The water came out of the pipe warm. That was the first thing I noticed, three hours before dawn, lying on my belly on a sandstone ledge with my chin scraped raw and my hands buried in red dust. The pipe ran down from the spring house in a long iron line, and where the elbow joint leaked, the water pattered onto the rock and steamed a little in the cold. Warm water meant the spring was alive. Warm water meant the Çöl pack was pulling it up from somewhere deep, which meant they were not starving, and which meant my own people were dying of a drought that was not a drought at all. I had known that for six days. Six days of watching the cistern behind the Kızıltaş pack house drop another finger's width every morning, six days of listening to Ruth say the same thing at every meal, in her patient voice, that the canyon had gone dry before and would go dry again and the only water that mattered was on the other side of the border. Ruth was my Beta. Ruth had been my mother's Beta too, for eleven years, and she had a way of saying things that made them sound like they had already been decided by wiser people than me. I had the poison in my jacket pocket, wrapped in wax paper so it would not sweat through. Wolfsbane and a little something Mira had not asked about. Three pinches in the spring house and the Çöl pack would be sick for a month. Nobody dead. Ruth had been very clear about that, as if clarity were the same thing as mercy. My mother would have had something to say about this plan. My mother had been in the ground for three weeks and I still caught myself turning to ask her things. The ledge dropped away to my left, down into the dark where the canyon floor held a creek that had been dry since before I was born. I could smell it anyway, that old mineral smell of wet stone that never quite leaves a riverbed. To my right, the spring house sat in a nest of boulders, low walls of fitted rock, a tin roof, a door with a bar across it. Two wolves on guard, both of them shifted, one pacing a slow circle near the pipe and one lying flat on the warm stone with his nose on his paws. They were not very good guards. The Çöl pack had held that spring for forty years and nobody had come for it in thirty. I had come for it. I had a knife in my boot, the poison in my pocket, and a plan I had rehearsed so many times that I could not feel my own hands. Then the wind turned. It came down the canyon from the north, cold off the mesas, and it carried the smell of juniper and dust and something underneath both of those, something that reached into my chest and closed around my ribs like a hand. I stopped breathing. The two guards lifted their heads at the same moment, the pacing one swinging his muzzle toward the wind, and I should have taken that as a warning and gone flat and still. Instead I lifted my own head, a small stupid movement, and breathed in again. That scent. I had no name for it. It was not a smell like bread or rain. It was a hook, and it was in me now, and every part of me that had ever been a wolf was pulling toward it while every part of me that was a woman and a Luna knew exactly what it meant. No. Not possible. Not this border. Not this night. The pacing guard made a low sound and trotted off toward the spring house, and the other one stood up, shook himself out from nose to tail, and turned into a man. He was not Hank. I knew Hank by sight. Every Kızıltaş wolf knew the Çöl Alpha by sight, from the Council meetings and from the border, and I had seen him twice from a distance, both times across a line of armed warriors, both times at enough distance that his face was only a shape. This one was younger and leaner, and he pulled a canvas jacket on over his bare shoulders and called out something I could not hear, and then he walked away down the track that led toward the Çöl pack house. He left the door unbarred. I do not know how long I lay there. Long enough for the sky behind the eastern rim to go from black to something like ink in water. Long enough for my knees to lock and my jaw to ache from clenching. The scent was still in the wind, fainter now, drifting, and I told myself it was nothing. A wolf's nose plays tricks in a dry canyon. I had been sleeping four hours a night and eating worse than the dogs. I got up on my elbows. The spring house door stood ajar, and no one was watching it. I was halfway down the slope, one hand on a juniper root, when he came out of the spring house with a tin cup in his hand. He did not shout. He did not shift. He stood in the doorway with the lamplight behind him and he watched me come down the last twenty feet of rock, and when I stopped, six paces from him, with my heart going like a rabbit's, he lifted the cup and drank from it and said, "You are early." I had a knife in my boot and poison in my pocket and I could not remember a single word of the speech I had rehearsed. "Early for what," I said. "For the water." He had black hair, cut short and pushed back off his forehead, and a face that gave nothing away. His eyes were the amber of a winter fire, and they were not angry. That was the worst of it. I had expected anger. I had built my whole plan out of the belief that the Çöl Alpha would be furious and stupid when he caught me, and instead he was standing there in a wool shirt with the sleeves rolled and looking