The Spring Between Us

Chapter 36: Nora Remembers

We did not answer him.

Hank took my arm and pulled me off the road and up the rocks, and we went up the slope behind the sheds on our hands and knees with the ledger under my arm and the saddlebag over his shoulder, and Silas's voice came down the road again and then stopped. We lay flat behind a boulder and looked down and saw three lanterns moving around the pump house and a fourth at the office door, and a man in a dark coat standing in the middle of the road with his hat off and his face turned up toward the rim.

He stood there for a long time. Then he put his hat on and went into the pump house.

We went over the rim and down the other side. Cal was at the old wash with the horses and four warriors and the ledger from the chamber in a sack, and I came down out of the rocks with the company ledger under my arm and my boots cut to pieces and said, "We are leaving. Now. All of us."

We rode up the mesa road at a walk with our lanterns hooded and came in through the back gate, and I put the ledgers in my mother's room under the bed and the ring on my thumb and the letter inside my jacket, and then I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall and my hands in my lap.

Cal came in. "Luna. Silas is on the road. He will be at the gate in half an hour."

"He will not be let in." I looked up. "Tell Berik to close the gate and bar it and to put six warriors on it and to tell the Council man that the Luna is asleep and will see him in the morning. Tell him to say it politely and then shut the gate in his face."

Cal went. I sat on the floor of my mother's room and looked at the two ledgers under the bed and the ring on my thumb and thought about the second ring.

"Hank," I said. "Nora."

"My mother is on the other side of the border."

"Then we go to her tonight." I got up. "Before the inquiry. I need the second ring and she has it around her neck, and if we walk into that hall tomorrow with one ring and a pact the Council says is void, Silas will pick us apart. If we walk in with two rings and a pact and both packs behind us, he cannot." I picked up my jacket. "I will go out through the wash and down the creek bed and across the border and you will meet me at the spring house. We take the ring to the inquiry together."

Hank looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, "If you cross that border tonight and Silas finds out, he will say the Luna of the Kızıltaş pack crossed into Çöl territory in the middle of the night with a stolen ledger and a Council demand hanging over her head."

"He will say that anyway."

"He will." Hank got up. "Then we go now, before he gets through that gate."

We went out through the wash and down the long slope to the creek bed, and the moon was down and the canyon was black, and we rode the creek bed south for an hour until the border line and then across it and up the long slope to the spring house. There was a light in the window and smoke coming out of the chimney and Nora was sitting at her table with a cup in her hands and a shawl around her shoulders.

She looked up when we came in and her dark brown eyes went from me to Hank and back to me.

"I wondered when you would come," she said. "Sit down. Both of you. There is tea."

We sat. The spring house was warm and small and there was a smell of woodsmoke and dried sage and old wool. Nora poured the tea and set the cups down and sat back in her chair.

"Now," she said. "What has happened?"

I told her. I told her about Helle on the ledge and the rope on her wrists and the bruise on her brow, and about the company ledger and Ruth's name in it, and about the rider on the road and the pump house and Silas's voice calling down the road. And then I put my hand in my jacket and brought out my mother's letter and put it on the table.

Nora read it. Her face did not change while she read it and when she was done she folded it and put it down and sat very still.

"The second ring," she said.

"You have it." I looked at the chain around her neck. "Hank told me."

Nora put her hand up to her throat and drew the chain out from under her shawl. There was a ring on it, a plain iron ring worn thin at the back with a crescent cut into the bezel. It was the match of the one on my thumb.

"I have worn it for forty years," Nora said. "My mother gave it to me when I was a girl and told me it belonged to the first pair and that I was to keep it and never sell it and never show it to a Council man." She held it in her hand. "I did not know what it meant until I was a grown woman and had a mate of my own. And then I understood." She looked at me. "Take it off the chain. It is yours now."

I took it off the chain. It was cold and heavy and worn thin, and when I put it on my other thumb the two rings sat there side by side, one on each hand, and the mark on my arm went warm.

"Now," Nora said. "The pact. You have it?"

"In my jacket."

"Then read it to me. I have never read it. My mother told me the story and made me swear to keep the ring, and she died before she would tell me the whole of it. I have known the shape of it for forty years and I have never known the words."

I took the hide out of my jacket and unrolled it on the table, and the three of us sat in the little spring house with the lamp between us and read it.

