Chapter 2 What I Came to Do

Hank went out the door with the lantern in his hand and did not tell me to stay.

I stayed anyway, for about four seconds. Then the howling stopped, and the quiet that came after it was worse, and I was through the door and down the track after him with my heart in my throat. The sky over the eastern rim had gone from ink to a thin grey, enough light to see the shape of things, the boulders, the pipe, the wagon ruts leading down toward the creek bed. Hank stood at the corner of the spring house with his head up and his whole body still.

"That was three wolves," he said. "Not my patrol. Mine would have called in first."

"Rogues?"

"Rogues do not hunt in threes this close to a pack house unless they are hungry or paid." He turned his head toward me. "Go back inside."

"I am not going to stand in your spring house while something comes over that ridge."

"Then stand here and stay behind me."

The feet I had heard were gone now, if they had ever been there. What I could hear was wind in the juniper and the warm water dripping, and my own breathing, which was too fast. I made myself slow it. My mother used to say a scared wolf smells like a scared wolf and there is no hiding it, so you may as well be scared on purpose.

Three weeks. She had been dead three weeks and two days, and I still measured time by it, the way you measure by a storm or a birth.

The last morning I saw her she had come down to the cistern at first light with her hair unbraided and a cup of coffee in each hand. My mother had a way of appearing wherever the work was, without any fuss, and you would look up and there she was with her sleeves rolled and her grey eyes on the gauge. She had been Luna of the Kızıltaş pack for nineteen years. She had taken it from her own mother, who had taken it from hers, and she had held it through two bad winters and a border dispute and the year the mine flooded, and she had never once raised her voice in the pack hall. People did what she asked because the asking was so quiet that refusing it would have been rude.

She handed me the second cup and said, "The gauge is down another inch. That is eleven inches since the spring thaw."

"Ruth says the creek bed is holding water."

"Ruth says a great many things in that voice of hers." My mother drank her coffee and looked out at the mesa. "I want you to ride the south fence line with Cal this afternoon. Not the north. South."

"Why south?"

"Because I am asking." She said it lightly. Then she set her cup down on the cistern lid and put her hand on my arm, and her grey eyes, which were the same grey as the sandstone in the low light, went somewhere else for a moment. "If anything ever happens to me, Derya, you go to the old maps in the attic. Your father's maps. Not the ones in the office."

"What would happen to you?"

"Nothing." She picked her cup back up. "I am going to be a very old woman and a great nuisance to you and your children. But you humor me. You always have."

I rode the south fence line that afternoon with Cal, who was nineteen and complained about the heat the whole way and made me laugh twice, and we came back at dusk to find the pack house in an uproar and my mother's horse standing riderless in the yard with blood on the saddle.

They told me she had fallen. The south rim was loose rock in those weeks, they said, and her horse had spooked at something, a snake or a bird, and she had gone over the edge and broken her neck in the fall. It was Ruth who told me, Ruth who rode out with the search party, Ruth who brought her body back wrapped in a canvas tarp and put her hand on my shoulder in the yard and said, "I am so sorry, Derya. She was the best of us."

I believed it for two days. I was twenty four years old and my mother had just died in a fall, and there was a funeral to arrange and a pack to hold and forty wolves looking at me to see if I would cry or break or hold. I did not have time to disbelieve anything.

Then Mira came to my room on the third night with her healer's bag and her round face gone the color of old paper, and she sat on the end of my bed and said, "There was no rock under her nails, Luna. There was rope."

I remember the sound the lantern made when I set it down on the floor. It was a small sound. I remember that the floorboards in my mother's room had a knot in one of them that looked like an eye, and I stared at it while Mira talked.

"Rope burns on the wrists," Mira said. "And the neck was broken before the fall, or near enough. I did not want to say it in front of the pack. I did not want to say it at all."

"Who else knows?"

"Nobody. I cleaned her and wrapped her myself." Mira's hands were shaking in her lap. "Ruth asked me twice whether I had found anything unusual. She asked in that way she has. I told her no."

We sat there for a while. Somewhere out in the hall a door closed and a wolf laughed at something and the ordinary evening sounds of the pack house went on around us, and my mother was in the ground with rope marks on her wrists and the whole pack believed she had fallen from a horse.

"Say nothing," Mira said. "Not yet. Not to Ruth."

"Why not to Ruth?"

"Because I am an old woman who has watched this pack for thirty years, and I am telling you to say nothing to Ruth yet." She got up and picked up her bag, and at the door she stopped. "Your mother came to see me four days before she died. She asked me how much wolfsbane it would take to make a wolf sick and not kill him. I told her three pinches. She wrote it down on the back of her hand."

She left. I sat on the end of the bed until the candle burned out, and then I sat in the dark.

