Chapter 3 His Eyes in the Dust

I folded the paper before Ruth could see the writing on it.

That was the first thing I did, and I did it without thinking, the way you cover a wound. Then I put it in the inside pocket of my jacket and took my hand out again and tried to arrange my face into something a Beta would believe.

"It is a list of terms," I said. "I came to talk about the water."

Ruth's eyebrows went up a fraction. She had a way of doing that, one small movement that said she had caught you in something and was going to be very patient about it. "You came to talk about the water. At dawn. Alone. Without telling me."

"I did not want a delegation. You said yourself that a sick pack is easier to bargain with than a strong one, and I decided I would rather try the bargain first."

"And the Alpha of the Çöl pack received you in his nightshirt, I see." She looked at Hank, who had not moved from the wall and who still held his tin cup. "Good morning, Alpha. I hope my Luna has not inconvenienced you too badly."

Hank drank from the cup and set it down. "She has been no trouble at all. Will you get down, or are you going to conduct the rest of this from the saddle?"

Ruth swung off her horse. She did it gracefully, the way she did everything, and she landed and straightened her jacket and walked toward us, and I watched her take in the spring house and the pipe and the two scouts up on the rise. Her horse stood with its head down, blowing, its coat dark with sweat along the neck. She had not ridden since before dawn because she was afraid for me. She had ridden since before dawn because I had not come home and she wanted to know what I was doing.

"I think we should talk in private," Ruth said to me. "Alpha, you will forgive us. Pack business."

"Whatever the Luna has come to discuss with me is already known to me," Hank said. "You can say it here."

Something passed across Ruth's face and was gone. She turned her back on him. It was a small insult, done politely, and I saw one of the scouts up on the rise shift his weight.

"Derya," Ruth said, and her voice went soft and warm. "I gave you a simple task. Come in the night, do it, come home. Instead I find you at the border at sunrise drinking coffee with a rival Alpha and holding papers. What am I supposed to think?"

"You are supposed to think I made a better bargain than poisoning a spring."

"Poisoning." She said the word as if she were tasting it for the first time. "I never said poison."

"You gave me the packet."

"I gave you a tincture to make them sick for a week so that the Council would grant us water as a mercy." Ruth's grey eyes were steady and mild. "If you have decided not to use it, that is your choice as Luna, and I will respect it. But you should have told me. You should have let me help you. Your mother would never have gone over a border alone."

The morning was cold and my jacket had dried stiff with dust and I was so tired that the ground felt soft under my feet. I have thought since about how easy it would have been to let her have it. To say you are right, Ruth, I am sorry, I have been grieving and I am not myself, and let her put her hand on my shoulder and take the paper out of my pocket and walk me home. For about two seconds I wanted that more than I have wanted anything.

"She did not go over a border alone," I said. "She did not go over the border at all."

Ruth's face did not change. "I do not know what you mean."

"No. You do not."

We looked at each other. The wind came down the canyon and pushed a strand of auburn hair across her cheek and she did not lift a hand to fix it, which was not like her, and I watched her decide something behind her grey eyes. Then she turned and walked to her horse and took a folded document out of the saddlebag, and came back with it in her hand.

"Since we are being honest with each other at dawn," she said, "the Council sent a rider to the pack house last night after you had gone. This was waiting for me when I woke."

She handed it to me. The paper was heavy and cream colored and had the Council seal pressed into the corner, and I opened it with the taste of bad coffee in my mouth.

It was one page. It was addressed to me, by title, not by name. It said that the Council of Alphas had received information that the Luna of the Kızıltaş pack had been seen crossing the border into Çöl territory without the consent of her pack, and that in light of the recent death of her mother the Council would be sending an envoy to the canyon to inquire into the matter of the Kızıltaş succession. The envoy would arrive within the week. It was signed by a name I did not know, and beneath the name, in a different hand, the words On behalf of the Council.

"Within the week," I said. "Someone told them before I crossed the border."

Ruth spread her hands. "I told no one. I have been riding since before dawn looking for you. You may believe that or not."

I looked at Hank. He had come away from the wall and was standing close enough to read over my shoulder, and he read the letter twice, and then he held his hand out for it. I gave it to him. He turned it over and looked at the back and held it up to the light as if there might be something hidden in the paper.

"Who is this envoy?" he asked.

"The letter does not say. Only a signature." Ruth's voice was dry. "In my experience the Council sends the man they mean to do the work. They do not announce him first."

Hank handed the letter back to me. His face had settled into something flat and calm that I could not read at all, and for reasons I could not have explained, that frightened me more than Ruth's arrival had. A shouting wolf you can brace against. A quiet one you cannot.

"You should go home, Luna," he said. "Both of you. This letter will be all over your pack house by noon, and your warriors will want to hear from you before they hear it from somebody else."

