The Spring Between Us

Chapter 28: Ruth's Challenge

Mira stepped in front of me.

She did it without a word, putting her round body between me and the door with her apron still on and her hands up, and Ruth stopped in the middle of the hut with her lamp and looked at her.

"Out of the way, Mira," Ruth said. "This is pack business."

"This is my hut and my patient and you will say what you have to say from where you are standing." Mira did not move. "A challenge is a formal thing and it is done in the hall in front of the pack, not at midnight in a healer's hut with a naked arm in the lamplight. If you have a challenge to make, make it in the morning in the hall."

Ruth's grey eyes went past her to me. They went to my bare arm and stayed there.

"I saw it," she said. "In the yard. The two of you came in through the wash and the Alpha had his hand on your elbow and I saw your sleeve was torn and your arm was bare. I saw the mark from the porch. It is a crescent and it is silver and it goes past the elbow, and it is not a scratch and it is not a burn." She set her lamp down on the table. "So. You have a truce mark. The Council is going to examine it in two days and the Council is going to rule on it. And before that happens I am going to take this pack out of your hands."

"Ruth," Mira said.

"Be quiet, Mira." Ruth's voice had not risen. "I have served this pack for eleven years. I served the Luna's mother and I served her and I have held this pack together while the Council man wrote his report and while the water ran out and while the Luna rode around the canyon at night with the enemy. And now I find that she has a truce mark on her arm and that she has been lying to me and to the pack for a month." She put her hand on the back of a chair. "So I am going to challenge her. In the hall, in the morning, in front of the pack, as the old law allows. I am going to say that she is not fit to hold the seat and that she has deceived the pack and that she has put forty wolves at risk for a bond. And then she and I will settle it the old way, and the winner takes the seat."

I put my sleeve down over my arm.

"You cannot win a challenge against me," I said. "You are forty one years old and your wolf is not strong."

Ruth's face did not change. "No. My wolf is not strong. But a challenge is not won by the stronger wolf. It is won by the wolf who does not lose her head." She looked at me. "I have watched you since the spring. You shifted wrong in the pasture and bit your own warrior in the hall. You nearly shifted on the powder path tonight and the Çöl Alpha had to put his hands on your neck to hold you. Your wolf is a wild thing and you cannot hold her, and in a challenge in front of the pack she will come out of you and she will not stop." She picked up her lamp. "I will see you in the hall at midday. Bring your wolf. I will bring mine."

She went out. The door shut behind her. Mira let out a breath and sat down heavily on her stool.

"She is right," Mira said. "About your wolf. She is right and she knows it. If you go into that circle with her at midday your wolf will come up and you will not be able to hold her, and she will let you run at her and then she will step aside and let you fall, and the pack will see a Luna who cannot hold her own shift."

"Then I will not shift."

Mira looked up. "What?"

"The old law. A challenge is settled by the wolves, but the challenge is issued to the seat, not to the wolf. Read it again. Ruth read it to me in the record room and she read the clause about the bond and she did not read the clause about the challenge." I sat down on the stool opposite her. "A challenge for the Luna seat is settled by a fight in the circle. The fight may be settled by the wolves, or it may be settled by the challenge and the answer. If the Luna answers the challenge in human form and fights in human form, the challenger must fight her in human form too. The old law says that the challenge is answered in the form the Luna chooses, and that the challenger must match it."

Mira stared at me. "Derya. Your mother never told you that."

"My mother told me everything about the old law. She used to sit me down in the hall when I was a girl and make me recite it, and I hated it, and I have forgotten most of it, but I remember that." I got up. "I will answer her challenge in human form. She cannot use her wolf. She is forty one and her wolf is ill and she has been counting on mine to lose its head. She will have to fight me as a woman with her hands, and I have been wrestling in the yard since I was nine."

"You are still not steady." Mira got up and took my arm and turned it to the lamp again. "And the mark. The mark is a problem and it is not going to get smaller."

I looked at the mark. It lay on my arm, a silver crescent with the horns turned up, and the lines of it were bright as wire.

"Mira," I said. "You said there was a way to make it go quiet for a few days."

Mira's face closed. "I said it would hurt."

"I know."

"And that it comes back brighter."

"I know."

"And that the wolf who does it has to give something." She looked at me. "The mark is tied to your wolf. To make it go quiet, I have to put a thing on it that pulls the wolf back. It is a paste of wolfsbane and silver dust and it goes on the mark and it burns like a brand for an hour and after that the mark fades to nothing for three or four days. And while it is faded your wolf is faded too. She will be asleep. You will not be able to shift at all, and if something happens in those three days and you need her, she will not come."

I sat with my arm on the table. "When it comes back."

"It comes back brighter. It comes back into the fourth stage and it will not be a crescent anymore." Mira put her hand on mine. "And there is one more thing. The paste does not work if the bond is active. It has to be quiet before it goes on. That means no touching, no scent, no nearness. If the Alpha is within a mile of you, the bond will push against the paste and the paste will fail and you will have a burn on your arm and a mark that is brighter than ever. Three days, Derya. Three days without him anywhere near you."

I sat in the hut with my arm on the table and the lamp burning and the smell of sage all around me. Out in the yard a dog barked and somebody laughed and the ordinary night of the pack house went on.

"Do it," I said. "Tonight. And then I am going to sleep, because in the morning I have to stand in the hall and answer a challenge."

Mira got up and went to the shelf. She took down three jars and a small iron mortar and set them on the table.

"This will take an hour," she said. "Lie down on the cot and put your arm out and do not move it. And Derya. When it burns, do not scream. The whole pack house will hear you and by morning Ruth will know what we have done."

I lay down on the cot and put my arm out. Mira mixed the paste in the mortar and the smell of it came up, wolfsbane and something sharp and metallic, and she came to the cot with the bowl and a cloth and looked down at me.

"Last chance," she said.

"Do it."

She put the paste on the mark and it was like a coal being laid on my skin. I closed my eyes and bit down on the leather strap she put in my mouth and I did not scream. I counted the beams of the ceiling. There were eleven of them. I got to eleven and started again.

When it was over my arm was wrapped in clean linen and the mark was gone and the sky outside the window was going grey. Mira was sitting on her stool with her apron in her lap and her face grey and wet.

"It is done," she said. "Three days. No shifting, no Alpha, no touching. And Derya. In the circle tomorrow, when Ruth comes at you, you will be a woman with her hands and nothing else. If you lose, she takes the seat and the pack and the inquiry and the Council reads whatever decision Silas wrote. So do not lose."

I sat up. My arm was burning under the linen and my wolf was gone, asleep, and the place where she had been was quiet in a way that frightened me more than any howling.

"I will not lose," I said.

Then I went out into the grey yard to wash my face, and at the gate a warrior was running toward me with his jacket half on, and he was shouting something about the border.