Her name, as it turned out, was not Kira's daughter.
Elowen had been calling her that in her own mind for the months of their morning meetings on the forest trail, the gradual and patient building of a relationship between a woman and a wild wolf who had lost her mother and was running the eastern forest alone and had decided, over a period of approximately fourteen weeks of careful assessment, that the woman who sat on the trail every morning and brought dried meat and did not reach toward her was acceptable company.
She had a name, as all the pack's wolves had names, recorded in the pack's wolf registry by the senior tracker who maintained the forest territory map. Elowen had looked it up in February.
Sable.
She told the wolf this on a March morning when Sable came within two feet, w
