Semua Bab The Wolf She Silenced: Bab 51 - Bab 60

I sent the message down the coast road before dawn and Selin came back the next evening.She rode in at the head of six warriors with her copper hair loose and her dark green eyes taking in the burned smokehouse and the fresh sand on the north cairn and the warriors doubled on every wall. She did not smile."Luna," she said. "I hear you have a Council wolf in your guest wing and a Beta in your root cellar and a cairn marked in my pack's name by a wolf who does not know how to draw it.""You hear a great deal for a wolf who rode for the coast a week ago.""I hear a great deal because I left three warriors on this mountain and one of them has been sending me word every night." Selin dismounted and handed her reins to a warrior. "The one with the pale hair. She is mine. The other three were not, and I know that now. I have known it since the second night, and I have been waiting to see what they would do."I looked at her for a long moment."Then you knew Fearchar had wolves in your part

Nadia burned the mark off Cemal's shoulder with an iron she heated in the lamp.He did not make a sound. He sat on the fallen stone with his shirt off and his hands on his knees and his black hair hanging over his face, and the iron went into his shoulder and his whole body went rigid and his jaw worked and he did not make a sound.When it was done Nadia put a salve on it and bound it and said, "The mark is gone. Fearchar will not be able to find you by it. He will know it is gone, and he will not be pleased."Cemal pulled his shirt on. His face was grey and there was sweat on his forehead and his hands were not steady."Then he knows I have chosen," he said."He knows you have chosen." Nadia looked at me. "The counter-ritual. We begin tomorrow at dusk. Three nights. The full moon is on the third." She picked up her jar. "Bring the healer and the vial. Without the vial the words are only words."I looked at Maren. She was standing at the edge of the hollow with her basket on her arm a

Fearchar at my gate.I stood in the pines with the child's question still in the air and the warrior waiting and forty Council wolves on the ridge above my pack house."Get the rogues into the deep pines," I said. "Sonia, take the women and the children and the old ones and go up the eastern valley to the high hollow. Do not light a fire. Do not send anyone back down until I send word."Sonia nodded and began to give orders. The camp moved fast and quiet, the way a rogue camp moves, and within a quarter of an hour the fires were out and the pines were empty.Cemal was beside me with his black hair tied back and his coat on."You are not going to the gate," he said."I am going to the gate.""Elif. Fearchar has forty warriors and a Council seal and he has come a day early. If you walk up to that gate and stand in front of him, he will take you and he will take the pack and he will do it in front of the whole mountain.""He will try." I started up the low path. "He has come early becaus

The bridge swayed under us and the ravine fell away into the dark, and I stood on the ropes with my hands on them and looked at Cemal."Say the whole of it," I said."The vial Maren gave you is not the vial from a hundred years ago," Cemal said. "I do not know what Nadia told you or what Orhan told you, but the vial I carried up the mountain was Fearchar's. He gave it to me in the great house and told me to put it in the Luna's tea. It was a preparation of wolfsbane and resin, and it was made to make a bond read false. I carried it up the mountain and I did not use it. I put it under the shelf in the herb shed and I left it there.""And Maren found it.""Maren found it six years ago. Before I came." He looked at me. "That is the thing, Elif. Maren has been carrying that vial since before I was sent. Fearchar did not give it to me on the coast. He gave it to a wolf on this mountain and that wolf gave it to Maren, or Maren took it from him."I stood on the rope bridge with the wind and

The wolf put her feet under her and I felt my bones begin to move.It started in my chest and went out through my shoulders and down my arms, and it was not the way I had imagined it in five years of lying awake at night. It was not a smooth change. It was a breaking and a remaking, and I heard myself make a sound that was not a human sound, and I put both hands flat on the stone at my back and held on.The hollow place behind my ribs opened.She came out of it the way a wolf comes out of a den in spring. Slow at first, with her nose working, and then all at once, and there was no more hollow place because there was no more room for one. She filled me. She filled my chest and my throat and my hands and my feet, and my hands were not hands anymore, and my feet were not feet, and I was on the ground on four legs in the dark with the pines around me and the moon above the ridge.I was a wolf.I was a wolf and I was ginger red from my nose to the tip of my tail and I was smaller than a wa