Chapter 3 The Alpha Who Forgot Me

Barış held the lantern high and let the silence do his work. The whole yard had turned to watch me, and the boot print lay between us in the packed earth like a word spoken out loud.

"I was on the north ridge last night," I said. "I found a rogue bleeding at the cairn. He had a silver burn on his side and said hunters did it. I brought him in."

"You brought him in." Barış said it slowly, as if tasting the words for poison. "A rogue, into the pack house, without telling the Beta whose duty it is to guard the border."

"Whose duty it is to guard the border, or whose duty it is to know what I do before I do it?"

The lantern light shifted on his jaw. "You should have called the patrol."

"He would have bled out in the moss while the patrol walked down from the east line. That is not who we are." I turned to the pack and raised my voice. "He is in the smokehouse shed, bandaged, and he will answer every question put to him at first light. If he has lied to me, I will hand him to the council myself."

Some of the wolves nodded. Others looked at Barış. I saw then what I had been refusing to see for months: this pack had two centres, and mine had been slipping.

"At first light, then," Barış said. "Before the elders, not before me."

"Before the elders," I agreed.

He walked away and the crowd broke up, and Maren came to stand beside me. She looked at the boot print, then at me, and said, "First light. You should eat something before then, and so should he."

The Alpha's rooms were at the top of the house, where the stairs were worn in the middle from three hundred years of feet. I went up after the yard had emptied. My father sat by the window with a blanket over his knees and a cup of cold tea in his hand, watching the dark beyond the glass as if it were a thing he could still command.

He had been a big man once. Broad shoulders, a voice that carried down the mountain. When I was a girl he would carry me on his back up the lower path and tell me the Luna was the spine of the pack, and that a spine did not show itself but nothing stood without it.

"Father." I took the cold cup from his hand. "It is late. You should be in bed."

He looked up, and his pale eyes cleared for a moment, and my heart lifted the way it always did at that first flicker of him. "Ayşe," he said. "You came back."

The cup almost slipped from my fingers. Ayşe had been my mother. She had been dead eleven years.

"It is Elif," I said. "I am Elif. Your daughter."

He frowned, then smiled, and it was the kind of smile a man gives a stranger who has been polite to him. "Elif. Of course. My girl has hair like a fox. She used to run the ridge with the young warriors and beat them all." He patted the arm of the chair. "Sit down, Ayşe. Tell me what the elders are saying about the border."

I sat, because there was nothing else to do, and held his hand while he talked about a raid from forty years ago and the winter the snow came to the kitchen door. When he finally tired and let me help him to bed, he was asleep before I pulled the blanket up.

I stood in the corridor outside his door for a long time with my fist pressed to my mouth, and I did not cry, because the corridor had thin walls and the pack was already whispering.

The elders' circle met at first light in the long room below the hall, where the founding laws were kept in a chest of black wood and the windows looked east toward the sea. Orhan sat at the head, as he had sat there before my father was born. White hair, clouded eyes, a face like the bark of an old tree.

Cemal came in between two warriors with his bandaged side and his black hair still damp. He walked without help. His eyes found me before they found anyone else in the room.

"He crossed a marked boundary in the dark," Barış said. "That is a rogue's crime and the law is clear."

"The law is clear about trespass," Orhan said. His voice was thin and dry and very old. "It is less clear about a wolf carried in by the Luna herself. Tell us, Elif. Why did you not leave him in the moss?"

"Because he told me something I could not leave in the moss." I had spent the night deciding how to say this, and every version sounded like a fool's bargain. "He claims the mate bond. He claims he felt it the moment I touched his hand."

The room went quiet. Orhan's eyes moved from me to Cemal and back again.

"Rogues claim the bond often," Barış said. "It is the oldest trick on the mountain. A rogue claims a Luna and the pack is forced to keep him."

"I did not claim it to be kept." Cemal's voice was quiet and even, and he stood with his shoulders squared despite the bandage. "I am telling you what I felt. If the elders wish to test me, test me. If they find me false, I will walk out of this room and take my chances in the pines."

"Easy words," Barış said.

"Words are easy," Orhan agreed. "The bond is not." He looked at me. "What did you feel, Elif?"

Every face turned toward me. I could smell them all: Barış's sharp suspicion, Maren's worry from her seat by the wall, Orhan's old dust and old grief. And under all of it, Cemal, his scent reaching across the room like a hand held out.

"I felt nothing," I said. "The bond is unproven. He stays in the shed until the elders decide."

Barış's mouth turned. "Then the Luna herself admits there is nothing between them."

"The Luna admits nothing," Orhan said, before I could answer. "She tells us what she knows and no more. That is the law." He rose, slow and creaking. "The stranger stays. The elders will hear him again in three days. In the meantime, Elif, you will bring him his food and his bandages, since you are the one who chose to keep him."

"That is unwise," Barış said.

"That is the law," Orhan said. "And it has stood longer than your opinions."

The room emptied. I waited until Barış had gone and Maren had followed him out with one last look at me, and then I walked to the door with Cemal and the two warriors.

In the corridor, where the lamp smoked and the others were out of hearing, Cemal bent his head to mine. "You said you felt nothing."

"I did."

"You are a poor liar." He said it gently. "Your pulse went strange when I walked in. I could hear it from the door."

"Then hear this. If you are playing a game with my pack, I will find it. I have a nose for games."

"I know." He lifted his bandaged hand and brushed a strand of hair from my cheek, and my wolf turned over in her sleep and reached for him without waking. "You said the bond was unproven. Prove it, then. Ask the elders for the testing rite."

"There is no testing rite."

"There is." His brown eyes held mine, and in them I saw something careful and sad and certain. "It is in the old founding laws. Your elder knows it. Ask him what it costs a false mate when the bond is tested and the claim is false."

He walked on down the corridor with the warriors, and I stood where he had left me.

I was still standing there when one of the young wolves came running up the stairs from the kitchens, out of breath, her face white in the lamplight. She stopped in front of me and took a moment to find her voice.

"Luna," she said. "There is a wolf at the western gate. A Çamlıca wolf, with a message and a seal. She says she is expected."