Chapter 82: What the Tunnel Holds

The voice came out of the dark at the far end of the room and the lantern in Elias's hand did not reach it.

"Who is there?" I said.

"It is me," the voice said. "It is Clara."

Clara Renn came into the light.

She was in her coat with her white hair down and her old face gray and she was holding a lantern in one hand and a key in the other and she looked at me and at Elias and at the book in my hands.

"You followed us," I said.

"I did not follow you. I have been down here since before you came down the stair. I have been sitting in the dark at the end of the tunnel and listening to the two of you read my diary." She put the lantern on the table. "I have been sitting in the dark because I did not know how to come out and say it. And then I heard you read the last page and I decided that sixty years of hiding was enough."

"You are the second wolf," I said.

"I am the second wolf."

She sat down in the chair and put the key on the table.

"I have been the second wolf since 1919," she said. "My mother was the miller's daughter and she was in the mill when they took the Luna out to the pond and she pulled her out of the water and hid her in the cellar and put her in a wagon and sent her east. And when she was old she told me what she had done and she told me what the founders had done and she told me I was the last of the line that knew. And she gave me the key and she gave me the diary and she told me to watch."

"Watch what?"

"The field," Clara Renn said. "The circle. The stones. The wolves who came for the land. She told me that one day the Luna would come home and that I would know her when I saw her and that I was to keep the record until she came." She looked at me. "I have been keeping it for sixty years. I have been in that house at the end of the mill road and I have been watching that field and I have been writing it all down. And on the night your brother died I was in the trees by the wall and I saw the whole of it and I did not come out."

"Why not?"

"Because I am a wolf of the old pack and I have been hiding since 1919 and I was afraid." She put her hands in her lap. "I was afraid of the Council and I was afraid of the founders' line and I was afraid that if I came out of the trees they would kill me the way they killed the Luna. So I stayed in the trees and I watched and I went home and I wrote it in the diary and I told myself that I would tell the healer in the morning."

"And you did not."

"And I did not." She looked at the floor. "I have been telling myself for four months that I would tell the healer in the morning. And then you came to my door with a cursed wolf and I told you about my mother and the pond and the wagon and I did not tell you about the field. And then you came again with the county file and I told you Erik had taken the box and I did not tell you about the field." She looked up at me. "I am telling you now."

I sat down across from her.

"There is more," I said. "There is a thing at the end of this tunnel that you have not shown me."

Clara Renn looked at me for a long moment.

"Yes," she said.

She picked up the lantern and went to the far wall of the room and put her key in a lock I had not seen and opened a door.

It was a storeroom. It was cut out of the earth like the rest of the tunnel and it had shelves along the walls and the shelves were full of crates.

I went in with the lantern.

The crates were wood and they were old and they had the Council mark on them. Some of them had been opened and some of them had not. I opened the nearest one and it was full of paper.

Trial claims. Hundreds of them. Filed and stamped and signed and stacked in the crate in date order. The dates went back to 1902.

"Clara," I said. "What is this?"

"The Council's file copies," Clara Renn said. "Every trial claim and every deed and every cull order the Council has sent to this territory since 1902. My mother started collecting them in 1902 and I have kept collecting them. When the Council sent a paper to the pack, a copy came to the mill for the miller's records, and my mother kept the copies and hid them here." She put her hand on a crate. "There are four hundred and six of them. Every one of them is a Luna who was claimed and a piece of land that was taken."

I opened the next crate.

It was full of photographs. Small ones, brown at the edges, in envelopes. I took one out and turned it over.

It was three children standing in a field with their arms around each other. Two girls and a boy. The girls had dark hair and the boy had hair so pale it was almost white.

I turned it over. There was writing on the back in a hand I did not know.

Margaret's children. 1911. The three of them before they were scattered.

"That is the photograph," I said. "The one in Maeve's box. The one in the founders' record."

"It is the same photograph," Clara Renn said. "There were four copies. One went to the Council and one went to my mother and one went to Maeve's mother and one went into this crate." She looked at it. "The three children are the founders' line and the Luna's line both. Margaret was the founders' wife and she was the Luna's cousin. She married into the founders' family to keep the Luna's blood alive in the line."

I sat down on a crate.

"Margaret was the Luna's cousin," I said.

"Margaret was the Luna's cousin," Clara Renn said. "That is why she helped her. That is why she sent the record to the Council and that is why she kept the photograph. She was the Luna's blood and she married the founder and her children carried both lines." She put her hand on the photograph. "The founders' line and the Luna's line are the same line. They have been the same line since 1891."

The storeroom was quiet.

"Two bloodlines," I said. "One claim. No cure."

"Two bloodlines," Clara Renn said. "And they are the same blood."

I stood up.

"Then the curse is not two lines," I said. "It is one line divided. And the cure is not three Lunas in a circle." I looked at her. "The cure is one line made whole."

Clara Renn looked at me.

"That is what my mother said," she said. "She said it to me when I was a girl and I did not understand it. She said the curse came from a house divided and it would end when the house was one again."

I sat down on the crate and put my head in my hands.

And then Elias said, from the door, "Wren. There is a light in the tunnel. Somebody is coming."

I got up.

Clara Renn put her hand on my arm.

"It is the Alpha," she said. "I told him where to find us. I sent him word before I came down." She looked at me. "I told him to bring the pack. It is time for the tribunal to see what is in this room."

The light came up the tunnel and it was not one lantern. It was a dozen.

And then Harlan came into the room with Ada behind him and six Alphas behind her and the pack behind them, and the storeroom filled with light and the crates of paper were in the light for the first time in eighty-five years.