Semua Bab The Wolf She Silenced: Bab 21 - Bab 30

I found him before dawn on the old smugglers' path that ran down the ridge toward the coast.He was sitting on a fallen pine with his bag at his feet and his black hair wet with mist, and he was not moving. He had gone three hundred paces and stopped and sat down in the dark to think, and when he heard me on the trail he lifted his head and did not look surprised."You did not run," I said."I ran three hundred paces and sat down. It is a strange kind of running." He looked at the bag at his feet. "I have been here since the gate. I could not make myself go further.""Why not?""Because I could not decide what to tell the wolf I was going to meet." He looked up at me. "And then I decided I was not going to meet him at all."I stood on the path with the mist on my face and my coat pulled tight, and I did not sit down. "You were going to meet someone.""A rider who comes up the coast road every third night and waits at the fork below the ridge. I was going to tell him the bond had been

The howls came up the valley in a line, one wolf answering another, and by the time we reached the gate the eastern wall was manned.Barış was on the walk with his auburn hair tied back and a spear in his hand, and he did not turn around when I came up the steps."Nine of them," he said. "Çamlıca grey, moving up the low path in twos. They are not raiding. They are walking the line and showing themselves.""Then they want to be seen.""Or they want us to come out and meet them." He looked down at me. "The warriors are on the wall and the gate is barred. If they come over, we hold them. If they turn back, we let them go."I looked out at the valley. The mist was lifting and the pines were black against the grey sky, and I could see two grey wolves at the edge of the trees, standing still and watching the wall."They are waiting," I said. "For the Council wolf to tell them what the elders decided."Cemal had come up the steps behind me. "That is how the coast works. You show your teeth u

I did not wake him.I sat on the stool by the window with the blanket around my shoulders and watched the grey turn to gold over the ridge, and Cemal slept on the bed with his black hair across the pillow and one arm flung out. He slept the way a wolf sleeps when he has not slept properly in years. His face had gone young in the dark, and his mouth was open a little, and I could see the old bruise on his shoulder from the wall rope.I tried to decide what I felt and could not.That was the trouble with my nose. It could tell me what was true and false in a scent and it could not tell me what was true in my own chest. I had spent five years holding a door shut behind my ribs and now the door was standing open and I did not know what was on the other side of it. Every time I looked at him I wanted to touch him. Every time I touched him I wanted to know who he was. Every time I asked who he was he gave me an answer with a hole in it, and I was running out of patience with holes.And yet.

The paper was folded small and sealed with a thumbprint in wax, and it had no name on the outside.I turned it over twice and then held it out to Cemal."It is addressed to you," I said. "Open it."He broke the seal and read it in silence. His face did not change while he read, but his hands did. They went still in a way I had seen before, the way a wolf goes still when he is deciding whether to run."Read it to me," I said.He held it out. I took it and read it.The mountain is closed to you. Come down to the coast before the moon is full and the matter will be settled. If you stay, the matter will be settled on the mountain. You know the house. You know the door.It was signed with a mark I did not know. A small circle with a line through it, cut into the paper with a dry pen."Who is this from?" I asked."The wolf on the coast road. The rider." Cemal folded the paper and put it in his coat. "He has never signed a letter before. He gives his word in person. A letter is a new thing."

Every head in the yard turned to the east point.Selin stood with her copper hair bright in the last of the light and her hands folded and her face calm, and she did not look at me. She looked at Orhan."I am an envoy," she said. "I do not sit in your circle and I do not speak in your councils. But I have been on this mountain a week and I have smelled what your elders smelled tonight." She paused. "The preparation in the rogue's blood is not a mountain preparation. The boat resin in it comes from the coast. My pack has used that resin for a hundred years. If a wolf on this mountain has been laying a coastal preparation on your cairns, then the wolf who brought the resin here came from the coast, and I would like to know who it was."The yard began to murmur again, and this time the murmur had a different shape to it."That is a large thing to say in another pack's circle," Orhan said."It is a large thing to have happen on a border I am trying to make an alliance with." Selin incline