Chapter 3 The Alpha They Whispered About

The gathering was held on the flat ground below the pack house, where the moor runs out into a wide bowl of grass that the old Alphas had kept clear for a hundred years. By the time I came down the path, the whole pack was there.

I had forgotten how many of them there were. Two hundred wolves, maybe more, spread across the bowl in family groups with blankets and baskets, children running between the legs of the adults, a few of the older ones sitting on folding chairs they had carried up from the village. The morning was clear and cold and the grass was white with dew. A line of trestle tables had been set up along the eastern edge with bread and cheese and a great iron pot of something steaming. It smelled of onions and mutton and woodsmoke, and my stomach turned over, because I had not eaten since the day before.

I came in along the border track, which brought me in at the back, and I stood at the edge of the crowd with my new gloves on my hands and my heart going hard. Nobody looked at me. That was the strange part. I had been braced for it, for the turning heads and the whispers, and instead the pack went on eating and talking and calling to each other across the grass as if a ghost had not just walked in among them.

Then a woman near the bread table glanced up, and her face changed, and she leaned over and said something to the woman beside her.

The whisper went across the bowl faster than I could walk. I watched it move, group by group, a head turning here, a hand to a mouth there. A boy of about ten stared at me with his bread halfway to his mouth. An old man with a stick said something to the ground and shook his head.

I kept walking. I had promised her I would come, and I had promised her I would stand where she could see me.

The Alpha's table was at the head of the bowl, a long board on trestles with the challenge stone behind it, a grey slab of rock about the height of a man's waist that had stood on that spot since before anyone could remember. Isla sat at the middle of the table with Fergus on her right and Duncan on her left. Her hair was down today, dark brown and wavy and caught back from her face with two combs, and she wore a grey dress under a heavy shawl, and she was listening to a woman who had come up to speak to her with her head tilted and her hands folded on the table.

She saw me before I had taken ten steps into the bowl. Her eyes came up and found me across the whole crowd, and her mouth did something small, a tightening at one corner that might have been a greeting and might have been nerves.

Fergus saw me a moment later. He leaned over and said something in her ear, and she did not turn her head, and he sat back with his hands folded and his face pleasant.

I stopped at the back of the crowd, where I had said I would stand, and folded my arms, and the pack went back to its breakfast with one eye on me.

The gathering opened the way these things always open. The Alpha stood and welcomed the pack, and the pack made the low sound in their throats that means they have heard and agreed. She spoke about the year past, the lambing, the long wet winter, the two wolves lost on the north ridge in the spring. She spoke about the year ahead, the new fence along the eastern road, the Council's inspection in the autumn. Her voice carried well. She did not use notes.

Then she said, "Before we eat properly, there is a matter the Council has asked me to bring to the pack."

The bowl went quiet. I saw people put their bread down.

"The Council has received a complaint," Isla said, "about the state of this pack's leadership. It has been suggested that I am unfit to hold the Alpha seat, on the grounds that my wolf came late and that I have not yet been tested in a formal challenge."

Nobody moved. Somewhere at the back a child asked a question and was hushed.

Fergus rose. He did it slowly, with a hand on the table, the way a man rises when he means everyone to watch him, and he turned to the pack with his silver hair bright in the sun and his green eyes going along the rows of faces.

"I asked the Council to consider this question," he said. "I want the pack to understand that it was my request. My niece is the daughter of my only brother and I have loved her since she was born. But the Council has a duty to the pack, and I have a duty to the Council, and a complaint that is not answered becomes a rumor, and a rumor becomes a challenge on the stone with no rules and no witnesses. Better to answer it here, in the open, with all of us watching."

He turned and put his hand on the back of Isla's chair, a gesture so warm and fatherly that half the pack relaxed.

"The Council has asked me to put the question plainly," Fergus said. "So I will. Alpha, your wolf came to you three years after every other wolf in this bowl found theirs. The pack has never seen you in a formal challenge. There are those who say the bloodline has run thin, and that the Cairn pack would be safer with a stronger hand at the table. What do you say to them?"