at me the way a man looks at weather coming in. "Hank," I said. "Alpha." "Derya." He said my name without any particular weight. "Luna of the Kızıltaş. You are a long way from your mesa." "So are you." "I live here." He gestured with the cup at the spring house, at the boulders, at the pipe running its warm line down into the dark. "This is my pack's land, and that is my pack's water, and you are standing on it at an hour when honest wolves are asleep. I would like to know why." The wind came down the canyon again. I smelled him properly now, at six paces, and the hook went through me so hard that I put a hand out and caught the juniper trunk to keep from swaying. Juniper bark under my palm. Rough, real. I held onto it. His head tilted. Just slightly. He had caught it too, then. I watched him take a breath, and I watched him go still the way a deer goes still, and something moved behind those amber eyes that I did not have a name for. "There is no drought," I said. It came out flat and ugly and I was glad of it. "My people have been hauling barrels from the creek bed for six days and finding mud. My mother's pack is drinking from a cistern that will be empty by the end of the month. And your pipe is running warm." "It is." "So you admit it." "I admit that my pipe is warm." He came down the two steps from the door and set the cup on the stone wall, and I made myself stand my ground. "I also admit that a pack with a spring does not usually let its neighbors dry out, because a neighbor with nothing to lose is a neighbor who comes over the border at night. I have been wondering when yours would come." "Here I am." "Here you are." He looked at my jacket, at the pocket, and I saw his nostrils flare. "With wolfsbane in your coat." I did not answer. "Three pinches in the spring house would put half my pack on their backs for a month," he said. "The old ones might not get up. Did your Beta tell you it would only make us sick?" The canyon felt very quiet. Somewhere far down the dry creek bed an owl was working, and the warm water pattered on the rock, and my knees had begun to shake in a way I could not stop. "How do you know what my Beta told me?" "Because Ruth has been trying to buy water from me for two years, and last spring she started asking what would happen if the spring ever failed." He said it without heat, the way a man reads a bill of lading. "She has a particular way of asking questions. She makes them sound like a favor she is doing you." My hand was still on the juniper. The bark had cut into my palm and I could feel the blood warm against my fingers, and I did not let go. "Take your hand off the tree," Hank said. "No." "I am not going to hurt you." He took a step closer, and then another, and the hook pulled so hard that my wolf, my late, stubborn, half-wild wolf who had been sleeping all winter, came awake in my chest with a sound I had never heard her make. "Derya. Look at me." "I am looking at you." "You are looking past me." His voice had gone quiet. "I have smelled you since you came over the rim, an hour before dawn. I know what I smell. You do too, or you would not be holding onto that tree like it owes you money." I should have run. I had four routes off that ledge mapped in my head and I should have taken any of them, and instead I stood there with my bloody hand on the juniper and let him come close enough that I could see the small scar at the corner of his mouth and the grey threads at his temples that the lamplight had not shown me from a distance. "You knew," I said. My voice had gone strange. "Before tonight. You knew." He stopped. Something in his face changed, and for the first time all night he looked away from me, out at the eastern rim where the sky was turning the color of a bruise. "Three months ago," he said. "At the Council gathering. You came in with Ruth and your mother and you stood behind the chair, and I was across the hall, and I knew." Three months. My mother had been alive three months ago. I had stood behind her chair in a borrowed dress with my hair pinned up and eaten lamb off a tin plate and complained afterward about the long ride home. "You knew for three months and you did not say a word." "What would I have said? Alpha of the Çöl to Luna of the Kızıltaş, a border and forty years of bad blood between us, and I come to your gate with a claim like that?" He turned back. "Your mother would have had me driven off the mesa. Ruth would have made sure of it. And you would have paid for it, whether you wanted to or not. So I said nothing, and I waited, and I told myself the bond would fade if it was never answered." "It does not fade." "No." He looked at the cup on the wall. "It does not." The mark chose that moment to arrive. It began at my wrist, a small heat, like a coal held to the skin. I looked down and saw the underside of my left arm where the sleeve had ridden up, and there was nothing there, and then there was a line, thin and pale as a scratch, curling from the base of my thumb toward the pulse. It did not hurt. It burned the way a mouthful of whiskey burns, warm and bright and almost welcome, and I heard myself make a sound I had never made before. Hank reached out and caught my arm before I knew my legs had gone. His hand closed around my wrist, right over the mark, and the whole canyon went white. I do