Chapter 3 The Borrowed Luna

Yusuf read for an hour and a half, and most of it was dull.

That surprised me. I had expected something grand, a pact written in blood and fire and sealed with oaths that made the walls shake. What I got was a list. Boundaries and water allotments and the precise number of wolves each pack could bring to a Council meeting. A paragraph about grazing rights. Two pages about how disputes over the water station would be settled by a rotating arbiter chosen every three years. The old man's voice was dry and patient, and he read every clause without hurrying, and my coffee went cold in my hands.

Then he reached the part I had come for.

"On the matter of the borrowed Luna," he read, "the two fires agree as follows. When one pack shall stand without an heir of age, and the other pack shall stand without a Luna, that pack which lacks a Luna may request of the other a woman of good standing to dwell among them for one season, from the first frost to the last, and be known as the Luna of the house."

"From the first frost to the last," I said. "Nobody told me that. I thought it was forty-two days."

Yusuf looked up. "It is forty-two days, if the frost holds. In a warm year it can run to fifty."

"Fifty days in a house full of wolves who hate me."

"Fifty days at the most, and most years it is fewer." He turned the page. "Would you like me to continue?"

I nodded.

"The Luna shall be marked before the pack within the first week of her dwelling, that all may know her place and her standing. The mark shall be given by the Alpha of the house, upon the palm or the throat as the two shall agree, and shall be witnessed by no fewer than six wolves of the pack, and by any envoy of the Council who may be present."

I set my cup down. "Marked how?"

"That is what the next clause says." He traced the line with one finger. "The mark shall be given with scent, and with the laying on of hands, and with words spoken aloud, in the manner of the old ceremony, so that the whole pack may know the Luna by her scent and by her bearing."

"With scent."

"Yes."

"His scent."

"His scent, laid upon your skin, at your palm or your throat, so that the pack can smell which house you belong to."

I sat very still. I had known there would be a marking. Everyone had said marking, and I had pictured something ceremonial and distant, a ribbon, a cut on the arm, an old man chanting. Not this. Not his hands on my throat and his scent worked into my skin for the whole pack to smell.

"How long does it last?" I said.

"A season. That is the point of it." Yusuf closed the book on his finger and looked at me. "The mark will fade when the frost breaks, and you will go home, and no one will be able to say you were anything but what the pact made you."

"And if it doesn't fade?"

The old man was quiet for a moment. "Then the pack will know the bond was true, and the Council will be called, and the pact will be tested."

I wanted to ask what testing meant. I had a feeling I did not want to know, and I had a feeling he would not tell me if I did. So I asked the other question instead, the one that had been sitting in my chest since the riverbed.

"What happened to the last borrowed Luna?"

Yusuf's face did not change. He turned the book over in his hands, closed, and set it on his knee.

"The last borrowed Luna was your mother's cousin," he said. "A woman named Alina."

I knew that name. It was in one of the letters in the box in my drawer at home. I had read it when I was a girl and had not understood it.

"She died," I said.

"She died in this house, in the winter of 1948, three weeks before the frost broke. The records say she took a fever." He met my eyes. "I was eleven years old. I remember the funeral. Half the pack would not attend."

"Why not?"

"Because they did not believe it was a fever."

The room felt smaller than it had a minute before. The window was full of morning sun and the highway and a truck going past with a load of pipe, and none of it seemed to be in the same world as the old man in the chair.

"Who was Alpha then?" I said.

"Cal's grandfather."

"And what did he say?"

Yusuf picked up the book again. "He said she took a fever." He opened to the page he had marked. "Shall I read the rest?"

"Yes," I said. "Read the rest."

He read for another half hour. There were clauses about the Luna's duties, her authority, her right to speak at pack meetings and her obligation to be present at every ritual of the season. There were clauses about what happened if she left before the frost broke. There was a long, dull passage about the Council's right of inspection. And at the very end, in a different hand, in ink that had gone brown, there was a short paragraph that Yusuf read slowly and then read again.

"No mark given under this pact shall be counted false until the moon has judged it," he read. "And if the moon shall judge the mark true, the Luna shall be heir to the water, and the water shall follow her."

I stared at him.

"What does that mean?"

"It means what it says."

"Yusuf."

"It means," he said, and he closed the book and held it against his chest with both arms, "that if the marking is real, the water rights that the packs have argued over for two hundred years would pass to the Luna's pack. Not by war. Not by Council ruling. By the old law, written down before any of us were born."

I thought about the aquifer. I thought about the hills, and my brother, and the wells that had been going dry for three years. I thought about the word real.

"Who else knows about that paragraph?"

"Very few."

"Dorian?"

Yusuf did not answer at once. He stood up and put the book under his arm and walked to the door. When he turned back, his face was tired in a way that had nothing to do with his age.

"Dorian has read the pact," he said. "Dorian has read it more carefully than any wolf in this house. And if I were you, Marisol, I would count the days until the marking ceremony, and I would count them out loud, and I would not let that man get close enough to count them for me."

He opened the door.

"One more thing," he said. "The marking must be given before the Council envoy arrives. That gives you four days. Cal knows. He has known since the terms were agreed."

The door closed behind him. I sat on the edge of the bed with my cold coffee and my hands in my lap.

Four days. Four days until Cal put his hands on my throat in front of six wolves and the whole pack and laid his scent on me so that everyone would know which house I belonged to. Four days until the moon judged whether the mark was true.

I got up and went to the window. Down in the yard, Dorian was standing by the water trough with two other wolves, and they were talking, and one of them was laughing. Dorian was not. He was looking up at the house, at my window, and when he saw me he did not look away.

He raised one hand and touched two fingers to his brow, a small, mocking salute, and then he turned and walked off toward the gate with the other two following.

I stood at the window a long time after they were gone. Then I went to the dresser and picked up my mother's photograph and looked at her face.

"Four days," I said to her.