Chapter Eight
Zaden
The new moon came, and with it the run I had been dreading, because the new moon meant Will's flask was empty.
The arrangement with the smugglers had ended when the treaty began.
No need to buy stolen water at triple price when I had treatied access, except that the treaty access came with joint patrols and a written schedule, and the schedule was public, and four sick pups were not.
The whole structure of my lie required that no one, not the Council, not Clawfore, not my own pack beyond Freya and Ivan, ever connect Nightsteel's hunger for the Springline to the healing den behind my village.
A weakness named is a weakness priced. My father taught me that.
It was one of the few things he taught me that turned out to be true.
So on the dark of the moon I went over the wall of my own treaty like a thief, alone, with two empty jars in a pack, and I was a mile into the Springline with the spring's cold mineral smell already reaching me when I knew I was being followed.
I knew it the way I knew everything about her now, hook and line.
I stopped in the black under the pines and said, to the night in general, "You walk quietly for sunshine."
Sana stepped out of the dark with her arms crossed. She was in patrol leathers with her hair bound back, and her face had no lamp lit on it at all, and the steel underneath was pointed at me.
"Eleven weeks I've wondered," she said. "I told you in your hall I didn't care why you wanted the water, and that was a lie.
I always care, it's my land. So I watched.
Joint patrols for a month and the great Alpha Nightsteel walks the schedule like a monk, and then the dark of the moon, and over the wall he goes with jars. Jars , Zaden?"
Her voice dropped low and even. "Here is what Nylah would say. She'd say the water has a black market price and Nightsteel has debts. She'd say you signed a treaty for open access and kept the smuggler's habit because the real volume is bigger than the schedule shows. She'd say I mated a thief."
"And what do you say?" I asked.
"I say a thief doesn't carry two jars," she said. "Two jars is not a market. Two jars is a dose."
She came closer, and her eyes in the dark were steady on mine. "Who's sick, Zaden?"
I stood in the dark of my own lie with the empty jars on my back, and the strange thing, the thing I will never fully explain, is that it did not even occur to me to lie to her.
I was a good liar to everyone but myself, and somewhere in the weeks of rehearsals and scarves and chairs pulled to the sides of desks, she had ended up on the wrong side of that line.
"Come with me," I said.
We filled the jars at the spring, the moonstone glow coming faint up through the water like a drowned star, and then I took my mate over my own border, into Nightsteel, through the sleeping village, to the lamplit den against the hillside.
Freya met us at the door, and her eyes went from me to the Clawfore Luna and back, and to her endless credit she said only, "Wipe your feet."
Will was awake. Will was always awake when something interesting was going to happen, he had a sense for it.
He looked at Sana standing in the doorway of the back room, and his eyes went enormous.
"You're the enemy Luna," he said, with deep satisfaction.
"I'm the enemy Luna," Sana agreed.
"You're prettier than Ivan said," Will said. "He said you were average."
"Ivan and I will be discussing that," Sana said.
She came in and sat on the end of his cot, easy as anything, while behind her in the doorway I stood with two jars of stolen treaty water and watched her count the cots.
Four. Will, Jay, and the twins, asleep in the low lamplight, all of them too thin, all of them too pale, and I watched her do the math I had spent two years guarding from the world.
Her hand found the edge of Will's blanket and smoothed it flat.
"What's your name?" she asked him.
"Will," he said. "I have the wasting. It's why I'm awake.
I sleep all day instead. Are you here because of the water?
Zaden brings the water. It tastes like licking a sword but it works.
Jay can run again, he's slow but he runs.
Did Zaden show you the spring? It's our secret. Well, not anymore, I suppose."
"Not anymore," Sana said softly. "But I'm very good with secrets, Will. I've been keeping one or two myself."
She stayed an hour. She learned all four names and the names of the two who hadn't made it, the ones from before we found what the water did, and she asked Freya the questions a Luna asks; onset and seasons and bloodlines, and Freya answered her like a colleague, and Will fell asleep mid-sentence in the way he did, like a lamp going out.
We walked back through the dark together, and she was silent the whole length of my village, and at the wall she stopped.
"Three generations," she said. "My grandfather, my father, forty wolves of mine and I don't know how many of yours, all of it for a border, and on one side of the border there's a spring and on the other side there are dying pups, and the whole time, the entire time, all anyone had to do was ask."
Her voice cracked on the last word, and she stood there in the dark with her fists closed, and I watched the Luna of Clawfore grieve sixty years of her own history at once. "Why didn't you ask, Zaden? Before the rejection, before any of it. Why didn't Nightsteel just ask?"
"Because a weakness named is a weakness priced," I said.
"My father's law. If Clawfore had known our pups were dying for that water, your father would have owned us.
Every treaty, every border dispute, every Council vote, the price would have been the water, and we would have paid anything, and he would have known it. "
"My father would have given it to you," she said.
"You believe that," I said, "because you're you .
I couldn't bet four lives on it. I still can't bet them, Luna.
That's what you're carrying back over this wall tonight.
Darius is coming, and Nylah is writing letters, and you now know the exact shape of the lever that moves Nightsteel. You know what I'll pay anything for."
I looked at her in the dark, and I said the truest thing I had said in years. "I just handed you the knife my father spent his life hiding. I don't fully know why I did it."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she stepped in close, and took my hand, and pressed it flat against her ribs, just below the place where the hook lived, where the line ran taut between us, and the bond hummed up through both of us like a struck bell.
"Feel that?" she said. "That's why. Some idiot moon tied your secret to the one wolf in the world who can't sell it. Goodnight, Zaden. Tell Will the enemy Luna is coming back, and she's bringing better tea than that swamp Freya brews. Don't translate that part for Freya. I want to live."
She went over the wall of my treaty like a thief, my mate, with my pack's life in her keeping, and I stood on Nightsteel ground and watched her go, and my wolf said what he had been saying since the Council hall.
For the first time, I didn't argue.