not have a better way to describe it. There was the heat of his palm and the smell of him at arm's length and then there was a surge that started where his skin met mine and ran up my arm and down my spine and into my teeth. I heard him take a sharp breath. My wolf, my stubborn half-wild wolf, rolled over and pressed herself against the inside of my skin like a dog against a door. When I could see again, he was holding me up with one arm and staring at my wrist with a face gone very still. "Three months," I said. My mouth was dry. "You waited three months." "Three months is not so long." His thumb moved across the mark, once, and I felt it in my ribs. "Derya. Your hand is bleeding." I looked down. My palm was a mess of juniper cuts and red dust, and there was blood on his cuff now, and the poison was still in my pocket, and the spring behind us was still running warm and steady into the dark. "I came here to ruin you," I said. "I know." "I still have the wolfsbane." "I know that too." He let go of my wrist and stepped back, one pace, then two, and the space between us felt like a canyon of its own. "So here is what I am going to do. I am going to walk to that spring house and bar the door and stand in front of it. You are going to take the poison out of your pocket and hand it to me. And then you are going to come inside and drink something hot, because you have been lying on a rock in the cold for three hours and you smell like a wet dog." I almost laughed. I do not know why. It came up out of me like a cough. "You are giving me orders." "I am offering you a drink." He picked up the cup and held it out. "The orders come later." I should have refused. There was a canyon full of reasons to refuse, and every one of them had a name and a rank and a debt attached to it. I thought of Ruth at the pack table with her careful voice. I thought of my mother's grave, still raw and mounded with red earth. I thought of the mark on my wrist and how it had felt to have his thumb move across it. I reached into my pocket and brought out the wax paper packet, and I put it in his hand. "One condition," I said. "My people need water. Not a favor from the Çöl pack. A share, on paper, with terms I can take back to my warriors." Hank looked at the packet in his palm for a long moment. "And if I say no?" "Then I will drink your coffee and go home and come back with a knife instead of poison." "That is a terrible plan." "It is the only one I have." He smiled, and it was a small, unwilling thing that he seemed to regret almost immediately. "Come inside, Luna. I will find paper." I followed him through the door of the spring house, and the warm air of it closed around me, and behind my ribs my wolf began to settle for the first time in three weeks. I was not sure I liked that. I was not sure of anything, except that the scent in the canyon was not a trick of a tired nose, and the man in front of me had known it before I did. He set the lantern on a shelf and turned, and his face was serious again. "There is one more thing. The wolves who saw you come over the rim tonight will talk. By noon tomorrow, both packs will know the Kızıltaş Luna crossed the border, and Ruth will want to know why." "Let her want." "She will not ask you." He glanced at my wrist, at the mark the lamplight had turned to a pale shine. "She will go to the Council." The word sat in the warm little room like a stone dropped in a well. I opened my mouth to answer him, and out in the canyon a wolf began to howl, long and high and wrong, and another answered it, and another, and Hank's head came up as if someone had shouted his name. The howl broke off. Then a second started, closer, and beneath it I heard a sound I knew from the border raids of my childhood, the sound of many feet moving fast over dry ground. Hank was already at the door. "That is not my pack," he said.

Hank went out the door with the lantern in his hand and did not tell me to stay. I stayed anyway, for about four seconds. Then the howling stopped, and the quiet that came after it was worse, and I was through the door and down the track after him with my heart in my throat. The sky over the eastern rim had gone from ink to a thin grey, enough light to see the shape of things, the boulders, the pipe, the wagon ruts leading down toward the creek bed. Hank stood at the corner of the spring house with his head up and his whole body still. "That was three wolves," he said. "Not my patrol. Mine would have called in first." "Rogues?" "Rogues do not hunt in threes this close to a pack house unless they are hungry or paid." He turned his head toward me. "Go back inside." "I am not going to stand in your spring house while something comes over that ridge." "Then stand here and stay behind me." The feet I had heard were gone now, if they had ever been there. What I could hear was wind in the juniper and the warm water dripping, and my own breathing, which was too fast. I made myself slow it. My mother used to say a scared wolf smells like a scared wolf and there is no hiding it, so you may as well be scared on purpose. Three weeks. She had been dead three weeks and two days, and I still measured time by it, the way you measure by a storm or a birth. The last morning I saw her she had come down to the cistern at first light with her hair unbraided and a cup