"What about the water?" I asked.

"The water stands where it stood an hour ago. My pipe runs warm and my spring house is mine, and I have written terms that I will honor if you bring them to your pack and they hold." He looked at Ruth and then back at me. "But you should know that if the Council is coming, they will not come for the water. They will come for the succession. A new Luna with a dead mother and a disputed border is exactly the kind of thing they like to take apart and put back together their own way."

Ruth made a small sound. "The Alpha speaks as if he has experience of the Council."

"I have experience of losing things to them," Hank said.

He walked with us to the horses. Ruth went ahead, leading her mare, and Hank and I came behind, and I could feel the space between us like a hand's width of warm air in a cold morning. He did not touch me. He had said he would not unless I asked, and he did not, and I found that I was noticing his hands very much, the way they hung at his sides with the knuckles scarred, the way one of them had closed around my wrist at the pipe.

"There is a thing I did not say in front of her," he said, quietly. "The wolves who saw you come over the rim last night are mine, and they answer to me, and none of them sent a rider to the Council. Whoever told them you crossed, it was not a Çöl wolf."

I stopped. "Then how did they know?"

"Someone in your pack was waiting for you to do something they could report." He looked down the track at Ruth's back. "The letter says you crossed the border without the consent of your pack. That is not a description of an accident. That is a description of a plan that went wrong for whoever made it."

The sun had come over the eastern rim now and the red rock was throwing long shadows, and a crow somewhere up on the mesa was making a noise like a rusty hinge. I looked at the paper in my hand and then at Ruth, who had reached her horse and was already mounted and waiting for me with her patient face.

"Three days," Hank said. "You said you would come back in three days. Come back with the paper and what you find in that attic, and we will make a second bargain that the Council cannot touch."

"I will try."

"Do not try. Come back." He said it flatly. "And do not tell her about the attic. If she already knows about it, then she already knows, but you will not be the one to tell her."

I mounted my horse. Ruth had already turned hers toward the track, and I gathered the reins and looked down at Hank standing in the red dust with the sun on his black hair and his face still and unreadable, and I felt the mark on my wrist give a small dull ache, like a bruise that has been pressed.

"Alpha," I said. "Thank you for the coffee."

"Luna," he said. "Ride south."

He did not watch us go. He turned back to the spring house and picked up his cup and went inside, and that was the last I saw of him for three days. I had expected him to argue. I had expected a challenge or a claim or some demand made in the language of the mate bond that I could have refused and been angry about. Instead he let me ride out of his territory with a folded paper in my pocket and a debt between us, and the ease of it sat in my stomach all the way down the creek bed and up the long switchbacks to the mesa.

Ruth did not speak for the first two miles. Then she said, "You like him."

"I do not know him."

"You know him well enough to spend the night at his spring house." She said it lightly. "Your mother would have been careful about that. She would have said that a Luna can afford many things, but she cannot afford to be seen to be soft on the border."

"My mother is dead."

"Yes." Ruth's voice was gentle. "And I am sorry. More than you know."

We rode up the last switchback and the pack house came into view below us, its long low walls of fitted stone, the water tower behind it, the cistern in the yard with the gauge on its iron side. There were wolves in the yard. More than there should have been at that hour, a knot of them by the gate, and as we came down the last slope I saw Cal among them, sandy hair bright in the sun, and he looked up at us and his face did something I did not like at all.

Ruth reined in. "Derya," she said. "Before we go down. Whatever the pack says in the next hour, remember that I was your mother's Beta for eleven years and I have been yours since the day she died. I am not your enemy."

I looked at her grey eyes and her patient face and the neat grey jacket, and I thought about rope burns on my mother's wrists.

"No," I said. "You would never be that obvious."

She smiled at that, a small smile that did not reach her eyes, and rode down into the yard ahead of me. I followed her, and the wolves by the gate turned their faces up toward me, and Cal came forward and caught my horse's bridle before I could dismount.

"Luna," he said, low. His freckled face was pale under the tan. "Mira sent me to watch for you. She says you are to come to her hut before you speak to anyone. She says it is urgent."

"Is she ill?"

"No." Cal's eyes went to my wrist, where the sleeve had slipped, and he looked away quickly. "She says she knows what is on your arm and she has to see it herself."

I put my hand over my wrist. The mark had been a pale curve at dawn, and now under the sun it was warming, the small heat coming back into it as if someone had opened a door. Ruth was already across the yard with a group of warriors closing around her, and the air above the pack house was full of the sound of many voices talking at once.

"What does she think it is?" I asked.

Cal let go of the bridle and stepped back. "She would not tell me. She told me to tell you one thing. She said it is not a scratch, Luna. It is a claim."

I got down off my horse.