Chapter Fourteen
Zaden
I asked Odell.
I went to her porch with a jar of Nightsteel mountain honey as tribute, and sat where she pointed, and submitted to twenty minutes on the inadequacy of my coat before she would permit business.
Then I laid the problem out plain, because you do not manage Odell, you arrive honest or you leave educated.
She knitted through all of it. When I finished she knitted a while longer.
"Luna Concordat," she said.
"I don't know it," I said.
"No, you wouldn't," she said. "Nobody alive does but me and maybe two other relics, and the Council would prefer it stayed that way, because it's older than the Council and they hate that the way cats hate weather.
Before there was a Council, boy, packs joined by concord.
Two packs, one mated pair at the head, merged whole into a new pack under a new name, if and only if both packs consented.
Not the Alphas. The packs. Every adult wolf of both, freely, unanimous.
The mating law you're chewing on was written centuries later, and it governs adjacent packs, plural.
A merged pack is one pack. The Concordat doesn't break your law. It walks around it, on older legs."
I sat very still. Down the lane, Sana was visible outside the granary, surrounded by Opus children, laughing at something Mila was performing.
"Unanimous," I said. "Both packs. Sixty years of feud, Odell. Her wolves have buried wolves mine killed and mine the same. Four hundred souls there, three hundred sixty at Nightsteel. One bitter widow on either side says no, and it dies."
"Yes," Odell said. "That's the cost. The Concordat is hard because it's supposed to be hard.
It's not a clause, it's a marriage, the real kind, the kind whole people make.
You'd have to walk into her pack and earn it face by face, and she into yours, and the ones who hate you, you'd have to earn most of all. "
The needles stopped. She looked at me over them, ancient and beady and kind. "The question, Alpha Scowl, is whether you believe what's between you and that girl is worth proposing to seven hundred wolves at once. Because that's what it is. The biggest proposal ever made in this valley."
"How do you know all this?" I asked.
"I was born to the last pack made by Concordat," Odell said, "before the Council unmade it in my grandmother's day, divided it up tidy on their maps.
I watched the old ones grieve that name my whole girlhood.
I've sat on this porch sixty years watching two packs water one feud, and I knit, and I wait, and along comes a girl made of morning and a wall with a gate in it. "
She took up the needles again. "I'll give you the rite's form, it's in my head entire. Bring Ivan tomorrow, and that Rose, and bring my honey forward a month, it's medicinal. Now go away. You stand on porches like you're guarding them."
We took it to the packs together, but separately, because Odell was exact on the form. Each pack must hear it from the other's leader. Clawfore must be asked by me, Nightsteel by Sana. The stranger Alpha standing alone before the wronged pack, no mate beside them to soften it.
I have led wolves into battle. Nothing has frightened me like the Clawfore meeting hall, four hundred faces, sixty years of grief seated in rows, and me alone on the floor asking them to become one people with the pack that made their widows.
I had no sunshine to spend. I had only what I am, so I spent that.
I answered every question, and they were not gentle.
A man whose brother died at the ford in my father's time stood and asked me, voice shaking, why he should share a name with the wolves who killed him, and the hall went silent as stone.
"Because I can't give you your brother," I said.
"Nobody on either side of that border can give anyone back.
We have spent sixty years trying to pay the dead in each other's blood, and the dead have never once collected, and the bill just grows.
Your Luna found a different coin. I'm not asking you to forgive Nightsteel, sir.
Some of mine won't forgive Clawfore, and I won't insult either side by ordering it.
I'm asking you to let the pups inherit the peace instead of the bill.
Vote no, and I'll bear it, and the feud will still be here, faithful as ever.
It's the only thing in this valley that never lets anybody down. "
The man sat. Beside him, after a moment, his wife took his hand.
In the third row, Nylah squared her papers with a sound like a knife being set on a table, rose, and walked out, and I watched eleven wolves of her faction follow, and I counted them, because every single one was a no, and a single no was death.
Sana fared better at Nightsteel, which I will never live down and don't intend to try.
She went alone into my hall under my antlers and was, by every account, twenty minutes of impossible.
She named our dead of the feud, the Nightsteel dead, by name, all of them, learned in secret over weeks, and the hall heard their own grief spoken in the enemy's voice and broke open like ground in spring.
Corvin, my treasurer, my forty year opponent, stood at the end, and the hall braced, and the old man said only, "The figures favor it.
The figures have favored it for forty years.
We were all just too angry to read them," and sat down, and blew his nose with a sound like a war horn, and the thing was as good as carried.
Three weeks of it, village by village, hearth by hearth.
Rose and Freya ran a joint healers' circuit that did more diplomacy than any speech.
Ivan organized the pups of both packs into a combined and frankly criminal enterprise of message running that ended with Mila and Will as co conspirators.
Will carried the last mile on Ivan's back, and I am told the two of them now style themselves the founders of the new pack and have begun designing flags.
It was working. That was the thing, the bright unbearable thing. Vote by vote, face by face, it was working, and Nylah watched it work, and somewhere in the third week she stopped attending councils, and I was too happy to read it, and I have paid for that misreading every day since.