of coffee in each hand. My mother had a way of appearing wherever the work was, without any fuss, and you would look up and there she was with her sleeves rolled and her grey eyes on the gauge. She had been Luna of the Kızıltaş pack for nineteen years. She had taken it from her own mother, who had taken it from hers, and she had held it through two bad winters and a border dispute and the year the mine flooded, and she had never once raised her voice in the pack hall. People did what she asked because the asking was so quiet that refusing it would have been rude. She handed me the second cup and said, "The gauge is down another inch. That is eleven inches since the spring thaw." "Ruth says the creek bed is holding water." "Ruth says a great many things in that voice of hers." My mother drank her coffee and looked out at the mesa. "I want you to ride the south fence line with Cal this afternoon. Not the north. South." "Why south?" "Because I am asking." She said it lightly. Then she set her cup down on the cistern lid and put her hand on my arm, and her grey eyes, which were the same grey as the sandstone in the low light, went somewhere else for a moment. "If anything ever happens to me, Derya, you go to the old maps in the attic. Your father's maps. Not the ones in the office." "What would happen to you?" "Nothing." She picked her cup back up. "I am going to be a very old woman and a great nuisance to you and your children. But you humor me. You always have." I rode the south fence line that afternoon with Cal, who was nineteen and complained about the heat the whole way and made me laugh twice, and we came back at dusk to find the pack house in an uproar and my mother's horse standing riderless in the yard with blood on the saddle. They told me she had fallen. The south rim was loose rock in those weeks, they said, and her horse had spooked at something, a snake or a bird, and she had gone over the edge and broken her neck in the fall. It was Ruth who told me, Ruth who rode out with the search party, Ruth who brought her body back wrapped in a canvas tarp and put her hand on my shoulder in the yard and said, "I am so sorry, Derya. She was the best of us." I believed it for two days. I was twenty four years old and my mother had just died in a fall, and there was a funeral to arrange and a pack to hold and forty wolves looking at me to see if I would cry or break or hold. I did not have time to disbelieve anything. Then Mira came to my room on the third night with her healer's bag and her round face gone the color of old paper, and she sat on the end of my bed and said, "There was no rock under her nails, Luna. There was rope." I remember the sound the lantern made when I set it down on the floor. It was a small sound. I remember that the floorboards in my mother's room had a knot in one of them that looked like an eye, and I stared at it while Mira talked. "Rope burns on the wrists," Mira said. "And the neck was broken before the fall, or near enough. I did not want to say it in front of the pack. I did not want to say it at all." "Who else knows?" "Nobody. I cleaned her and wrapped her myself." Mira's hands were shaking in her lap. "Ruth asked me twice whether I had found anything unusual. She asked in that way she has. I told her no." We sat there for a while. Somewhere out in the hall a door closed and a wolf laughed at something and the ordinary evening sounds of the pack house went on around us, and my mother was in the ground with rope marks on her wrists and the whole pack believed she had fallen from a horse. "Say nothing," Mira said. "Not yet. Not to Ruth." "Why not to Ruth?" "Because I am an old woman who has watched this pack for thirty years, and I am telling you to say nothing to Ruth yet." She got up and picked up her bag, and at the door she stopped. "Your mother came to see me four days before she died. She asked me how much wolfsbane it would take to make a wolf sick and not kill him. I told her three pinches. She wrote it down on the back of her hand." She left. I sat on the end of the bed until the candle burned out, and then I sat in the dark. That is what I came to the Çöl border with. Not a plan, whatever I told myself on the ledge. I came with my mother's voice in my head asking about wolfsbane, and Mira's voice telling me about rope, and Ruth's careful voice at every meal saying the canyon has gone dry before, and eleven inches on a gauge, and the south fence line, and the attic, and the way my mother had put her hand on my arm and told me to humor her. Ruth had given me the poison herself. She had wrapped it in wax paper and put it in my hand at the pack house door and said, "Three pinches. Make sure nobody sees you. When the Çöl pack is sick, we will go to the Council and ask for a water share as a mercy, and they will grant it, because a sick pack cannot hold a spring against the whole Council. Do you understand me, Derya? This is how a Luna keeps her people alive." And I had looked at her cold grey eyes and said yes. Because I did not know yet, that night. I knew Mira's story and I knew about the rope and the wolfsbane on my mother's hand, and I did not know who had done it. Ruth had been my mother's Beta for eleven years. Ruth had ridden out with the search party. Ruth had brought her body back. I had no proof that Ruth had