DENY ME IF YOU CAN のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 31 - チャプター 40

The arrangement, as they called it — neither of them had used a different word, which Dorin said was very them and which Zara chose not to examine too closely — worked like this:She spent three weeks of every month at the Silverblood pack house. One week at Ironfang.This was practical. She was Silverblood's senior captain, and the border committee met twice a month in Valdenmoor, and Reyn needed her present for the alliance council sessions that had replaced the old war council with the specific energy of an institution that had nearly destroyed itself and was now trying very hard to be useful. She had responsibilities. She had a command. She had a hundred wolves who had followed her through three weeks on a frost-covered ridge and deserved a captain who showed up.The one week at Ironfang was also practical. The joint patrol schedules required coordination. The eastern border committee had three open questions that needed both packs' senior representatives to resolve. There were su

It started over the eastern creek.Specifically, it started over Kade's decision to grant the Stoneclaw Pack temporary access to the eastern creek crossing for supply transport — a decision he had made in a meeting with the Stoneclaw Beta three days before Zara arrived for her weekly visit, and which she found out about from Dorin, who had found out from a Silverblood border scout, who had found out from the specific fact of Stoneclaw supply wagons rolling through a crossing that Silverblood wolves had held and defended and bled for.She found Kade in his command tent going over the supply requisitions.She put the scout's report on the table in front of him.He looked at it. Looked at her. Said, in the even voice of someone who had anticipated this conversation and had not been looking forward to it: "I was going to tell you.""When.""When you arrived. Which is now.""Dorin told me twenty minutes ago, Kade. At the camp boundary. Which means your scouts talked to my scouts before you

He came to the Silverblood camp on a Wednesday.Not her week at Ironfang. Not a scheduled meeting. Not a border committee session or an alliance council or any of the logistical reasons that had been, until now, the stated justification for every visit in both directions.He simply arrived.She was in the training yard when Dorin appeared at the edge with the expression of someone trying to arrange his face into professional neutrality and not entirely succeeding."Alpha Voss is at the eastern gate," he said.She lowered her sparring staff. Looked at Dorin. "Why.""He didn't say specifically." A pause. "He said he was passing through."She looked at Dorin for a long moment."The Ironfang territory is three hours in the other direction from anything he would be passing through," she said."Yes," Dorin said."So he's not passing through.""No."She handed the sparring staff to her training partner, who had the wisdom to find something absorbing to look at in the middle distance. She wal

No one documented the conversation.This was appropriate, since both wolves involved would have denied it occurred if asked, and the only witness was a camp cook named Brel who had the wisdom to keep his head down and his mouth shut and was consequently one of the more respected wolves in the Ironfang camp.It happened at the eastern border supply point, three weeks into the joint patrol arrangement, on a cold afternoon when the resupply wagon was late and both Beta General Hadrik and Captain's Second Dorin were waiting for it with the patient, slightly irritable energy of senior wolves who had better things to do.The wagon was two hours late.They waited side by side in silence for the first forty minutes, which was — for both of them — entirely comfortable. They were not wolves who needed to fill silence.At the forty-first minute Dorin said: "Your supply chain from the eastern depot is running twelve minutes behind consistently. It's the Millford junction — the road has a drainage

She didn't notice it happening.That was the thing about it — she had been watching for it, in the careful way she watched for everything, expecting it to arrive with some kind of signal, a moment she could file and date and point to later. Instead it arrived the way most real things arrived: incrementally, and then all at once, and by the time she noticed it had already been true for a while.She was at the Ironfang camp on her fourth visit, in the adjacent room that had been cleared of storage, going through the eastern border supply projections for the winter quarter. It was late afternoon. The camp sounds came through the canvas — familiar now, distinct from Silverblood sounds, a slightly different rhythm she had learned without trying to.She needed the third quarter comparison figures, which were in the ledger she had left — her ledger, the one she'd started keeping specifically for the joint border work, a decision that had seemed purely practical at the time.She had left it i