Chapter Four
Zaden
The border guard who brought the news was a young wolf named Lucan, and he delivered it the way a man delivers news he expects to be blamed for.
"Alpha," he said, "the Clawfore Luna is at the river crossing. Alone . She says she's here to see you, and when I told her to leave she sat down on a rock and started waving at our patrols. Ryzak waved back, Alpha. I want it on record that I told him not to."
"She did what?" I asked.
"Sat on a rock," Lucan said miserably. "She's still there. She's been there an hour. Myron's wife brought her tea. I don't know how that happened, Alpha. One minute we were a hostile border and the next there was tea."
Ivan, sharpening a knife by my fire with his boots up on my table, started laughing and did not stop for an unreasonable amount of time.
"Bring her," I said.
"Bring her here?" Lucan asked.
"Unless you'd rather I came to the rock," I said.
They brought her to the great hall as the sun went down, and I made the mistake of being there when she walked in.
The bond hit me the moment the doors opened, before I even saw her, the hook under my ribs pulling tight and my wolf surging up with a joy so violent it felt like being shoved.
Then she came through the doors with two of my guards trailing her like confused chaperones, and she was wearing travel leathers and a yellow scarf, and she was smiling at my hall, at my guards, at my pack's banners on the wall, at sixty years of enemy territory, as if she had been invited.
"You have a lovely hall," she said. "Very brooding. The antlers are a strong choice. Did you pick them or did you inherit the antlers?"
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"Inherited, then," she said. "You'd have chosen something with more menace. A whole skeleton, maybe."
She came down the length of the hall, unhurried, looking around her with frank curiosity, and my guards looked at me for instruction and I had none to give them, because nothing in my life had prepared me for being invaded by sunshine.
She stopped an exact, polite distance away. Close enough that her scent reached me. Wildflowers and rain.
My wolf keened.
"You have until I finish this cup," I said. There was no cup.
She looked at my empty hands and her mouth twitched, and she let it go, which somehow was worse.
"I'll be quick," she said. "Clawfore dissolves at the Blood Moon.
You know this. Everyone knows this. When it dissolves, the Council divides our lands among four bordering packs, and you'll spend the next decade fighting Jademoor and the Ridgenight in Council chambers over the pieces, and the piece you want is the Springline, and you might not get it.
Darius wants it too. Darius is better at Council politics than you, because Darius enjoys lying and you're terrible at it.
You scowl when you lie. You're scowling right now, incidentally, and I haven't even said anything yet worth lying about. "
"You came here to insult my face," I said.
"I came here to save my pack," she said, and the sunshine dropped away all at once, and what was underneath stopped me cold, because what was underneath was steel.
"Here is my offer, Alpha Nightsteel. Mate me.
On paper, before the Council, by the Blood Moon.
A mating of pure politics. In exchange, Clawfore grants Nightsteel permanent, treatied access to the Springline and the moonstone spring.
Not smugglers' access. Not stolen jars in the night.
Open access, signed and sealed, forever. "
The hall went very quiet. I heard Ivan, somewhere behind me, stop sharpening his knife.
"You don't know what you're offering," I said.
"I know exactly what I'm offering," she said.
"I know your wolves have been crossing into the Springline at night for at least two years.
My patrols have found the tracks. I know you're buying moonstone water through the smuggler routes at triple value, because I know the smugglers, and they like me better than they like you, because everyone does.
I don't know why you want the water, and I've decided I don't care.
What I care about is four hundred wolves who will be scattered to packs that hate them in eleven weeks unless an Alpha stands beside me at the Blood Moon, and you are the only Alpha in the region the bond hasn't poisoned, because you're the other end of it. "
"I rejected the bond," I said.
"Yes," she said. "Loudly. I was there. It was memorable."
Her voice stayed level and her smile stayed gone, and I realized I was seeing something almost no one saw, and I had no idea why she was showing me.
"This isn't about the bond. I'm not asking you to take it back.
I'm offering you a contract. Separate lives, separate dens, no expectations.
We stand together at ceremonies and sign things and otherwise you may go on scowling in your antler hall until the Moon takes you.
All you have to do is say yes, and your pack gets the spring, and my pack gets to exist."
"The contract you're describing is the forbidden kind," I said. "Political mating, adjacent packs, feuding packs. You're offering me a document that dissolves you faster than the deadline does."
"The document stays in a drawer," she said.
"What the Council sees is the bond, and the bond is real, Alpha Nightsteel.
Every wolf in that hall felt it strike. They can't call ignition a fraud, the Moon signed it itself.
All we decline to do is seal it. There's no law against restraint.
There's no law for it either. I checked. I'm proposing we live in the gap."
I should have said no. Every year of my life had built toward saying no to exactly this, to a mate, to a bond, to the soft fatal thing that had hollowed out my father and burned my pack to its foundations.
I had watched a bond eat the strongest Alpha I ever knew.
I had sworn on his grave, with the smoke of our own village still in the air, that no mate would ever hold a knife to Nightsteel through me.
But that was the thing about her offer. It wasn't soft. There was no bond in it, no love, no knife. It was territory and treaty, and on the other side of it Will drank moonstone water openly, in the sun, for the rest of his life, and Jay, and the twins, and every pup that came after.
"The spring access," I said. "In writing. Permanent. Surviving the mating itself, surviving both our deaths, attached to the land and not to us."
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
"You've thought about this spring a great deal," she said.
"Those are my terms," I said.
"Then those are your terms," she said. "Attached to the land. Done. I'll have it drawn tonight."
"And separate lives means separate lives," I said. "I don't want your sunshine in my hall, Luna. Don't charm my guards. Don't bring tea to my borders. Don't smile at me."
"I'll smile at you in public," she said. "It's in the part of the contract called convincing the Council we're mated. You'll have to bear it. Privately, I promise to treat you with all the warmth you've earned."
She put out her hand, businesslike, and I looked at it the way I should have looked at it the first time, and she watched me look.
"It won't bite," she said. "That was last time. The bond only ignites once. Now it just sits there. Like a guest neither of us invited."
I took her hand. The bond pulled, hook and line, and her breath caught very slightly, so slightly no one else could have seen it, and I knew it cost her exactly what it cost me, and that she had walked into my hall and offered her hand anyway.
We shook once and let go.
"You're not what I expected," I said, before I could stop myself.
"I know," she said, and the smile came back on like a lamp, bright and impenetrable, and I understood for the first time that it was armor, and that I had just watched her take it off and put it back on, and that I might be the only living soul who knew the difference.
"Nobody ever expects the sunshine to do math. "