done anything except be useful, and in the three weeks since the funeral she had been very useful, always at my elbow, always with an answer ready, always so sorry, Derya, so sorry, and the pack had begun to turn to her when they had questions they did not want to bring to a grieving girl. The poison in my pocket was the first thing Ruth had ever asked me to do as Luna. I told myself I was taking it to the border to find out what she wanted. I told myself I would not use it. I am not sure that was true. I had a knife in my boot and a hole in my chest and a pack that was dying of thirst, and I had been awake for most of six days, and there is a kind of tired that makes a person very simple. I think I would have put the poison in the spring. I think I would have done it and come home and washed my hands and never told anyone. Then Hank came out of the spring house with a tin cup in his hand and looked at me like weather coming in, and the whole of it fell apart. The rogues did not come over the ridge. We waited at the corner of the spring house until the sky was full grey, and Hank sent two of his warriors up the track to scout, and they came back with nothing but a story about a dead mule deer and a coyote that had been at it. The howling had been a warning, maybe, or a mistake, or a wolf from some other pack passing through and making noise to say so. Hank listened to his scouts and nodded and did not look convinced. "Go home," he said to me. We were standing by the pipe, and the eastern rim had gone the pale gold that comes before the sun. "Ride the creek bed south and come up on your mesa from the far side. Nobody from my pack saw you come in except the two on watch, and I will speak to them." "And the paper? The water share?" He took a folded page out of his shirt pocket and held it out. It had been written in a firm, small hand, with the terms set down in numbered lines, a share of the spring for the Kızıltaş pack in exchange for labor on the spring house and a promise that no Kızıltaş wolf would cross the border armed. My mother would have read it twice and argued about clause four. "This is more than I asked for," I said. "I know what I wrote." He looked at my wrist. The mark had faded in the grey light until it was only a pale curve, but it was there, and we both knew it. "Derya. Before you go. The mark." "It is nothing." "It is not nothing, and if you say that again I will begin to think you are a poor liar." He said it without heat. "I will not touch you again unless you ask me to. But you should know that I am not going to pretend I did not feel what I felt at that pipe, and I am not going to let you pretend it either." I looked at the paper in my hand because it was easier than looking at him. "And what does the Alpha of the Çöl pack propose to do about it?" "Nothing, for now. I have a pack that will riot if I am seen to be soft on the Kızıltaş, and you have a Beta who will use anything she can against you. So we keep it quiet and we think, and we do not let Ruth find out before we are ready." He picked up his cup from the wall. "And you come back in three days and tell me what you found in that attic your mother was so fond of." I had not told him about the attic. I had not told him anything about my mother except that there was no drought. I opened my mouth to ask how he knew, and then I saw his face, and the question went out of my head. He was not looking at me anymore. He was looking past my shoulder, down the wagon track toward the creek bed, and the cup in his hand had stopped halfway to his mouth. A horse was coming up the track. One horse, walking, unhurried, and the sun was behind it so that I could not see the rider at first, only the shape of the animal and the long shadow it threw ahead of it. Then the horse came around the last boulder and I saw the auburn hair and the grey eyes and the neat grey jacket with the Kızıltaş crest on the pocket, and my stomach turned over. Ruth reined in six paces from us and looked from me to Hank and back to me, and her face did the thing I had seen it do a hundred times at the pack table, the thing where it went soft and concerned and ready to help. "Derya," she said. "Thank the moon. I have been riding since before dawn. When you did not come back to the pack house I was so afraid something had happened to you out here on the border." Her eyes went to the paper in my hand. "What is that you are holding?"

I folded the paper before Ruth could see the writing on it. That was the first thing I did, and I did it without thinking, the way you cover a wound. Then I put it in the inside pocket of my jacket and took my hand out again and tried to arrange my face into something a Beta would believe. "It is a list of terms," I said. "I came to talk about the water." Ruth's eyebrows went up a fraction. She had a way of doing that, one small movement that said she had caught you in something and was going to be very patient about it. "You came to talk about the water. At dawn. Alone. Without telling me." "I did not want a delegation. You said yourself that a sick pack is easier to bargain with than a strong one, and I decided I would rather try the bargain first." "And the Alpha of the Çöl pack received you in his nightshirt, I see." She looked at Hank, who had not moved from the wall and who still held his