The Spring Between Us

Chapter 37: The Old Pact

I did not go home.

I got as far as the border and then I stopped the horse in the dry creek bed and sat there with the reins in my hands and the two rings on my thumbs and I could not make myself ride on. The sky was grey in the east and the pack house was up the slope and Silas was at my gate with a paper and a seal and three lanterns, and I had one night and one morning and a dead woman on my table and I did not know how to say any of it to forty wolves.

So I turned the horse and went back to the spring house.

Nora was still awake. She had not gone to bed. She was sitting at the table with the lamp burning and the pact unrolled in front of her and her hands flat on the hide, and she looked up when I came in and did not seem surprised.

"Sit down," she said. "You have not read the whole of it."

"I read it."

"You read the top and the bottom. You did not read the middle." She turned the hide around on the table. "Sit down, Derya. There is a thing in this pact that your mother did not put in her letter and that I have only just found, and you need to know it before you go up that road."

I sat down. The lamp was low and the spring house was warm and the hide on the table had gone soft and dark with age.

The middle of the pact was written in the old hand. It was harder to read than the rest, because the ink had faded and the letters were smaller, and I had to lean close with the lamp.

It said: The spring is the heart of the canyon. It was here before the packs and it will be here after them. It gives water to the mesa and the creek and the town below, and it has been given to the two packs in trust. The trust is kept by a pair, one from each pack, bonded in the old way, and the pair shall guard the spring and the water and the land, and shall read this pact aloud at the spring at every change of the moon.

It said: The pair shall be known by the marks on their arms and the rings on their hands, and no wolf who is not of the pair may take the ring or sit at the spring in their place.

It said: If the pair is broken, the spring shall fail.

I stopped. I read that line again.

"If the pair is broken," I said, "the spring shall fail."

Nora nodded. "That is what it says. The old woman who wrote it put it in the middle, where a wolf who reads only the top and the bottom will not find it. My mother read the top and the bottom. Your mother read the top and the bottom. Neither of them ever read the middle."

"Why would the spring fail?"

"Because the spring is not only water." Nora put her finger on the hide. "The old law says the pair are the keepers of the spring and that the spring answers to them. I do not know what that means and neither did my mother. But I know one thing." She looked up. "The spring has been failing for forty years. It failed after the first pair died. It failed again after the second pair died. And it is failing now, and it has been failing since the spring thaw, and we have been blaming the Council for it and the Council has been taking the water and the spring has been failing anyway." She sat back. "Derya. What if it is not the plate and it is not the pump? What if the spring has been failing because the pair is not at the spring?"

I sat in the little spring house with my hands on the table and the mark on my arm burning.

"That cannot be right," I said. "My mother was at that spring every week for two months. She measured it and she wrote it down."

"She was at the spring alone. Not with her pair. A pair is two wolves." Nora's dark brown eyes did not move from my face. "When did the water first start to fail? Not the plate. Not the pump. The first time the gauge dropped and nobody could explain it."

I thought about it. I thought about my mother's notebook and the cistern and the eleven inches since the thaw, and then I thought about the winter before, and the autumn before that, and the year the creek went low when I was a girl.

"It has been going down for three years," I said. "Slowly. Not just this spring. My mother wrote it in her notebook. She said the creek went low three summers ago and the cistern dropped two inches the winter after."

"And three years ago what happened in this canyon?"

I looked at her. "I do not know."

"Your mother's mate died eighteen years ago. My mate died nineteen years ago." Nora folded her hands. "But the pact was kept. Your mother and I kept it. Not as a pair. We were not the pair. The pair was your father and my mate, and when they died the pact was broken and the ring was hidden and the spring began to fail." She looked at the lamp. "It has been failing ever since. Nineteen years of a slow failing that nobody could measure, and then three years ago it got worse, and this spring it went dry. Not because of a plate. The plate was put there to hide the failing, not to cause it."

"Who put the plate there, then?"