It was written in two hands, one at the top and one at the bottom, and the top hand was old and the bottom hand was my father's. It said that the water under the canyon belonged to the two packs and to the land itself and to no one else. It said that the spring was sacred and that neither pack could take from it without the other. It said that the bond between the two packs would be kept by a bonded pair, one from each pack, and that the pair would be known by the marks on their arms and the rings on their hands. And it said that the pact was older than the Council of Alphas and that no law of the Council could break it.

At the bottom of it, under my father's name, there was a line in a third hand, small and square.

This pact is sworn before the moon and the water and the two packs. It shall be read aloud at the spring by the bonded pair at every change of the moon, and any wolf who breaks it shall be known to both packs and to the water itself.

Nora sat back in her chair. Her face was wet.

"Forty years," she said. "I have had that ring around my neck for forty years and I did not know that."

"Your mother knew," Hank said. "She knew and she did not tell you."

"She knew and she was afraid." Nora wiped her face with the back of her hand. "She was afraid of the Council and she was right to be. My mother watched the first pair die. She watched the Council take the ring off the Kızıltaş Alpha's hand before they buried him. She spent the rest of her life keeping that ring out of their sight and she did not tell me why because she thought I would be safer not knowing." She looked at me. "And she was wrong. She was wrong and I have been walking around this canyon for forty years with the answer on a chain around my neck and a pair of dead wolves in my memory and I never put the two of them together."

"Tell me," I said. "What do you remember about the first pair?"

Nora was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I was eight years old. I remember a tall quiet man from the Kızıltaş pack and a small quick woman from my own pack and I remember them at the Council gathering in the summer before it happened. They stood at the edge of the hall together 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 at the table. "Two years later the Kızıltaş Alpha was dead in a mine collapse and the Çöl Luna was dead of a fever. I was ten. I remember my mother crying in the kitchen. I remember the Council envoy coming to the pack house and telling us that it was bad luck and that the Council would keep the peace." She lifted her head. "And I remember the second pair. I remember your father, Derya, and I remember my own mate. I remember them in this house the summer before the mine came down, sitting where you are sitting, and I remember my mate saying to your father, 'We are the second pair and they will come for us the way they came for the first.'"

I sat very still. "My father was in this house."

"Your father was in this house many times." Nora looked at me. "He and my mate were bonded. Not in the way you are thinking. There is more than one kind of bond in the old law. There is the mate bond between a man and a woman, and there is the truce bond between two wolves who swear to keep the pact. Your father and my mate swore the truce bond in this canyon nineteen years ago, and your mother and I were their mates, and the four of us kept the pact together." She put her hand on the table. "And then the Council came, and my mate died of a fever in the winter, and your father died in the mine in the spring, and your mother and I were left with the ring and the pact and the children and a Council man who has been coming to this canyon ever since."

The lamp guttered. Out in the dark the spring ran steady under the floor.

"Then there are two bonds," Hank said. "The truce bond and the mate bond."

"There are two bonds," Nora said. "And your father and my mate swore the truce bond and your mother and I kept it after them, and now you and Derya are the third pair in this canyon and you have both bonds at once." She looked at us. "That is what the Council is afraid of. Not a Luna and an Alpha who are in love. A truce pair who are also mates, because a truce pair who are mates cannot be separated by a Council writ, and the Council has known it for two generations and has been killing the pairs to stop it."

I looked at the two rings on my thumbs and the pact on the table and my mother's letter inside my jacket.

"Nora," I said. "At the inquiry tomorrow. Will you stand with us and say all of this in front of both packs?"

Nora looked at me. Then she said, "I will. And I will bring the letter my son's Beta wrote to the Council man, and the letter your mother wrote to me, and the ring my mother gave me, and I will stand in that hall and I will say the words I have been keeping in my mouth for forty years." She stood up. "But there is one thing you should know before we go down that road. The inquiry is at sundown tomorrow at the quarry and the Council man will have the hall and the healer and the clerk and the soldiers. We have one night and one morning to put the two packs in that hall and make them listen." She looked at Hank. "Son. Go to your pack tonight. Wake them. Tell them the truth and bring them to the quarry at sundown. And Derya. Go home and do the same."

We went out into the dark. Hank took my hand at the door and the mark on my arm went hot and he let go at once.

"Not yet," he said.

"Not yet." I swung up onto my horse. "At sundown."

"At sundown." He turned his horse toward his own pack house. "And Derya. When we stand in that hall tomorrow with the rings on our hands and the pact on the table, we do it as a pair. Not a Luna and an Alpha. A pair."

I rode back across the border with the two rings on my thumbs and the pact inside my jacket and my wolf awake behind my mark, and the sky was going grey over the eastern rim.