tin cup. "Good morning, Alpha. I hope my Luna has not inconvenienced you too badly." Hank drank from the cup and set it down. "She has been no trouble at all. Will you get down, or are you going to conduct the rest of this from the saddle?" Ruth swung off her horse. She did it gracefully, the way she did everything, and she landed and straightened her jacket and walked toward us, and I watched her take in the spring house and the pipe and the two scouts up on the rise. Her horse stood with its head down, blowing, its coat dark with sweat along the neck. She had not ridden since before dawn because she was afraid for me. She had ridden since before dawn because I had not come home and she wanted to know what I was doing. "I think we should talk in private," Ruth said to me. "Alpha, you will forgive us. Pack business." "Whatever the Luna has come to discuss with me is already known to me," Hank said. "You can say it here." Something passed across Ruth's face and was gone. She turned her back on him. It was a small insult, done politely, and I saw one of the scouts up on the rise shift his weight. "Derya," Ruth said, and her voice went soft and warm. "I gave you a simple task. Come in the night, do it, come home. Instead I find you at the border at sunrise drinking coffee with a rival Alpha and holding papers. What am I supposed to think?" "You are supposed to think I made a better bargain than poisoning a spring." "Poisoning." She said the word as if she were tasting it for the first time. "I never said poison." "You gave me the packet." "I gave you a tincture to make them sick for a week so that the Council would grant us water as a mercy." Ruth's grey eyes were steady and mild. "If you have decided not to use it, that is your choice as Luna, and I will respect it. But you should have told me. You should have let me help you. Your mother would never have gone over a border alone." The morning was cold and my jacket had dried stiff with dust and I was so tired that the ground felt soft under my feet. I have thought since about how easy it would have been to let her have it. To say you are right, Ruth, I am sorry, I have been grieving and I am not myself, and let her put her hand on my shoulder and take the paper out of my pocket and walk me home. For about two seconds I wanted that more than I have wanted anything. "She did not go over a border alone," I said. "She did not go over the border at all." Ruth's face did not change. "I do not know what you mean." "No. You do not." We looked at each other. The wind came down the canyon and pushed a strand of auburn hair across her cheek and she did not lift a hand to fix it, which was not like her, and I watched her decide something behind her grey eyes. Then she turned and walked to her horse and took a folded document out of the saddlebag, and came back with it in her hand. "Since we are being honest with each other at dawn," she said, "the Council sent a rider to the pack house last night after you had gone. This was waiting for me when I woke." She handed it to me. The paper was heavy and cream colored and had the Council seal pressed into the corner, and I opened it with the taste of bad coffee in my mouth. It was one page. It was addressed to me, by title, not by name. It said that the Council of Alphas had received information that the Luna of the Kızıltaş pack had been seen crossing the border into Çöl territory without the consent of her pack, and that in light of the recent death of her mother the Council would be sending an envoy to the canyon to inquire into the matter of the Kızıltaş succession. The envoy would arrive within the week. It was signed by a name I did not know, and beneath the name, in a different hand, the words On behalf of the Council. "Within the week," I said. "Someone told them before I crossed the border." Ruth spread her hands. "I told no one. I have been riding since before dawn looking for you. You may believe that or not." I looked at Hank. He had come away from the wall and was standing close enough to read over my shoulder, and he read the letter twice, and then he held his hand out for it. I gave it to him. He turned it over and looked at the back and held it up to the light as if there might be something hidden in the paper. "Who is this envoy?" he asked. "The letter does not say. Only a signature." Ruth's voice was dry. "In my experience the Council sends the man they mean to do the work. They do not announce him first." Hank handed the letter back to me. His face had settled into something flat and calm that I could not read at all, and for reasons I could not have explained, that frightened me more than Ruth's arrival had. A shouting wolf you can brace against. A quiet one you cannot. "You should go home, Luna," he said. "Both of you. This letter will be all over your pack house by noon, and your warriors will want to hear from you before they hear it from somebody else." "What about the water?" I asked. "The water stands where it stood an hour ago. My pipe runs warm and my spring house is mine, and I have written terms that I will honor if you bring them to your pack and they hold." He looked at Ruth and then back at me. "But you should know that if the Council is coming, they will not come for the water. They will come for the succession. A new Luna with a dead