Chapter 79: The Founders' Circle

I stood in the circle and did not say anything.

The ground was cold under my boots and the trees were dead around it and the stone with the Luna's mark was broken in two, and the whole of the pack was standing at the edge of the trees watching me and the seven Alphas were standing behind them.

"Not now," I said. "Not in the daylight. The circle is claimed at the new moon and the new moon is in two days."

Ada put her stick on the ground.

"Then we have two days," she said. "And in two days the Council will have the stone in Boise and the register in a fire and a story that the circle was never here." She looked at the broken stone. "What do we do with two days?"

I looked at Clara Renn.

"Mrs. Renn," I said. "You have been in this territory for seventy-nine years and you have been watching this field since you were a girl. The stone that Erik took is the stone the curse was tied to. Is there another one?"

Clara Renn was quiet.

"There is a thing my mother told me," she said. "She told me the old Alpha broke the stone into pieces when he cursed the founders and scattered them and that the founders spent eighty-five years collecting them. But she also told me that the founders did not get all of them. She told me there was one piece that the founders never found and that it was the piece the old Alpha kept for himself."

"Where is it?"

"She never told me. She said it was a thing that could only be found by the Luna." Clara Renn looked at the ground. "And she said it was in the circle."

I looked around at the dead trees and the broken stone and the moss.

"The circle is the ground," I said. "The stone was the marker. The ground is what the old pack claimed and the ground does not move." I looked at Ada. "The Alphas' record says that whoever stands in the circle at the new moon and speaks the words of the old tongue can claim the territory. It does not say the stone is required. It says the circle."

Ada looked at me for a long moment.

"Then what are you waiting for?" she said.

"The new moon is in two days," I said. "And the Alphas have to rule on the tribunal before the new moon, because if the tribunal rules against us there is no claim to make."

Ada turned and looked at the pack.

"The tribunal will rule tonight," she said. "In the pack square. Every wolf in this territory will be heard and the Alphas will give judgment and then we will go to the circle." She looked at me. "Two days, Gamma. And then the whole of it."

The pack went down the ridge and the Alphas went with them and I stayed in the circle with Elias and June and Hannah and Arthur Renn and Clara Renn.

"Two days," June said. "And the stone is in Boise and the register is in Boise and the chief clerk has offered to give evidence and there is nothing to give evidence with."

"There is the copy of the register in the vault," I said. "And there are the fourteen photographs on the wall and the file from the courthouse and the knife with the silver handle and the ledger and the co-op tickets and Arthur Renn's record and Clara Renn's mother's letters and the three Lunas."

"That is not the stone," June said.

"It is not the stone." I looked at the broken stone in the moss. "But the stone is not the curse. The curse is the bargain and the bargain was made with the ground and the ground is here."

Clara Renn came and stood beside me.

"There is a thing I have not told you," she said. "About the circle. About what my mother told me before she died."

"Tell me."

"She told me the founders built a back door into the vault and she told me the door opens with the Luna's mark and she told me there was a thing in the vault that the founders did not know about." Clara Renn looked at the stairs going down into the dark. "She told me the old Alpha put a thing in the vault before the founders built it. She told me the vault was built on top of a place that was already there."

I looked at the stairs.

"What place?"

"The old pack's place," Clara Renn said. "The place the circle was built around. My mother said the old pack kept a stone in the ground under the circle and that the stone was the heart of the territory and that the founders never found it because they built their vault on top of it and never went down deep enough."

I stood in the circle with the stairs going down into the dark.

"Then we go down," I said.

We went down the stairs with a lantern and we came out in the vault and the vault was empty. The shelves were bare and the table was bare and the fourteen photographs were gone from the wall. The register was gone and the box was gone and the lamp was gone.

"They took everything," June said.

"They took everything that was on the shelves." I put the lantern on the table and looked at the floor. "But they did not take the floor."

The floor of the vault was stone. It was the same stone as the walls and it was laid in slabs and it was old. I went down on my knees and put my hands on it and went along it slab by slab.

The slab under the table was different.

It was the same gray stone and it was the same size but the edges of it were not mortared and there was a gap at the corner where a knife could go.

I put Owen's knife in the gap and lifted.

The slab came up.

Under it there was a stair going down, and the stair was older than the vault and the walls of it were rough stone and there was a light coming up from the bottom of it.

Not fire. Not lantern. A pale gray light.

I went down first with the lantern and the stair went down about twenty feet and opened into a room.

It was round. It was cut out of the bedrock and the walls were rough and the floor was flat and in the middle of it there was a stone.

It was the same stone that had been in the circle. It was flat and it was gray and it had the mark on it and it was not broken.

And it was lit. The light was coming out of the stone itself, out of the mark, and it was pale and steady and it filled the room.

Clara Renn came down the stairs behind me and stopped.

"That is it," she said. "That is the heart."

I walked to the stone and put my hand on it.

The heat came up through my palm and into my arm and into my chest and the mark on my shoulder burned and the whole room was warm.

"This is the stone the founders never found," I said. "This is the one the old Alpha kept."

And then the light went out of the stone and the room was dark and the only light was the lantern, and from above us in the vault there was a sound.

It was boots. A lot of boots.