The Spring Between Us

Chapter 17: What the Omega Knows

I came up the ladder into grey daylight with the ledger inside my shirt and my shoulder aching and my boots wet through.

The tipple was crowded. Ruth had gone up ahead of us and taken the warriors with her, and by the time I climbed out of the shaft head the yard by the tipple had eleven warriors in it and two horses and a rider in a Council coat who was standing by his saddle with a paper in his hand, and Berik was saying something to him in a low voice that stopped the moment he saw me.

"Luna," the rider said. He was young and tired and he had ridden all night. "The Council of Alphas sends its greetings. A complaint has been lodged against the Kızıltaş pack by the Çöl pack, and the Council has instructed the second envoy to hear both complaints at the same inquiry. The complaint is signed by the Çöl Beta and it concerns the theft of water from the sacred spring."

I looked at Hank. He was standing at the shaft head with the rope over his shoulder and his coat dusty, and his face had gone flat and cold.

"The Çöl Beta," he said. "Say the name."

The rider looked at his paper. "The complaint is signed by a wolf named Ryland. He is named as Beta of the Çöl pack."

Hank did not say anything. He put the rope down on the ground and walked away from the tipple toward the track, and I watched him go with the ledger against my chest and the mark warm under my sleeve, and then I turned to the rider and said, "Thank you. Go to the hall and get something to eat. Tell the cook I said so."

He went. Berik came up beside me.

"Luna," he said. "The Beta is telling the pack already. She went up the road ahead of you and she is at the pack house now and she is telling them you went down the shaft with the Çöl Alpha and found a book."

"Of course she is." I put my hand on the ladder rail. "Berik. Go to the hall and stand at the door and do not let anyone out until I get there. If Ruth asks you to move, do not move."

He nodded and went. Cal came up out of the shaft with his lantern and I said, "Cal. Go to Mira's hut and tell her I need her. Not in the hut. In the record room. I will be there in ten minutes."

He went. I walked down the track to where Hank stood by the juniper, and he had his back to me and his hands on his hips and he was looking out at the mesa.

"Ryland," he said, without turning. "My Beta. He has been with me four years. He came to me from a pack up north that had gone to pieces, and I gave him the Beta seat because he was good with the warriors and he never asked me for anything."

"He is selling land to Owen. You knew that already."

"I knew he was selling coordinates. I did not think he would go to the Council." He turned around. "Derya. If Ryland has lodged a complaint about the spring, then Silas has him. That is what Silas does. He does not come at you with a knife. He finds the wolf in your own house who wants something and he gives it to him." He looked at the ledger in my hand. "And if my Beta has signed a complaint, then at noon my mother will ride up that road to inquire into a complaint signed by my own Beta against your pack, and she will be asked to choose between her son's mate and the Council's case."

"She will hear the truth."

"She will hear whatever Silas puts in front of her first." He picked up his coat. "I have to go back. I have to be in my own pack house before my mother gets here, and I have to find Ryland, and I have to do it without the warriors seeing the Alpha tear his own Beta apart on the day the Council envoy arrives." He swung up onto the grey. "The ledgers. Keep them out of Ruth's hands. Do not put them in the record room."

"Where then?"

"Wherever you sleep." He gathered the reins. "And Derya. When my mother asks you what you were doing in that shaft, do not lie to her. She has been smelling lies for sixty years and she will not thank you for a good one."

He rode down the track and out the second gate and I watched him go, and then I walked back to the pack house with the ledger under my shirt and the sun coming up over the rim.

Mira was in the record room with her bag on the table and her arms folded, and Cal was at the door.

"Shut it," Mira said.

I shut it. She looked at me for a long moment and then she said, "You went down the old shaft."

"Yes."

"With the Çöl Alpha."

"Yes."

"And you found the ledger room with the four pipes and your father's books." She said it flatly. "I know about the room, Derya. I have known about it since before you were born."

I sat down in the chair. The room was the same as it had been three days ago: the shelf of ledgers, the table where Elias had put his packet, the window that looked out at the cistern. I put the ledger on the table between us and I said, "Tell me."

