The Spring Between Us

Chapter 20: The Council's Letter

Hank stepped in front of me.

I did not see him do it. One moment he was beside me with his hand on my arm and the next he was between me and Silas with his shoulders squared and the firelight on his face, and his voice when he spoke was very quiet.

"Say that again."

Silas did not move. His arm stayed out with the paper in his hand and his pale blue eyes went from Hank to me and back again, and his pleasant face was as calm as a man reading a ledger.

"The Council requires proof of any mate bond between the Alphas of rival packs," he said. "The rule is old. It is in the truce law of the Council of Alphas, which I believe is in the record room of the Kızıltaş pack, on the second shelf, in the third volume, if anyone cares to look." He turned the paper slightly so the seal caught the light. "The rule has not been enforced in fifty years. I am enforcing it now."

"Why now?" Hank said.

"Because the Council has received two complaints about this canyon in five days, and both of them touch on the question of a bond." Silas's voice was patient. "The Kızıltaş complaint says the Luna crossed the border at night without her pack. The Çöl complaint says the Kızıltaş pack has been stealing water from the sacred spring. In a case like this the Council has a duty to ask whether the Luna of one pack and the Alpha of the other are acting as separate wolves or as a bonded pair, because a bonded pair is one wolf in the eyes of the old law, and one wolf cannot steal from itself."

"That is a lawyer's trick," Hank said.

"It is a law. The Council does not care whether you like it." Silas held the paper out to me. "Luna. Take it. Read it. The demand is formal and it is on the record and it says that proof shall be given in public before the Council within three days, and that the proof shall be a healer's examination of the mark on the skin of both parties, given before witnesses. If no mark is found, the matter is closed and the Council will look very hard at whoever made the accusation. If a mark is found, the Council will consider whether the bond was formed before or after the border crossing, and whether it was formed with the consent of both packs."

I took the paper. My hand was steady. I did not know why it was steady.

"Who wrote this?" I said.

"The Council of Alphas."

"Who wrote it?" I said again. "You have been in this canyon for five days and this letter is dated yesterday. A rider cannot get to the Council and back in a day. You wrote it yourself in the guest hut with a pen in your hand and you put a seal on it."

Silas smiled. It was the first real smile I had seen on him, and it was not pleasant. "Luna, you have a suspicious mind and you are not wrong. I wrote the letter. The seal is mine, and it was given to me by the Council, and it carries the Council's authority wherever I take it. That is how an inquiry works. I write down what I see and I act on it, and at the end the Council judges whether I acted well. If I have overstepped, the Council will say so and I will be recalled and you will never see me again." He put his hat back on. "But if I have not overstepped, then in three days you will stand in front of the Council of Alphas and a healer will examine your arm, and I will be watching."

"You want the bond to be found," I said. "You want it found in public. Why?"

Silas looked at me for a long moment. The fire had gone down to coals and his face was half in shadow and I could not read it at all.

"Because a truce bond between two rival packs is the one thing in this canyon that the Council cannot sell," he said. "The water under this quarry is worth more than either pack, and it has been sold and resold for twenty years, and the only thing that could ever stop the sale is two Alphas who are one wolf in the eyes of the old law. So yes, Luna. I want the bond to be found. I want it found so that the Council can look at it and rule on it and end it, and then things can go back to the way they were."

Hank moved.

I caught his arm. I do not know how I was fast enough, but I got both hands around his forearm and held on and he stopped, and I could feel the muscle in his arm shaking under my hands.

"Alpha," I said. "Not here. Not tonight."

Silas looked at Hank's face and then at my hands on his arm, and he nodded once as if something had been confirmed for him.

"Three days, Luna," he said. "At sundown on the third day the inquiry will sit in the Council hall at the quarry, and both packs will be present, and the healer will examine you in front of everyone. I would advise you to spend the time finding your proof, whatever it is you have, because after that examination the Council will rule on the bond and the water both." He swung up onto his horse. "Good evening to you both. It is a beautiful canyon. I have always thought so."

He rode out of the firelight and up the creek bed at a walk, and we stood in the dark and listened to the hooves until they were gone.