"Somebody who knew the spring was failing and wanted it to look like a theft. Somebody who knew the Council would be blamed and that the blame would start a war." Nora looked at me. "Derya. Silas has been taking water out of this canyon for twenty years. But he did not make the spring fail. He found a spring that was failing and he took advantage of it, and he has been taking advantage of it ever since. And if the pact is right, then the only way to make the spring whole again is for the pair to stand at the spring and read the pact aloud."

I sat back in the chair.

"At the change of the moon," I said.

"At the change of the moon."

"The moon changes tomorrow night."

"It does." Nora stood up. "And tomorrow night at sundown the inquiry sits at the quarry. And after the inquiry, if we are still standing, we go to the spring with both packs and the rings and the pact and we read it aloud." She went to the window and looked out at the grey sky. "But there is a thing you must understand before you go into that hall. The Council does not know the middle of the pact. Silas has read the top and the bottom and he thinks the pact is a land deed. He thinks it is a paper that says the water belongs to the packs and that he can argue about it in a Council hall. He does not know that the pair is the seal and that the spring answers to the pair. If he did, he would not be trying to freeze the bond. He would be trying to kill you both."

The mark on my arm went cold.

"He has already tried," I said. "Helle on the ledge. My mother on the south rim. Elias in the well."

"He has tried to remove the Luna and the Gamma and a warrior on a fence line. He has not yet tried to remove the pair." Nora turned around. "And now he knows about the bond. He has known since the night he stood under the red rock with a letter in his hand. So at sundown tomorrow he will come at you in the hall with the healer and the law and the decision, and if that does not work, he will come at you in the dark."

I got up. The two rings were on my thumbs and the pact was on the table and the lamp was burning down.

"Nora," I said. "If we read the pact at the spring tomorrow night and the spring answers, what happens?"

Nora was quiet. Then she said, "I do not know. My mother never saw it. Nobody has seen it since the first pair died. But the pact says the spring shall fail if the pair is broken, and it says the pair shall guard the spring, and it says the spring is the heart of the canyon." She looked at me. "If the spring answers to the pair, Derya, then the pair may be able to give it back. Not just the water in the pipe. The whole of it. The creek and the town and the mesa and everything under it." She put her hand on the hide. "And the Council will do anything to stop that, because a canyon that answers to a pair of wolves is a canyon that does not answer to the Council."

The door opened behind me. Hank came in with his coat dusty and his hair wet with the morning and his mother's chain in his hand.

"The pack is awake," he said. "I told them everything. They are angry and they are frightened and half of them want to fight the Kızıltaş and half of them want to fight the Council and I have told them both that we are going to the quarry at sundown and they are going to stand in that hall and listen." He looked at the pact on the table. "What did I miss?"

"Everything," Nora said. "Sit down, son. There is a thing in the middle of this pact that your father did not tell you."

He sat down. Nora turned the hide around and read it to him. And I stood by the window with the two rings on my thumbs and watched the sun come up over the eastern rim and thought about a spring that answers to a pair, and a Council man who had been coming to this canyon for nine years to make sure it never answered to anyone.

When Nora was done Hank sat back in his chair and said nothing for a long moment.

"Tomorrow night," he said.

"Tomorrow night," I said. "But first we have to survive sundown."

Hank got up and came and stood beside me at the window and did not touch me.

"Sundown at the quarry," he said. "Both packs. The ledgers and the letters and the rings and the pact."

"And the healer," I said. "And the mark on my arm."

"The mark on your arm." He looked at me. "Derya. When the healer examines that arm in front of the Council, they will see the mark and they will know the bond is real. There is no paste that will hide it and no lie that will cover it. So we do not hide it. We stand there with the marks bare and the rings on our hands and the pact on the table and we tell them what we are."

Out in the canyon a wolf howled, long and high, from the direction of the Kızıltaş pack house. Then another. Then a third.

Hank turned his head. "That is not a hunting howl."

I knew it. I had heard it before, on the night Elias died.

"That is the pack howl," I said. "That is the howl for a death in the pack."