The Spring Between Us

Chapter 25: Hank's Beta Lies

Ryland was a big man with a heavy jaw and a scar across the back of one hand, and he stood in the doorway of my hall with his hat in his hands and his face gone the colour of wet clay.

"Luna," he said. "I am not here to make trouble. I am here because the Alpha of my pack told me this morning that if I did not come and tell the truth to you myself he would do it for me, and I would rather say it with my own mouth." He looked around the hall at the warriors and the women and old Tomas by the fire. "May I come in?"

"Come in," I said. "Say it in front of everyone. You came to say it in front of the pack, so say it."

He came in. He stood at the near end of the table beside Ruth and put his hat down and did not look at her or at me.

"I have been the Beta of the Çöl pack for four years," he said. "Two years ago a man came to me at the Council gathering and said he had work for a wolf who knew the border. He said he would pay in Council paper and that the work was nothing, just keeping an eye on the comings and goings in the canyon and writing down the coordinates of the new wells. I did it. I did it for two years. I wrote down the wells and the pipes and the patrol routes and I sent them to a man in a dark coat and he sent back money." He swallowed. "Six months ago he asked me for something else. He asked me for the coordinates of the old ore shaft on the Kızıltaş side of the border, and the depth of the shaft, and the water table under it. And I gave him that too."

The hall was silent. Ruth's hand was on the table and she had not moved.

"Who was the man in the dark coat?" I said.

Ryland looked at me. "I do not know his name. He never gave it. But I know what he looks like and I know where he stays and I know he has a seal on his paper that says the Council of Alphas." He put his hand into his coat and brought out a folded bundle of papers and set them on the table. "These are the letters. I kept them. I do not know why I kept them. Maybe because I knew one day I would need to show them to someone."

I unrolled the papers. They were short, and they were in a small square hand, and they said things like: The second well on the north line. The depth of the shaft and the water table. The patrol schedule for the full moon. And each of them was signed with a single letter.

S.

"He came to me again three days ago," Ryland said. "He told me the Council was going to inquire into the Kızıltaş pack and that the Alpha of the Çöl pack would be asked to testify, and he wanted me to make sure the Alpha said the right things. He told me that if the Alpha did not say the right things, there were other ways to make a Beta into an Alpha, and that a wolf who had been useful to the Council for two years could be very useful indeed." He lifted his head. "I went home and I thought about it all night and then I went to the Alpha this morning and I told him everything. He told me to come here."

The outer door opened again. It opened without a knock and without ceremony, and Hank came in with his coat on and his boots dusty and his face set, and behind him at the door two Çöl warriors stopped and stood with their hands folded.

"Luna," Hank said. "I see my Beta has got here before me."

"He has told us everything," I said.

"I know. I heard most of it through the door." Hank walked to the table and looked down at the papers and then at Ryland. "You left out the part where you signed the complaint against the Kızıltaş pack on the Council man's instruction and told him you would swear to it in front of the inquiry."

Ryland's jaw worked. "I was going to tell them that too."

"You were going to tell them whatever would keep you alive." Hank picked up one of the letters and read it and put it down. "Ryland. You have been my Beta for four years. I gave you the seat because you were good with the warriors and you never asked me for anything. Was that all a lie?"

"No." Ryland's voice had gone rough. "The first year was not a lie. I would have died for you in the first year. Then the money came and the letters came and I told myself it was nothing, and then it was not nothing anymore, and I did not know how to stop."

Hank looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, "Take your coat off and give me your badge."

Ryland took his coat off. He unpinned the small iron badge from his shirt and put it on the table and stood in his shirtsleeves with his hands at his sides.

"Go home," Hank said. "Go to your quarters and stay there until the inquiry is over. Do not speak to the warriors and do not speak to the Council and do not leave the pack house. When this is finished I will decide what to do with you, and I will decide it in front of the pack, and it will not be quick."

Ryland nodded. He picked up his hat and went out, and the door shut behind him, and the hall breathed.

Hank turned to me. "Luna. I need to speak to you. Not in front of the pack."

"In the record room," I said.

We went into the record room and shut the door, and the moment it closed he put his hands on the table and leaned on them and let out a breath.

"He has been in my pack house for two years," he said. "He has eaten at my table and sat at my right hand and I did not see it. My own Beta."

"You see it now. That is what matters."

"Does it?" He straightened up. "Derya, if Ryland has been giving Silas the coordinates of the old shaft for six months, then Silas has known about the rock room since the spring. He knew about the ledgers before we ever went down there. The only reason he has not taken them is that he wants the Council to take them legally, in front of witnesses, so that nobody can say he stole them." He looked at me. "Tonight you are going down to the pump house chamber to take the ledger. If Silas knows about the chamber, he will be waiting."

"Then we go early and we go quiet."

"Or we do not go at all." He came around the table. "Derya. Think. What do we have? We have a pact that the Council says is void, a bond the Council wants to rule on, a ledger that a human foreman says he will give us tonight, and a Beta who has just confessed in front of your pack. That is enough to make a case in front of an honest Council. Silas is not an honest Council."

"You want to wait."

"I want to be alive at the end of this." He stopped in front of me. "If we go down to that chamber tonight and Silas is waiting, then the ledger is gone and you and I are found in a company chamber on company land in the middle of the night, and the Council will say we were stealing. That is the story he will tell. A Luna and a rival Alpha caught in a company pump house at midnight."

I looked at him. His face was tired and his jaw was set and there was dust on his coat.

"Then we do not go down to the chamber," I said. "We bring the chamber up."

"What?"

"Owen said the hatch in the pump house floor is not on the company plans. The chamber is not on the plans. The second pump is not on the plans. That means Silas built it himself, or had it built, and he built it under a company pump house that the company does not know about." I put my hand on the table. "Tonight at sundown the inquiry sits at the quarry in the Council hall. Both packs will be there. Nora will be there. Silas will be there. And before the inquiry opens I am going to take Nora and the warriors and the whole of both packs down into that pump house and open the hatch and let them see what is under it."

Hank looked at me for a long moment.

"He will say he did not know about it," he said.

"He will. And then Owen will put the company plans on the table and show that the chamber is not on them, and Ryland will put the letters on the table, and the letters are in Silas's hand with his letter S on them, and Nora will read them out loud in front of both packs." I looked at him. "He cannot explain away a chamber under a company pump house with his own ledger in it and his own letters in Ryland's pocket. Not in front of both packs."

Hank was quiet. Then he said, "You have become very good at this in two weeks."

"I have had a good teacher."

He almost smiled. Then the door opened and Cal put his head in.

"Luna," he said. "Nora is in the hall. She has been listening at the door and she says she would like a word with you and the Alpha both, and she says she is tired of waiting in halls."

Hank straightened up. "My mother."

"Your mother." I went to the door. "Come on. She has been smelling lies for sixty years and she will not thank us for a good one."