Chapter 75: The Night Together

I got as far as the porch.

Clara Renn's house was dark and the door was shut and the snow was up to the step, and I stood there with my hand on the rail and did not knock.

I had been up for two days. My hands were burned and my throat was raw and there was a bruise on my back from the courthouse wall that had gone stiff. I had a mate in a bed up the ridge with his hands wrapped and a curse gone out of him and a trial in the morning, and I had a question that I had been carrying since the night my brother died, and I stood on that porch in the snow and could not lift my hand to the door.

Because if I knocked, I would get an answer. And I was not sure I could hold the answer.

I turned around and went back up the ridge.

Maeve was in the kitchen with the kettle on and June was at the table with the ledger and Arthur Renn was asleep in the chair by the fire. I went past them into the back room and shut the door.

Elias was sitting up in the bed with a blanket around his shoulders and his hands in his lap.

"You did not knock," he said.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I have been knocked around for a week and I am tired and I am burned and I have not slept and I am going to have an answer tomorrow whether I knock tonight or not." I sat down on the edge of the bed. "And because I did not want to go into that house alone."

He looked at me for a moment.

"Then I will go with you in the morning," he said.

"You can barely stand."

"I can stand." He put his hand on mine. "I have been standing since the field, Wren. I have been standing in the trees and in the mill and in the snow and I have been standing on my own for four months. And then you found me in a combine yard and I have not been standing on my own since."

I put my hands on his face and kissed him.

It was not a gentle kiss. It was the kiss of a woman who had been up for two days and had lost a co-op and a brother and a rank and a mill and who had walked into a fire for him and come out with him breathing. He made a sound against my mouth and his wrapped hands came up and found my hair and pulled the tie loose and my hair came down over both of us.

"Your hands," I said.

"They do not hurt."

"They hurt."

"They hurt and I do not care." He pulled me in. "Wren. I have been lying in this bed for six hours thinking about the fire and the stones and the voice and the only thing I have been able to think about is that I came out of it and you were there." He put his forehead against mine. "I do not want to sleep. I do not want to lie here in the dark and think. I want you."

I got up and turned the lamp down and took my boots off and got into the bed with him.

It was a narrow bed and a cold room and a healer's cottage with four people on the other side of a thin door and neither of us cared. I got his blanket open and put my hands on his chest and felt his heart going and he got his arms around me and pulled me down against him and the heat of him went through me from my chest to my knees.

"You are cold," he said against my throat.

"I have been cold for a week."

"Then I will warm you."

He did. He put his hands on my back and my shoulders and my hips and he went slow because he was tired and burned and I went slow because I wanted to feel every part of it. He kissed the mark on my shoulder and the hollow of my throat and the inside of my wrist where the burns were, and I put my hands in his wheat-blond hair and held his head and said his name out loud once and then did not say anything for a while.

There was no curse and there was no new moon and there was no silver in the room. There was a bed and a lamp turned down and two wolves who had been through a fire and come out the other side. The rope between us was not pulled tight and it was not slack. It was easy. It was the easiest it had been since the first night in the co-op.

Afterwards we lay in the dark with the blanket over us and my head on his chest and his hand in my hair.

"Three days," I said. "The new moon is in three days."

"And I will not change."

"And you will not change."

"I have been changing on the new moon since I was twenty-two," he said. "I have been changing for seventeen years and I have woken up in fields with no clothes and no memory and I have carried the marks of every wolf the curse took." He put his hand on my back. "I do not know what it is going to feel like to be a wolf who changes when he chooses."

"It is going to feel like being tired," I said. "It is going to feel like a long night and a sore back and a coat that does not fit."

He laughed. It was a low sound and it went through his chest and into my ear.

"And the trial is in the morning," he said.

"The trial is in the morning."

"What are you going to say?"

I lay there in the dark and thought about it.

"I am going to say what I have been saying since the calf in the combine yard," I said. "That the Council has been lying to this pack for eighty-five years and that the founders stole a Luna and drowned her and buried the proof and that the paper in that vault is the proof and that the man who killed my brother is in the pack house and the man who ordered it is in the square." I put my hand on his chest. "And then I am going to tell them about the land."

He was quiet.

"The land," he said.

"The land goes back to the Luna's line if the curse is broken. Ada told me. The founders' bargain is void and every deed in that vault is a lie." I looked up at him. "And I am going to have to decide what to do with it."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"I do not know yet," I said. "I have been thinking about it since the pack house and I have not got an answer." I put my head back down on his chest. "I know what I want to do. I want to give it to the pack. All of it. The mill land and the east field and the house and the co-op. I want to give it to the wolves who have farmed it for eighty-five years and let them hold it in their own names." I looked at him. "But there is a part of me that is the Luna's blood and that part has been walking that fence line for four years and that part does not want to give away the only thing my mother ever had."

He was quiet for a long time.

"Then do not decide tonight," he said.

"The trial is in the morning."

"The trial is in the morning and you are not going to decide the whole of your life in a healer's back room in the middle of the night." He put his hand on my head. "Sleep. The land will still be there tomorrow and the Alphas will still be there and I will be there. And whatever you decide, you will not decide it alone."

I closed my eyes.

"Elias," I said.

"What?"

"The night my brother died. The name he said before he said my sister. The one you could not say." I lifted my head. "Is it still there? Now that the curse is gone?"

He was quiet.

"It is still there," he said. "But it is not a thing the curse is holding back any more. It is a thing I am holding back. I have been holding it back since the mill and I am going to tell you in the morning."

"Why not now?"

"Because it is a name and a face and a thing that happened after your brother died," he said. "And you have had enough tonight."

I lay back down and closed my eyes and the last thing I heard was the wind on the roof and the kettle in the kitchen and his heart under my ear.

The knock came at dawn.

I got up with the blanket around me and went to the kitchen door and opened it and there was a young wolf in a Council coat on the step with a letter in his hand.

"Gamma," he said. "This came from Boise in the night. It is addressed to the tribunal and it has a seal on it."

I took it.

The seal was the founders' mark. The circle with the line through it.

And the handwriting on the front was the small neat hand of the chief clerk.