Hadrik and Dorin

No one documented the conversation.

This was appropriate, since both wolves involved would have denied it occurred if asked, and the only witness was a camp cook named Brel who had the wisdom to keep his head down and his mouth shut and was consequently one of the more respected wolves in the Ironfang camp.

It happened at the eastern border supply point, three weeks into the joint patrol arrangement, on a cold afternoon when the resupply wagon was late and both Beta General Hadrik and Captain's Second Dorin were waiting for it with the patient, slightly irritable energy of senior wolves who had better things to do.

The wagon was two hours late.

They waited side by side in silence for the first forty minutes, which was — for both of them — entirely comfortable. They were not wolves who needed to fill silence.

At the forty-first minute Dorin said: "Your supply chain from the eastern depot is running twelve minutes behind consistently. It's the Millford junction — the road has a drainage problem that slows the wagons in wet weather."

Hadrik looked at him. "I know."

"Have you submitted a repair request."

"Three times. It's a funding allocation issue at the joint committee level."

"I can expedite it. I sit on the supply subcommittee."

A pause. "You sit on the supply subcommittee."

"Zara put me on it two months ago. She said I needed something to do between crises." Dorin's expression suggested he had opinions about this characterisation. "I've been waiting for someone from Ironfang to raise the Millford issue officially so I could support it."

Hadrik looked at the road. "You could have simply raised it yourself."

"Ironfang should raise its own infrastructure issues. I support. That's the appropriate division." He paused. "Submit the fourth request. Copy me."

Hadrik was quiet for a moment. "The drainage repair will take six weeks."

"Four, if I push it. I know the infrastructure coordinator."

Another pause. Longer. The specific silence of a man revising an opinion.

"Dorin," Hadrik said.

"Yes."

"The scout rotation gap at the northern marker. The one Captain Ashcroft identified on her first morning."

"Filled," Dorin said. "Three weeks ago."

"Yes. She also identified a secondary gap at the creek bend, which your scouts had been informally compensating for but not formally logged."

"Fixed the same week."

"In Ironfang's rotation or Silverblood's."

"Both." Dorin glanced at him. "She writes up everything she finds in any camp she's in. Sends the notes to whoever commands that section. Doesn't wait to be asked."

Hadrik absorbed this. "That's unusual."

"She's been doing it since she was a lieutenant. She says a gap in coverage is a gap in coverage regardless of whose patrol it belongs to." A pause. "She once sent notes to an entirely separate pack's border captain during a joint exercise. The captain didn't know what to do with them. She said that was the captain's problem."

Something happened to Hadrik's face that was not quite a smile and was the closest thing to one Dorin had seen from him.

The wagon arrived.

They processed the resupply in parallel — Hadrik on the Ironfang inventory, Dorin on the Silverblood allocation — with the efficient, slightly competitive focus of two very organised wolves who had each been the most organised wolf in every room they'd entered for the past decade.

At the end, Hadrik said: "She's good for him."

Dorin looked at the supply manifest. "She's good for the patrol rotation."

"Yes," Hadrik said. "Also that."

A pause.

"He's good for her," Dorin said, which was the most he had said on the subject to anyone and the most he would say. "She sleeps."

Hadrik looked at him.

"She didn't, before," Dorin said simply. "Not properly. Field instinct — never fully off." He paused. "She sleeps now. When she's at your camp. I can tell when she comes back."

The silence that followed was a particular kind — two wolves who loved two difficult people in the specific way that long service produced, which was not uncritical and not undemanding and entirely without reservation.

"Submit the Millford request," Dorin said. "Copy me."

"By tomorrow," Hadrik said.

The supply wagon left. They went in opposite directions. Neither of them mentioned the conversation again.

Brel the cook, who had heard every word, said nothing to anyone for the rest of his life, which he considered an adequate contribution to inter-pack relations.