That is what I came to the Çöl border with. Not a plan, whatever I told myself on the ledge. I came with my mother's voice in my head asking about wolfsbane, and Mira's voice telling me about rope, and Ruth's careful voice at every meal saying the canyon has gone dry before, and eleven inches on a gauge, and the south fence line, and the attic, and the way my mother had put her hand on my arm and told me to humor her.

Ruth had given me the poison herself. She had wrapped it in wax paper and put it in my hand at the pack house door and said, "Three pinches. Make sure nobody sees you. When the Çöl pack is sick, we will go to the Council and ask for a water share as a mercy, and they will grant it, because a sick pack cannot hold a spring against the whole Council. Do you understand me, Derya? This is how a Luna keeps her people alive."

And I had looked at her cold grey eyes and said yes.

Because I did not know yet, that night. I knew Mira's story and I knew about the rope and the wolfsbane on my mother's hand, and I did not know who had done it. Ruth had been my mother's Beta for eleven years. Ruth had ridden out with the search party. Ruth had brought her body back. I had no proof that Ruth had done anything except be useful, and in the three weeks since the funeral she had been very useful, always at my elbow, always with an answer ready, always so sorry, Derya, so sorry, and the pack had begun to turn to her when they had questions they did not want to bring to a grieving girl.

The poison in my pocket was the first thing Ruth had ever asked me to do as Luna. I told myself I was taking it to the border to find out what she wanted. I told myself I would not use it.

I am not sure that was true. I had a knife in my boot and a hole in my chest and a pack that was dying of thirst, and I had been awake for most of six days, and there is a kind of tired that makes a person very simple. I think I would have put the poison in the spring. I think I would have done it and come home and washed my hands and never told anyone.

Then Hank came out of the spring house with a tin cup in his hand and looked at me like weather coming in, and the whole of it fell apart.

The rogues did not come over the ridge.

We waited at the corner of the spring house until the sky was full grey, and Hank sent two of his warriors up the track to scout, and they came back with nothing but a story about a dead mule deer and a coyote that had been at it. The howling had been a warning, maybe, or a mistake, or a wolf from some other pack passing through and making noise to say so. Hank listened to his scouts and nodded and did not look convinced.

"Go home," he said to me. We were standing by the pipe, and the eastern rim had gone the pale gold that comes before the sun. "Ride the creek bed south and come up on your mesa from the far side. Nobody from my pack saw you come in except the two on watch, and I will speak to them."

"And the paper? The water share?"

He took a folded page out of his shirt pocket and held it out. It had been written in a firm, small hand, with the terms set down in numbered lines, a share of the spring for the Kızıltaş pack in exchange for labor on the spring house and a promise that no Kızıltaş wolf would cross the border armed. My mother would have read it twice and argued about clause four.

"This is more than I asked for," I said.

"I know what I wrote." He looked at my wrist. The mark had faded in the grey light until it was only a pale curve, but it was there, and we both knew it. "Derya. Before you go. The mark."

"It is nothing."

"It is not nothing, and if you say that again I will begin to think you are a poor liar." He said it without heat. "I will not touch you again unless you ask me to. But you should know that I am not going to pretend I did not feel what I felt at that pipe, and I am not going to let you pretend it either."

I looked at the paper in my hand because it was easier than looking at him. "And what does the Alpha of the Çöl pack propose to do about it?"

"Nothing, for now. I have a pack that will riot if I am seen to be soft on the Kızıltaş, and you have a Beta who will use anything she can against you. So we keep it quiet and we think, and we do not let Ruth find out before we are ready." He picked up his cup from the wall. "And you come back in three days and tell me what you found in that attic your mother was so fond of."

I had not told him about the attic. I had not told him anything about my mother except that there was no drought.

I opened my mouth to ask how he knew, and then I saw his face, and the question went out of my head. He was not looking at me anymore. He was looking past my shoulder, down the wagon track toward the creek bed, and the cup in his hand had stopped halfway to his mouth.

A horse was coming up the track. One horse, walking, unhurried, and the sun was behind it so that I could not see the rider at first, only the shape of the animal and the long shadow it threw ahead of it. Then the horse came around the last boulder and I saw the auburn hair and the grey eyes and the neat grey jacket with the Kızıltaş crest on the pocket, and my stomach turned over.

Ruth reined in six paces from us and looked from me to Hank and back to me, and her face did the thing I had seen it do a hundred times at the pack table, the thing where it went soft and concerned and ready to help.

"Derya," she said. "Thank the moon. I have been riding since before dawn. When you did not come back to the pack house I was so afraid something had happened to you out here on the border." Her eyes went to the paper in my hand. "What is that you are holding?"