Chapter Seven
Sana
Elder Nylah requested an audience in my third week of married life, and she brought a list.
Nylah was tall and dry and had a face like a ledger, and she had served on my father's council for thirty years, and she had never once forgiven me for surviving him.
She laid her papers on my desk and squared their edges before she spoke, because Nylah squared the edges of everything, including conversations.
"The pack has concerns," she said.
"The pack," I said, "or you?"
"I speak for the elders," she said.
"Odell is an elder," I said. "Odell brought my husband a scarf yesterday because she decided he looked cold. She's knitting him another one. He doesn't know how to react to it and it's the best thing currently happening in my life. So perhaps you speak for some of the elders."
Nylah's mouth thinned.
"Odell is sentimental," she said. "The concerns are these.
An Nightsteel Alpha sleeps inside our walls.
Nightsteel wolves now patrol the Springline jointly with ours, on land your father died holding.
The treasury shows expenditures for a Blood Moon ceremony we may yet have cause to regret.
And the Luna spends her evenings behind closed shutters with a man who rejected her before the assembled Council, and the pack is asked to believe in a love story. "
She looked up from her papers. "I knew your father forty years, girl. He was a hard man and an honest one, and he would not know what to make of his daughter."
I kept my hands still on the desk. That one had been aimed carefully, and it had landed where she aimed it.
"My father held the Springline for thirty years," I said, "and it cost him his life, and my brother's, and forty more besides, and at the end of all that holding, the land is still there and the wolves are not.
I am trying something my father never tried, Nylah.
I'm trying to make the border worth less than the peace.
If that disappoints his memory, his memory is welcome to take it up with me, but his memory doesn't get a vote on whether four hundred living wolves keep their home. "
"Pretty," Nylah said. "You were always pretty with words. Your mate, since we are speaking of honesty, scowled through the entire harvest blessing yesterday."
"He scowls through everything," I said. "He scowled through our betrothal. It's his face. The pups have started imitating it, and frankly the pups are gaining on him."
That much was true, and it had become, against every expectation I owned, one of the small strange pleasures of my ruined autumn.
Zaden Nightsteel did scowl through everything.
He scowled through Odell's scarf presentation while wearing the scarf.
He scowled through the harvest blessing while carrying two crates of apples nobody had asked him to carry.
He scowled at the pups who followed Ivan everywhere, and one of them, fearless little Mila from the Opus, had scowled back, and something had passed between them like recognition, and now Mila walked behind him on patrol days doing his exact walk, and I had watched my grim contractual husband slow his stride so her legs could keep up while pretending not to notice her existence, and the hook under my ribs had done something complicated that I had filed away to never examine.
"The Council's observer arrives within the fortnight," Nylah said, gathering her papers. "Darius of Jademoor has claimed the duty personally. I'm told you'll want to prepare."
"How kind of you to be told things," I said. "Before my own courier was."
We looked at each other across the desk, and there it was, just for a moment, out from behind the ledger face.
She wanted me to fail. She wanted it more than she wanted Clawfore whole, because Clawfore under Jademoor would still have elders, would perhaps value them better, and Clawfore under a girl was an indignity she had decided not to survive.
"Thank you, Nylah," I said, Sana as morning. "That will be all."
I held the smile until the door closed. Then I sat in my father's chair in my father's office and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, and that was how Zaden found me, because the man moved like weather and never knocked.
"The door was open," he said. He stopped when I lowered my hands, and whatever was on my face, it changed whatever was on his.
"Nylah," he said. It wasn't a question.
"She squares the edges of papers," I said. "Before she insults you. Squares them up neat. I've started flinching at the sound."
He stood there a moment, this huge grim man in Odell's lumpy gray scarf, and then he did something he had never done, and pulled the chair to the side of the desk and sat down in it, not across from me like a petitioner, beside me like something else.
"My treasurer squares papers," he said. "Old Corvin.
Forty years on the council, voted against everything I've done since my father died, tells anyone who sits still that I've ruined the pack.
Last winter he took fever and I sat with him four nights, because he taught me figures when I was Mila's age, and on the fourth night he gripped my hand and told me my father would be ashamed of what I've made of Nightsteel.
First thing he'd said in two days. Saved it up. "
"What did you do?" I asked.
"Held his hand until he slept," Zaden said. "What else? You don't fight the old ones, Luna. You outlast them. They're grieving a world that's already gone, and you're the proof it's gone, and they'll forgive the world before they forgive the proof."
He paused, and the scowl shifted into the other thing, the dry thing I was learning to watch for. "He recovered, by the way. Corvin. Voted against my budget in the spring. I've never been so glad to lose a vote."
I laughed. It came out of me sideways, surprised, a real one, and his eyes came up at the sound of it, and the look on his face was one we had never rehearsed.
"That's against contract," I said.
"What is?" he asked.
"Cheering me up," I said. "There's no clause for it."
"I'll have it added," he said, and got up, and left, taking the weather with him, and I sat alone with the hook under my ribs singing like a struck string and informed myself, in my firmest Luna voice, that I was not in trouble.
I have never once in my life listened to that voice.