He went. I put the letter in my mother's cupboard with the sewing things and I went down the back stairs and out to the stable, and the yard was full of warriors talking about the pasture, and nobody stopped me. I saddled my horse myself. My right shoulder was stiff and my arm was still wrapped and I had to do it one handed, and it took three times as long as it should have.

The ride to the second gate took an hour. The moon was down and the track was dark and my horse picked its way along the south fence with his ears forward and his head low, and the canyon was full of the small sounds of night. When I came over the last rise I saw the lantern on the fence post and Cal's horse tied in the juniper and two other horses beside it.

Hank was already there. So was the third horse, a stocky grey with a pack on its back.

"You brought rope," I said.

"I brought rope, a lantern, two crowbars and my mother's old measure." Hank was in a dark coat with his sleeves rolled and his boots laced high and he looked like a man who had done this before. "She kept a measure of the water in the canyon, a brass rod with marks on it. If there is water under that quarry, I want to know how much."

Cal was already at the gate. "The shaft is half a mile down the track and the entrance is under the old tipple. There has not been a lamp in it in eleven years."

"Then we bring our own." Hank untied the grey. "Luna. Before we go down. There is a thing we have to settle and it is not the shaft."

I looked at him. Cal looked at the ground and then at the fence and then at his boots, which was his way of being polite.

"The bond," Hank said. "It is not going back in the box. It grew after the pasture and it will grow again, and your wolf cannot hold the shift while you are fighting it. So we make a rule tonight, and we keep it until the second envoy has gone and Silas is finished. We do not touch. Not for comfort, not for warmth, not for anything. If you need the bond to steady your wolf, you take my hand for as long as the shift takes and then you let go. Nothing else. No nights, no border meetings that are not about the work."

"That is a rule for both of us."

"It is." He looked at me. "And when this is finished, if we are both standing, we will have the conversation we have been putting off, and I will not let you run from it."

"I do not run."

"You ran at the spring house and you ran at the border and you ran at the gate with the warriors watching." He said it without heat. "You are a runner, Derya. It is the only thing about you I do not like."

I should have been angry. I was not. I got up on my horse and said, "Agreed. Now let us go and find the water."

The old tipple was a timber frame over the shaft head, half fallen in, with a rusted wheel and a rope still hanging from it, and the shaft mouth was a black square in the ground with a ladder bolted to the wall. The ladder was iron and had rusted, and the rungs were thin, and the whole thing went down into a dark that our lantern did not reach.

Cal went first. I went second. Hank came last with the rope over his shoulder.

I counted the rungs. Forty. Forty rungs and my boots on wet iron and the smell of old rock and rust coming up from below, and my shoulder aching, and my hand sweating on the rail. At the fortieth rung the ladder ended on a ledge, and the ledge opened into a tunnel, and the tunnel ran east into the rock.

There was water in the tunnel. I heard it before I saw it, a low steady sound under the dripping, and then the lantern light caught it: a channel cut into the floor of the tunnel, two feet wide, running with water that was clear and cold and moving fast.

Hank crouched at the edge of it and put his hand in. "It is running east," he said. "Away from the pack house. Toward the quarry."

I knelt beside him and put my hand in too. The water was cold and it pulled at my fingers, and it tasted of stone and iron.

"This is our water," I said. "This is the branch under the quarry. My father's map had it going down from the cistern under the yard and out east. Somebody cut it off at the cistern and turned it into this channel."

"There is a door." Cal was at the end of the tunnel with the lantern. "Luna. There is a door in the rock."

It was an iron door, low and wide, set in a fitted stone frame. It had a lock the size of my fist and the iron was black with age. I took the cord from around my neck and put the key in, and it turned, and the door came open with a sound like a long breath.

The room behind it was small and dry and cut out of the rock. There was a table in it, and a chair, and a shelf of ledgers with the dust thick on them, and against the far wall four iron pipes the size of a man's arm coming out of the rock and turning down into the floor.

The ledgers were mine ledgers. My father's hand, and another hand under his, and a third hand in a different ink. The last of them had an entry for every month going back nine years, and beside each entry was a number and a date and a name I did not recognize.

Hank picked up the newest ledger and turned the pages. His face, in the lantern light, had gone very still.

"What is it?" I said.

"The numbers are water." He held the page to the light. "Acre feet. This is a measure of how much water leaves the canyon every month and where it goes." He turned another page. "Derya. This is the Council's own water allotment ledger. Your father kept a duplicate. Every month the Council took water out of this canyon and sold it, and every month your father wrote down what they took and who bought it."

"Who bought it?"

Hank put his finger on a name. "The uranium company. Owen's outfit. Twenty years of water rights under this canyon sold off one month at a time, and the Council's envoy has been coming here three times a year for nine years to make sure the books stayed buried." He set the ledger down. "This is it. This is the proof."

I stood in the little rock room with the four pipes and the ledgers and the lantern light, and my hands had gone cold.

Then Cal said, from the door, "Luna. Somebody is coming down the ladder."

We put out the lantern. Hank had his hand on my arm and Cal had his back to the wall and we stood in the dark of the little rock room with the door half open and the water running in the tunnel, and I heard the boots on the iron rungs, one after the other, slow and careful.

They reached the ledge. They came into the tunnel. A lantern swung and its light went across the wet floor and stopped at the door of the rock room.

Ruth's voice said, "Derya. I know you are in there. Come out and bring the ledgers with you, or I will go back up this ladder and tell the pack that their Luna went down the old shaft in the night with the Çöl Alpha and did not come back."