Chapter Nineteen
Sana
The first winter of the Springline Pack arrived early and stayed late, and I have never loved a season more.
There was so much work. Two packs do not become one people at a vote, they become one people at a hundred shared woodpiles, and the winter gave us the woodpiles.
We rebuilt the north pickets with mixed crews. We ran one healers' hall under Rose and Freya jointly, after a power struggle that lasted two days and ended in an alliance so absolute that both packs learned to fear it.
We celebrated the first Springline harvest feast at repaired tables, and Odell presided in a new shawl, and the carving fork from the night of the rogues hung above the hearth, mounted, at her insistence, like a battle trophy, because it was one.
The spring came out of hiding. That was the part I held closest. With the border gone, the moonstone spring belonged to everyone and to no one, and we built a proper path to it, wide and graded gentle, and the first wolves to walk the finished path were four pups from a den behind the old Nightsteel village, escorted by an honor guard of every child in the new pack, with Will at the front, on his own legs, slow but on them, under a lopsided and magnificent flag.
The wasting did not vanish. Sickness is not a fairy tale.
But the water flowed daily now, openly, measured by healers instead of smugglers, and Rose and Freya's joint craft did what two packs' divided craft never could.
Jay ran. Ava talked, suddenly, endlessly, having apparently been saving it up.
Her twin drew wolves on every flat surface in the territory.
And Will, tyrant of the den, grew an inch by midwinter and another by thaw and cheated me at his own card game on the longhouse steps in the spring sun while lecturing my husband on flag protocol.
"It has to fly higher than the old banners," Will said. "Mila agrees. We took a vote."
"Two pups is not a quorum," Zaden said.
"It is if the Alpha owes them both card debts," Will said.
"Pay the boy," I said. "I've seen the ledger. We're ruined."
Zaden paid him in honey cakes, gravely, and the children went off down the hill arguing about heraldry, and my mate watched them go with the eyebrow lowered and the gate in the wall standing all the way open, and I leaned into his shoulder and felt, through the bond, the thing he never said in words and never needed to.
We were not done with the world. Darius's reckoning ground forward in chambers all that winter, fed by Nylah's terrible diligence, and in the spring the Council stripped Jademoor's witness rights pending inquiry into the rogue raid, the first stone of a slow avalanche.
Alric sent us the notice with a personal seal and a postscript, in his own hand, asking whether the Springline had any more relic law it planned to detonate, and requesting, if so, advance warning, as he was an old man.
Hold the line, we used to say, when the line was a lie we were defending. We still say it, both of us, in the doorway, on cold mornings, before hard councils. It means the other thing now.
It means the river. It means what answered.