What Lena Said to Sellane

Lena's formal statement took three days.

Zara sat in on none of it. That was the correct thing — the statement needed to be Lena's, unmediated, given directly to Sellane's clerk with Sellane present and no friendly faces in the room to influence the telling. She understood this. She also found it very difficult, in the way she found all things difficult that she couldn't control or move through quickly, and she managed it by spending the three days working through the border committee documents with a focus that Dorin described privately as alarming.

On the second day, Kade found her in the small private room at the end of the evening.

She was on the third revision of a supply route analysis. She was aware this was excessive.

He sat down across from her without announcing it and looked at the papers and then at her.

"She's all right," he said.

"I know."

"Sellane is careful with her. The clerk is—"

"I know, Kade." She set down her pen. "I know she's all right. I know Sellane is careful. I know that Lena has been waiting for exactly this and that she is handling it with more composure than most wolves would." She paused. "I still don't like not being there."

"Because you feel responsible for her."

"I am responsible for her. I was her commanding officer."

"She made her own choices."

"Under coercion."

"Yes. And then she made different ones — also her own." He held her gaze steadily. "You can't carry her choices as well as yours, Zara. You don't have room."

She looked at him for a moment. The specific irritating accuracy of it.

"I know," she said.

"You're doing it anyway."

"I know."

He leaned back slightly. "Tell me something that isn't the border documents."

She blinked. "What?"

"You've been in this room for twelve hours. Tell me something that isn't work." He paused. "Anything. A memory. Something you've been thinking about that isn't supply routes."

She looked at him. The request was so unexpected — from him specifically, from the cold Alpha whose emotional register she had spent weeks learning to read in its most minute expressions — that she almost laughed.

"Redmere," she said, after a moment.

"Lena's village."

"The boy's village now. His name is Kit. He's nine years old." She paused. "Dorin brought him to Silverblood territory three weeks ago. He'd never been outside Redmere — he thought the pack house was a palace." She stopped. "He asked Dorin if he could have a horse."

"And?"

"Dorin said he'd ask. Which means Dorin is almost certainly going to find that boy a horse, and we will have a nine-year-old in the Silverblood camp learning to ride, which is absolutely not an appropriate use of resources." She paused. "I told Dorin to find him a small one."

Something happened to Kade's face. Not the almost-smile. Something warmer than that, and quieter, and entirely unguarded.

"Tell me something," she said, because it was only fair.

He was quiet for a moment. She waited, the way she'd learned to wait for him — without filling the silence.

"My mother used to say," he began slowly, "that the moon chose mates the way good commanders chose their seconds. Not the easiest wolf to work with. The one who would make you better at the things you were worst at." He paused. "She said it was the moon's version of a challenge."

"She sounds like a difficult woman."

"She was extraordinary." Another pause. "She died when I was twenty. I never told Carr that story. I've never told anyone that story."

The quiet between them was the warmest thing in the room.

"The moon's version of a challenge," Zara said.

"Yes."

She thought about the summit hall. The bond like a blade. Thirty years of armour and this one pull that had ignored every wall she'd built.

"I'm starting to think," she said carefully, "that your mother may have been right."

He looked at her across the table with the border documents between them and the three days of Lena's testimony on the other side of the wall and the trial suspended and the investigation widening and all the complicated weight of everything they were still in the middle of.

"So am I," he said.

She picked up her pen. Looked at the documents. Set the pen down again.

"I am going to stop working now," she said. "For tonight."

"Good."

"Don't say good like that."

"Like what."

"Like you've been waiting for it."

"I have been waiting for it. For three hours." He stood. "There's a place in the city. Hadrik found it — a courtyard, heated, no Council wolves. I'm told the food is acceptable."

She looked at him. A courtyard in a city that wasn't a camp or a chamber, with food that was acceptable, and no wolves watching with complicated eyes.

"Yes," she said.

She stood up. Left the documents where they were.

For the first time in eleven days she walked out of the work and into the evening, and the city air was cold and clean and smelled of woodsmoke and winter, and he walked beside her at the exact pace that matched hers, and she thought about the moon's version of a challenge and found that the weight of it, tonight at least, felt less like a challenge and more like something else entirely.