Epilogue
Sana
Years on, the pups of the Springline know the story the way pups know stories, sideways and certain.
They know there were two packs once, which they find implausible.
They know there was a feud, which they find hilarious.
They climb their Alpha, who never smiles, except that he does, they've all seen it, it's just that the smile belongs to specific people and being climbed by pups turns out to be specific people.
They are corrected on the details by an authority no one questions, a long legged young man named Will who keeps the healers' records and is teaching the worst of the pups his card game, complete, I am assured, with its proud tradition of cheating.
They know their Luna shines. They have no idea it was ever a discipline.
It isn't, anymore. That's the part I can never explain to anyone except the man it belongs to, on the longhouse steps, in the evening, when the lamps come down the valley one by one and his arm is around me and the bond hums low and content between us, an old instrument, much played.
"Nylah's report came," he said, one such evening, this last autumn. "Final Jademoor filing. Darius's censure is permanent. She appended a personal note."
"Read it," I said.
"The edges are squared," he read, "at last. M."
I laughed the sideways laugh, his favorite, he collects them, and down the hill the lamps came on, and the flag flew over all of it, lopsided and magnificent, higher than any old banner, exactly as voted by a quorum of two children and ratified by a kingdom.
I should set down, before the account closes, the matter of the rock.
It sits at the old river crossing, where the border ran in the years when there was a border, a gray humped boulder the size of a cart, unremarkable in every way except one.
In the second spring of the Springline Pack, a plaque appeared on it.
No one commissioned the plaque. No one has ever confessed to the plaque, though the lettering has been examined by experts, by which I mean Odell, who studied it for a long moment, said "Hmf," and declined to share her findings.
The plaque reads, On this rock, the Luna Sana Clawfore sat down and waved at her enemies until they surrendered. Beneath, in smaller letters, it reads, They brought her tea.
Zaden was for removing it. He argued, in council, with a straight face, that it was historically misleading, that the surrender had taken considerably longer than the plaque implied, and that he personally had held out a full hour. He was overruled by acclamation.
Myron's wife, who had brought the original tea, was given a seat of honor at the next feast, where she told the story to anyone who slowed down, and the story, as stories do, has grown a little every season.
In the current version the tea was a full service for twelve and I had charmed the river itself into running quieter so the guards could hear me better.
The pups make pilgrimages to it. That is the part I never anticipated and cannot speak of steadily.
They go in small bands in the summer, with provisions, as if it were a great distance, and they sit on the rock in turns and practice waving at the far bank, where their friends stand pretending to be hostile patrols and pretending, never for long, not to wave back.
Last summer I came over the rise with the patrol and found nine of them at it, and stopped out of sight, and watched the whole solemn ceremony, the waving, the surrendering, the inevitable collapse into one mixed heap of pups in the shallows, gold heads and gray.
"That's your monument," Zaden said. He had come up beside me, weather quiet, the way he does. "Sixty years of war made cairns all along this river. You made that."
"We made that," I said.
"You sat on the rock," he said. "I just brought the antlers to the marriage."
He watched the pups a while, and the eyebrow lowered, and the gate stood open, and through the bond came the low warm hum of a man counting his treasury and finding it past counting.
"The Council wrote this week. They're sending a delegation to study the Concordat.
The word in chambers is that two packs in the southern ranges have petitioned to attempt one, and Alric wants Odell to advise, and Odell wants a new word for what she'll charge him. "
"And down south sixty years from now," I said, "some pup will sit on some rock, because of nine weeks and a contract and a candle."
"Because of you," he said.
"Because of us," I said, "and hold the line means the river, and I'll hear no appeals."
He smiled. Third expression, collector's item, mine.
"No appeals," he said.
Once, a girl in a yellow scarf sat down on a rock at the border of her enemy and decided to be the best bad decision a grim man ever made.
Oh moon, I married him. Twice.
And the sun came up, and keeps coming up, and these days, when it does, it isn't a performance, and it isn't armor, and it isn't a lamp lit over a grave to keep four hundred wolves from worrying.
It's just the morning, arriving over the Springline, on land where nobody bleeds for borders anymore, finding the wall with the garden behind it, and the gate, as always, open.
The End.