Chapter 68: Harlan's Choice

Nobody moved.

Rourke stood at the edge of the lantern light with the rifle against his shoulder and his face still bloody from the tack room and his hands steady.

"Rourke," Ada said. "Put the rifle down."

"The rifle goes down when the register goes in the fire," Rourke said. "You have read it. Every wire the Council ever sent is in that book. Every order and every cull and every Luna. If that book goes in front of the Council of Alphas, every clerk in Boise goes to the wall and every Alpha who ever signed a claim goes with them." He looked at me. "And I am not going to the wall for a clerk in a suit."

"You are already going to the wall," I said. "You put a false order in my pack's hands and you burned my co-op and you put a silver chain on a wolf in a pack square. There is no version of this where you walk away."

"There is a version where the book burns and the register is a story and the Alphas go home." Rourke lifted the rifle. "Step away from the table, warden."

I did not step away.

And then Harlan came down the pack house steps.

He had his hat off and his beard was gray and his coat was torn and he walked across the square slow with his hands at his sides and he stopped between me and Rourke.

"Rourke," he said. "I am the Alpha of this pack and this is my square and you are standing in it with a rifle pointed at my Gamma. Put it down."

"Alpha," Rourke said, "you have been an Alpha for twenty-two years and you have signed everything the Council put in front of you. You are not going to stop me."

"No," Harlan said. "I am not." He turned and looked at me. "Wren. Give me the register."

I looked at him.

"Harlan," I said.

"Give me the register." His voice was quiet and steady. "I have been the Alpha of this pack for twenty-two years and I have signed things I knew were wrong because I was afraid of the Council. I am not going to sign another one. But I am not going to let a Council officer shoot a Gamma in my square either." He put his hand out. "Give me the register and let me do the thing I should have done four months ago."

I gave him the register.

Harlan took it and turned and walked to the table and put it down in front of the seven Alphas.

"Ada," he said. "I am the Alpha of the Palouse Ridge pack and I am calling a tribunal under pack law, section eleven. A tribunal of the pack and the Alphas together, to hear the charge against the Beta and the charge against the Council and the charge against the culling officer. It will be held in this square in seven days and every wolf in this territory will be heard."

Ada looked at him.

"Alpha," she said, "the Alphas have already ruled."

"The Alphas have ruled on the claim and the land," Harlan said. "The Alphas have not ruled on the murder of Owen Halloran and they have not ruled on the fire at the co-op and they have not ruled on the culling officer who put a rifle on a Gamma in a pack square." He put his hand flat on the register. "Under pack law, an Alpha may call a tribunal and the Alphas must sit on it. It is in the code. It has been in the code since 1902."

Ada was quiet for a long time.

"It is in the code," she said. "It has not been used in eighty years."

"Then it is due," Harlan said.

Rourke's rifle came up.

And then Elias was there.

He came out of the dark behind Rourke without a sound and he put his hand on the barrel of the rifle and pushed it up and the shot went into the sky and the square broke into noise. Elias took the rifle out of Rourke's hands and put him on the ground with his knee in his back and his arm up behind him, and two of the Kessler wolves came and put their hands on him and held him there.

Rourke lay in the snow with his face turned to one side and his eyes on me.

"You will not get the book in front of the Alphas," he said. "The chief clerk is in this square and he will deny every word of it and the register is a book in a vault that was built by the Council and there is no wolf in this territory who will swear to what is in it."

"I will," I said.

"You are a Gamma who has been suspended and who has been hiding a cursed wolf and who asked a pack to stand against the Alphas. You are not a witness. You are a defendant."

"Then I will swear to it," Harlan said.

Rourke turned his head.

"And I will swear to it," Ada said.

The square went quiet.

Ada came and stood over Rourke with her stick in her hand.

"I have been on the Council of Alphas for forty years," she said. "I have signed cull orders and I have signed trial claims and I have never once read the register. I have taken the chief clerk's word for every order that came to my desk. And today a Gamma of a wheat pack brought me a book that says the chief clerk has been writing orders I never saw and culls I never approved and a wire that told a culling officer to go ahead with a cull against my own ruling." She looked at the six Alphas behind her. "I am going to sit on this tribunal and I am going to hear every wolf in this territory and I am going to read that register from the first page to the last. And when I am done I am going to give a judgment that the Council of Alphas will have to live with."

The six Alphas looked at each other.

And then one of them, an old wolf with a white beard and a scar through his eyebrow, stood up and said, "I will sit on it."

And another one said, "I will sit on it."

And another.

Ada turned back to Harlan.

"Seven days," she said. "You have seven days, Alpha. And then this square will hear the whole of it."

Harlan put his hat on.

"Seven days," he said.

The square began to empty.

I stood in the middle of it with the register on the table and the fourteen photographs in my jacket and my brother's knife in my pocket and the key in my hand.

Elias came and stood beside me.

"Seven days," he said.

"Seven days." I looked at the pack house and the barn and the square and the co-op road and the smoke still coming up off the co-op. "And then the whole of it."

And then June came running across the square with her face white.

"Wren," she said. "Wren, the co-op. It is burning again."

I turned and looked down the road. There was a light over the co-op and it was not a lantern and it was not a lamp.

It was fire.

And it was coming from the mill.