Chapter Nine
Sana
I declared war on the wasting on a Tuesday, quietly, with paperwork.
It turned out a Luna could move a great deal without ever naming a reason, if the Luna had spent her whole life teaching her pack to indulge her whims.
I reorganized the joint patrol schedule, citing efficiency, until the spring sat inside a window of hours when no Clawfore patrol came near it.
I sent Rose to Freya with a basket of herbs, citing diplomacy, and the two of them shut themselves up for a day and emerged thick as thieves with a tincture that made the water sit easier in small stomachs.
I had Odell knit four small blankets, citing nothing, because nobody cited anything to Odell, you simply pointed her at a need and stood back.
"Four blankets," Odell said, needles going, glaring at me with great affection from her porch.
"Pup sized. For pups we don't speak of, on land we don't speak of, for a reason I haven't asked about.
I want you to know I've drawn my own conclusions, girl, and my conclusions have made me cry twice, so they'd better be wrong or right, no middle. "
"No middle," I said.
"Hmf," Odell said, which in her language was a blessing, and she added a fifth blanket for Freya, dyed the gray of Nightsteel banners, because Odell's intelligence network was better than the Council's and always had been.
Zaden fought me on none of it, which is how I learned the shape of what surrender looked like on him.
He didn't speak of the den. He simply began appearing wherever the work was, the way weather appears.
When the patrol schedule changed, he walked the new routes himself for three nights to test the window.
When Rose's tincture was ready, he carried it over, and came back with the report that Will had pronounced it "less like swords," delivered in a voice so carefully flat that I understood the words had been a gift to him and he didn't know where to put it.
And in the evenings we rehearsed, because Darius was coming, except the rehearsals had gone strange, and we both knew it and neither of us said it.
"Watch my mouth, then my eyes," I said, on the night it finally tipped.
The candle was between us on the table where it always was.
"Darius will seat us across from each other at dinner and say something half charming and half cruel, he always does, and you will want to remove his head, and instead you will look at me.
Like this is the easiest thing you've ever done. Show me."
He looked at me.
The problem, the entire problem, was that he had learned.
Five weeks of drilling and somewhere in them the fence post had burned down, and what looked across the candle at me now was slow and gray eyed and certain, mouth then eyes, exactly as taught, except no one had taught the warmth in it, and no one had taught the way it settled on me like a hand between the shoulders.
And my own breath went thin, and the hook under my ribs pulled so hard I felt it in my teeth.
"Good," I said. My voice came out wrong. "That's… Yes, that's convincing."
"You're flushed," he said.
"It's the candle," I said.
"It's one candle," he said.
"It's a very committed candle," I said. "Again. This time I'll touch your arm, and you won't tense."
I reached across and laid my hand on his forearm, the way I had done forty times in five weeks, and he didn't tense, he had finally stopped tensing, and instead his other hand came up and covered mine, which was not in the drill, and we both looked at the stack of our hands on the table like a third party had put it there.
"That's not in the drill," I said.
"No," he said.
"You should take it back," I said.
"Probably," he said.
He didn't. His thumb moved once across my knuckles, slow, like a question asked in a language we had both agreed not to speak, and the bond sang between us so loudly I was amazed the village couldn't hear it, and I sat in the candlelight with four hundred wolves and one contract and a deadline balanced on my shoulders, and I wanted, with a violence that frightened me, to stop holding all of it and hold this instead.
So of course that was the moment the knock came, because the Moon is a comedian.
Rose didn't wait for an answer, she never did, she came through the door already talking. "Sana, riders at the south gate, Council banners. He's early, he's a full week early, and Nylah is already down there greeting him like he's her long lost son, and Sana-"
She stopped. She looked at the table, at the candle, at the stack of hands neither of us had moved.
"Rehearsing," I said.
"Mm," Rose said, in the exact tone of a woman filing testimony for later. "Well. The good news is, it's working. The bad news is at the south gate, smiling. Darius of Jademoor requests the pleasure of his hosts."
Zaden took his hand back. The cold where it had been was the loudest thing in the room.
"Get the candle face ready," I said to him, lamp on, armor up, already moving for the door. "It's opening night."