Mira sat down across from me. Her round face was grey and her hands were in her lap and she did not look at me.

"I was not always the healer of this pack," she said. "I was born in the Çöl pack. I was a girl there when Nora was young and when her mother was Luna. And before that, when I was very small, there was another Luna in the Çöl pack, and another Alpha in the Kızıltaş, and they were bonded."

"Bonded. You mean the mark."

"I mean the mark." Mira's hands turned over in her lap. "I was eight years old. I remember the pair of them at the Council gathering the summer before it happened. The Kızıltaş Alpha was tall and quiet and the Çöl Luna was small and quick and they stood together at the edge of the hall and nobody could get between them. My mother pointed them out to me and said, those two are a truce bond, and if the Council ever gets its hands on them there will be a war in this canyon." She looked up. "Two years later the Kızıltaş Alpha was dead in a mine collapse and the Çöl Luna was dead of a fever, and both packs were told it was bad luck and the Council sent a new envoy to keep the peace."

"My father died in a mine collapse."

"Yes."

"When I was six."

"Yes."

I sat there with my hands on the table. The record room was very quiet. Out in the yard somebody was calling for a horse.

"Mira," I said. "Was my father one of the pair?"

Mira's mouth worked. "I do not know. I have thought about it for thirty years and I do not know. Your mother carried a mark and would not say whose. Your father was a quiet man who kept books in a rock room and wrote down everything the Council took. He died in a collapse that the Council's own men were standing beside." She reached across the table and put her hand on mine. "That is all I know. But there is one more thing, and it is a thing I have never told anyone in this pack, and I am telling you now because the second envoy is your mate's mother and because at noon you will stand in a hall and be asked questions."

"What thing?"

"When your mother went up to the spring house in her last weeks, she did not go alone. I went with her." Mira's voice had gone low. "She took me up there and she showed me the plate on the welling hole, and she said, 'Mira, if I am right about this, then the water under this quarry was ours before the Council was ever invented, and there is a paper in the attic that says so.' I asked her what paper and she said the old pact. She said there was a pact in this canyon older than either pack, and the Council had taken it and hidden it, and she was going to find it and bring it out."

"A pact between the two packs."

"A pact between the two packs and the water." Mira took her hand back. "That is all she told me. Four days later she was dead. I have looked in the attic since. I have looked in the record room and the water tower and the stable loft. I have not found it."

I sat very still. The mark on my arm was warm and steady and the ledger was on the table and my mother had gone up to the spring house with her gauge and her notebook and a healer at her back, and she had known about a pact older than the Council and she had died before she could find it.

"Mira," I said. "At noon I am going to stand in the hall in front of Nora and Ruth and Silas, and I am going to put this ledger on the table and say that the Council has been stealing water from this canyon for twenty years. If my mother was right and there is a pact somewhere, I need it. Not for me. For the pack."

"I know."

"Will you help me look?"

Mira looked at the window. She was quiet for a long moment and then she said, "There is one place I have not looked, because I am a coward and because it frightened me. Your mother's room. Not the cupboard. The floor." She got up and picked up her bag. "Under the bed there is a board that does not match the others. I saw it once when I was cleaning after the funeral and I did not lift it. I think you should lift it tonight, when the house is quiet, and I think you should do it before Ruth remembers that your mother kept her private things where she slept."

There was a knock at the door. Cal opened it and put his head in.

"Luna," he said. "There is a rider coming up the mesa road. It is the second envoy. She is early."

I picked up the ledger and put it inside my shirt and stood up. The mark on my arm had begun to warm in a way I did not like, and my wolf, who had been quiet since the pasture, had come awake again and was pressing at my skin.

"How early?"

Cal looked at the window. "She is at the gate."

I went out into the yard with my boots still wet and my shoulder stiff and the ledger against my chest, and the gate was open and a tall old woman on a tall grey horse was coming through it with her white hair down her back and her dark brown eyes already looking for me. She was wearing a plain wool coat and no Council colors at all, and she rode into my yard the way a woman rides into her own kitchen.

She reined in and looked down at me and said, "So you are the girl who has my son's mark on her arm."