The bowl was silent. Isla stood up.

She did not look at Fergus. She looked out across the crowd, and I saw her eyes find the older women at the back, and the young warriors standing together at the eastern edge, and me, at the end, standing with my arms folded.

"Three years ago," she said, "I shifted for the first time in the wood behind the pack house, alone, in the rain, with no one to teach me and no one to watch. I did not ask for help because I was afraid that the pack would decide the late wolf was a broken wolf, and I was right to be afraid. You did decide that."

A murmur went through the bowl. Fergus's hand came off the chair.

"My father came to his wolf at twelve," she said. "His mother came to hers at eleven. I do not know why mine took so long. I have asked Mara, and Mara has told me that some wolves come late and are the stronger for it, and I have chosen to believe her because I have no other answer to give you. What I can tell you is that my wolf is here now, and that she has not failed me once since she came, and that I have led this pack through a hard winter without a single wolf lost to hunger or cold." She paused. "The complaint against me is a complaint about a thing I cannot change. What I can change is whether this pack is led by someone who answers rumors at a breakfast table, or by someone who does the work. I have done the work. I intend to keep doing it."

The bowl broke into noise. Some of it was cheering. Some of it was not.

Fergus waited for it to settle, and then he smiled and spread his hands. "That is my niece," he said. "You have heard her. I for one am satisfied." He looked around the bowl. "Are there others who are not?"

A warrior stood up near the eastern edge, a broad young man with a shaved head and a heavy jaw, whose name I did not know. "I would like to see the Alpha on the stone," he said. "Not today. But before the autumn Council. A friendly challenge, with witnesses. So the pack knows."

The bowl went quiet again. Isla looked at the warrior for a long moment.

"Then you will have it," she said. "Name the day and I will meet you."

The warrior nodded and sat down. Fergus sat down. The pack began to talk, and the trestle tables filled up again, and I stood at the back of the bowl with my arms folded and my heart going like a hammer.

She had not asked for help. She had not asked the Council to withdraw the complaint or her uncle to soften his words. She had stood in front of two hundred wolves and said, this is the shape of the thing, and I will meet it on the stone.

I have never in my life wanted to cross a piece of ground so badly.

Fergus found me an hour later, when the eating was done and the pack had broken into groups to talk about the challenge. He came around the side of the tables with his hands behind his back and his green eyes going over my new gloves.

"You came," he said. "Good."

"You told me to."

"I did." He stopped beside me and looked out at the bowl as if we were two old friends admiring the view. "And now the Council would like to ask its questions. Not in front of everyone, I think. A smaller room, with the Alpha and the Beta and myself. There is a matter of your border, and a matter of your rank, and a matter of what you remember about the night my brother died. We will do it this afternoon, in the pack house, and you will answer honestly, and then we can put all this behind us."

I looked at the Alpha's table. Isla was still sitting there with a woman I did not know, listening to something about a lambing, and her eyes came up and met mine across the bowl.

Do not answer a single one until you have looked at me first.

"I will answer in front of the Alpha," I said. "Not in a smaller room."

Fergus turned his head. Something went through his face, quick and cold, and then it was gone. "The Alpha is busy with the gathering. She cannot be expected to sit through an old border dispute."

"Then the border dispute can wait," I said, "until the Alpha is free."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled, and it was a warm smile, and it made the back of my neck go cold.

"You know," he said, "for a man with no rank and no friends, you have a great deal of confidence." He turned and walked away, and then he stopped, and turned back. "One more thing. There was a rogue found dead on the western boundary this morning. A wolf with no pack scent, cut open from throat to belly, lying in the heather forty paces from your border. The Council will want to know what you were doing last night, and why a dead wolf is lying on the line you are paid to watch."

The bowl went on around us, and the children shouted, and the bread was passed along the trestle tables, and I stood there with my new gloves on my hands and my blood going cold, because I had been on that border all night and I had seen nothing at all.