Hank let out a breath that was almost a growl. "Three days."

"Three days." I let go of his arm. "He wants the bond found. That is the thing I do not understand. He could have had it buried. He could have gone on selling water for another twenty years. Why does he want it found?"

"Because it is the only thing that can stop him, and he knows it, and he would rather fight it in the open than have it grow in secret." Hank turned to the fire and kicked the coals apart. "If the Council rules on the bond, they can rule it invalid. A rival bond that was never declared, never consented to by either pack, never registered, formed in secret during a border dispute. Any lawyer can make that sound like a crime. And once it is ruled invalid, the two Alphas cannot be one wolf, and the pact is dead, and the water is his."

"Then we do not let them rule it invalid."

"We do not get to decide." He looked at me. "Derya. In three days a healer will examine your arm in front of the Council and the mark will be there, and every wolf in both packs will see it. There is no more hiding. Whatever happens after that, you and I are going to be the bonded pair of this canyon in front of everyone, and half the wolves in that hall will want us dead for it."

I stood by the fire with my mother's letter in my pocket and the pact inside my jacket and the mark warm on my arm, and I thought about a room full of wolves looking at me.

"Then we had better have something to show them that they cannot argue with," I said.

Cal came out of the shadows with the horses. "Luna. We should get back before the gate closes. Ruth will have counted the warriors by now."

We rode back along the creek bed with Cal ahead and Hank beside me, and at the place where the creek turned toward the pack house Hank reined in and I reined in with him. Cal went on ahead a little and then stopped and pretended to be looking at his horse's hoof.

"There is a thing I have been meaning to ask you," Hank said. "Your mother's letter said take the pact to Hank. Not to the Council, not to your Beta, not to your warriors. To Hank." He looked at me. "She wrote that four weeks before she died. She knew my name."

"Yes."

"She knew my name and she knew about the pact and she knew about the two pairs and she did not take it to my mother, who has been sitting in that house by the spring for twenty years knowing the same things." He gathered his reins. "I am going to ask my mother why. Tomorrow, before the inquiry, I am going to sit her down and put this paper in front of her and ask her why she let your mother carry it alone."

"Derya." Cal's voice came from the dark ahead. "There is a light in the pack house. In the record room. Somebody is in there."

I looked. The pack house was dark except for one window, the small room at the back, and the light in it was moving the way a lantern moves when a wolf is walking around a room.

"Ruth," I said. "She is looking for the ledger."

"The ledger is on the table in the hall," Hank said.

"The real one is. I put it there for her to find. The one I am carrying is my father's and it is in my shirt." I gathered my reins. "But the record room has the truce law in it. If Ruth is in there with a lantern at this hour, then she is looking up the rule that Silas just used, and she is doing it before the inquiry, and she is doing it alone."

We rode the last mile at a canter and came in through the old wash behind the stable and left the horses with Cal and went in through the kitchen door, and the pack house was quiet and the hall was dark and the light was still moving in the record room.

I opened the record room door.

Ruth was at the shelf with a lantern in one hand and a book open in the other, and she turned when the door opened and her face in the lantern light was not patient at all. It was pale and hard and there was something in it I had not seen before.

"The truce law," she said. "I have been reading it for an hour. Did you know there is a clause in it about the proof of a bond?" She turned the book around and put her finger on a line. "It says the proof shall be given by a healer, before witnesses, and that a bond that is found in a rival pair shall be examined by the Council for the consent of both packs." She looked at me. "And then it says something else. It says that if the consent of both packs cannot be shown, the Council shall not rule the bond invalid. It shall rule the bond void, and it shall order the pair separated by the Council's own warriors, and it shall confine each of them to their own territory under Council guard for a year."

She closed the book.

"The Council does not want to argue with you, Derya," she said. "It wants to lock you up. And if you go into that hall in three days and the healer finds a mark on your arm, that is what will happen to you, and to Hank, and to this pack. So I am going to ask you one more time, and I am going to ask you as the wolf who has held this pack together while you rode around the canyon, and I want you to think about what you are doing to forty wolves who have done nothing wrong." She set the lantern down on the table. "Where is the pact?"