Chapter 37: What the Founders Wrote

I went to the door before anyone could stop me and opened it.

Dale was standing on the step in his shirtsleeves with the snow on his shoulders and a lantern in his hand, and his face was gray and wet and his eyes were red.

“Wren,” he said. His voice was not the voice he used at pack meetings. “I need to talk to you.”

“You can talk to me from there.”

“I am not going to do anything. I have no gun and no hunters and I walked up this hill alone.” He held up the lantern. “I am asking.”

I looked at him for a long moment. The mark on my shoulder was warm and steady and it did not burn.

“Come in,” I said. “But you say one wrong thing and you are out in the snow.”

He came in. He stood in the middle of Maeve’s kitchen with the snow melting on his shoulders and he looked around at all of us and something in his face went out like a lamp.

“Everybody is here,” he said. “The healer. The old woman from the mill road. The archivist from Boise. The investigator.” He looked at Elias and did not say anything. “I thought I was the only one who knew how many people were in this territory who wanted me gone.”

“Sit down,” Maeve said.

He sat down.

June put a cup of tea in front of him and he looked at it and did not touch it.

“I have been up all night,” he said. “I have been up all night with a thing in my head that I cannot get out, and I am going to say it now because if I do not say it now I am going to go back down that hill and I will never say it.”

“Say it,” I said.

Dale put his hands flat on the table.

“I killed your brother,” he said.

The kitchen did not move. Nobody breathed. The stove ticked.

“I did not mean to,” Dale said. “I want you to know that before anything else. I did not go to that field to kill Owen. I went to that field to talk to him.”

I sat down across from him. My hands were steady and my voice was quiet and the mark on my shoulder was warm.

“Tell me,” I said.

“He came to me on the twenty-first of June,” Dale said. “He came to the pack house and he shut the door of my office and he said, Dale, there is something under the east field and the Council wants it and you have been keeping the wardens away from it. And I said I did not know what he was talking about, and he said, do not lie to me, I have seen the letters in the tack room.” Dale’s jaw was tight. “He had been in the tack room. He had found the box behind the board and he had read the letters and he had found the coat and he had put two and two together.”

“And what did you do?”

“I told him to keep his mouth shut and I told him I would handle it,” Dale said. “And he said he was going to Harlan in the morning and he was going to tell him everything. And I said, Owen, you do not understand what the Council will do to this pack if this comes out, and he said, I do not care what the Council does, my sister is walking that field every night and she is going to find something she cannot put back.”

I heard Elias move behind me. I did not turn around.

“So you met him in the field,” I said.

“I met him in the field behind the mill road on the night of the twenty-second,” Dale said. “I brought a lantern and I brought a knife because I was going to make him listen, and we argued, and he turned his back on me and started to walk away, and I grabbed him by the arm and he swung at me and I put the knife up without thinking. It went into his chest. I did not mean it. I did not mean it, Wren. I have been living with it for four months and I have not slept a full night since.”

I put my hands on the table.

“You put him in the ground,” I said. “You told the pack it was a rogue and you told the Council it was a rogue and you sealed the report and you let my mother bury her son in a closed casket.”

“Yes.”

“You let me walk that fence line for four months looking for a wolf that did not exist.”

“Yes.”

“And then you filed a claim on me so you could take the land.”

Dale looked up.

“The claim was the Council’s idea,” he said. “I did not want it. I told them it was a bad idea and they told me to file it or they would take my rank and the land both. I am not a good man, Wren. I am a coward and I am a liar and I killed your brother. But the claim was not mine. The claim was theirs, and if I had not filed it they would have found someone else to file it.” He put his hand in his coat and brought out a folded paper and put it on the table. “This came to me this morning. It is from the Council. It says the trial claim has been withdrawn because the Council has been informed that the wolf in question is already mated and marked, and it says the Council has decided not to proceed.”

I looked at the paper and did not touch it.

“Who informed the Council?” I said.

“I did,” Dale said. “I sent a man to Boise last night with a letter. I told them the Gamma of the Palouse Ridge pack is marked and mated and the claim is void and I told them I would not pursue it.” He looked at me. “I do not expect you to thank me. I do not expect you to forgive me. I expect you to put me in front of the pack and let them do what they want with me and I will not fight it.”

Maeve came and stood at the end of the table.

“Why?” she said. “Why now?”

Dale was quiet for a long moment.

“Because my son came home yesterday,” he said. “He has been away at school in Spokane and he came home for the winter and he came into the barn while I was standing there looking at the box behind the board and he asked me what was in it. And I could not answer him. I stood there with my son asking me what was in the box and I could not say a word.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “I am not going to be the man my son finds out about in twenty years. I am going to be the man who told the truth even though it cost him everything.”

I sat there with the paper on the table and the man across from me and the mark on my shoulder warm and steady.

“There is a thing I need from you,” I said. “It is not forgiveness. I do not have that in me tonight. But there is a thing I need and I am going to ask you for it.”

“Anything.”

“The Council hearing is in three weeks,” I said. “We are going to Boise and we are going to file a claim of blood in front of the Council of Alphas and we are going to need a witness. A witness who will stand up in that room and say that the Council paid him to keep the wardens off the east field and ordered him to file a claim on a Gamma. A witness who will say it in front of every Alpha in the territory and not look away.”

Dale looked at me. His eyes were red and his face was gray and his hands on the table were steady.

“I will do it,” he said. “I will do it and I will say the rest of it too. About the coat and the knife and the report and your brother. I will say all of it.”

I picked up the paper and unfolded it and read it. It was on Council letterhead and it said what he said it said, and at the bottom there was a signature I did not know and a seal I did know.

“This seal is the founders’ mark,” I said.

Dale looked at it.

“It is the Council seal,” he said. “It has been the Council seal for eighty-five years. Every letter that comes out of Boise has that mark on it.”

I put the paper down and picked up the founders’ record and opened it to the page with the mark on it and put it beside the letter.

They were the same mark. A circle with a line through it and another line crossing it. The founders’ mark and the Luna’s mark and the Council seal were all the same shape, and the only thing that made them different was which line you put through the circle.

“Arthur,” I said. “Come and look at this.”

Arthur Renn came and looked. He looked for a long time.

“The founders took the old mark,” he said. “The Luna’s mark was a circle with two lines. The founders put one line through it and called it their own and then they called it the Council’s and then they wrote it on every piece of paper that came out of Boise for eighty-five years.” He looked at me. “Wren. The Council seal is a lie. It has always been a lie. The Council of Alphas has been stamping that mark on its paper since 1891 and nobody has ever once asked where it came from.”

I stood up.

“Then that is what we put in front of the Alphas,” I said. “Not the record. Not the stones. The seal. We show them the seal and we show them the mark and we tell them that the Council they serve has been using a stolen mark for eighty-five years.”

Maeve looked at the page on the table and then at me.

“There is a line under the mark,” she said. “In the founders’ record. The words your brother was looking for.”

I looked at the page. There it was, under the mark, in a small cramped hand.

Two bloodlines, one claim, no cure.

“Two bloodlines,” I said. “The founders’ line and the Luna’s line. One claim, the claim on the land. No cure.” I looked up. “But Maeve, we have a cure. The old Alpha said the Luna carries the cure. The founders wrote no cure because they did not know what the old Alpha said. They only knew the curse and not the promise.”

“Then the page is wrong,” Elias said.

“The page is wrong,” I said. “And in three weeks we are going to stand in front of the Council of Alphas and prove it.”