mother and a disputed border is exactly the kind of thing they like to take apart and put back together their own way." Ruth made a small sound. "The Alpha speaks as if he has experience of the Council." "I have experience of losing things to them," Hank said. He walked with us to the horses. Ruth went ahead, leading her mare, and Hank and I came behind, and I could feel the space between us like a hand's width of warm air in a cold morning. He did not touch me. He had said he would not unless I asked, and he did not, and I found that I was noticing his hands very much, the way they hung at his sides with the knuckles scarred, the way one of them had closed around my wrist at the pipe. "There is a thing I did not say in front of her," he said, quietly. "The wolves who saw you come over the rim last night are mine, and they answer to me, and none of them sent a rider to the Council. Whoever told them you crossed, it was not a Çöl wolf." I stopped. "Then how did they know?" "Someone in your pack was waiting for you to do something they could report." He looked down the track at Ruth's back. "The letter says you crossed the border without the consent of your pack. That is not a description of an accident. That is a description of a plan that went wrong for whoever made it." The sun had come over the eastern rim now and the red rock was throwing long shadows, and a crow somewhere up on the mesa was making a noise like a rusty hinge. I looked at the paper in my hand and then at Ruth, who had reached her horse and was already mounted and waiting for me with her patient face. "Three days," Hank said. "You said you would come back in three days. Come back with the paper and what you find in that attic, and we will make a second bargain that the Council cannot touch." "I will try." "Do not try. Come back." He said it flatly. "And do not tell her about the attic. If she already knows about it, then she already knows, but you will not be the one to tell her." I mounted my horse. Ruth had already turned hers toward the track, and I gathered the reins and looked down at Hank standing in the red dust with the sun on his black hair and his face still and unreadable, and I felt the mark on my wrist give a small dull ache, like a bruise that has been pressed. "Alpha," I said. "Thank you for the coffee." "Luna," he said. "Ride south." He did not watch us go. He turned back to the spring house and picked up his cup and went inside, and that was the last I saw of him for three days. I had expected him to argue. I had expected a challenge or a claim or some demand made in the language of the mate bond that I could have refused and been angry about. Instead he let me ride out of his territory with a folded paper in my pocket and a debt between us, and the ease of it sat in my stomach all the way down the creek bed and up the long switchbacks to the mesa. Ruth did not speak for the first two miles. Then she said, "You like him." "I do not know him." "You know him well enough to spend the night at his spring house." She said it lightly. "Your mother would have been careful about that. She would have said that a Luna can afford many things, but she cannot afford to be seen to be soft on the border." "My mother is dead." "Yes." Ruth's voice was gentle. "And I am sorry. More than you know." We rode up the last switchback and the pack house came into view below us, its long low walls of fitted stone, the water tower behind it, the cistern in the yard with the gauge on its iron side. There were wolves in the yard. More than there should have been at that hour, a knot of them by the gate, and as we came down the last slope I saw Cal among them, sandy hair bright in the sun, and he looked up at us and his face did something I did not like at all. Ruth reined in. "Derya," she said. "Before we go down. Whatever the pack says in the next hour, remember that I was your mother's Beta for eleven years and I have been yours since the day she died. I am not your enemy." I looked at her grey eyes and her patient face and the neat grey jacket, and I thought about rope burns on my mother's wrists. "No," I said. "You would never be that obvious." She smiled at that, a small smile that did not reach her eyes, and rode down into the yard ahead of me. I followed her, and the wolves by the gate turned their faces up toward me, and Cal came forward and caught my horse's bridle before I could dismount. "Luna," he said, low. His freckled face was pale under the tan. "Mira sent me to watch for you. She says you are to come to her hut before you speak to anyone. She says it is urgent." "Is she ill?" "No." Cal's eyes went to my wrist, where the sleeve had slipped, and he looked away quickly. "She says she knows what is on your arm and she has to see it herself." I put my hand over my wrist. The mark had been a pale curve at dawn, and now under the sun it was warming, the small heat coming back into it as if someone had opened a door. Ruth was already across the yard with a group of warriors closing around her, and the air above the pack house was full of the sound of many voices talking at once. "What does she think it is?" I asked. Cal let go of the bridle and stepped back. "She would not tell me. She told me to tell you one thing. She said it is not a scratch, Luna. It is a claim." I got down off my horse.