Chapter 31: The Lowest Seat

The road across the lake was finished the week before Winter Moon.

Jasper had built it of packed ice and spruce poles, with a lantern on a post every hundred yards.

He drove me out to the middle of it on a sledge at dawn and stopped.

The sun was coming up red on both shores, Snow Moon behind us and Ironwood ahead.

"Forty minutes round the lake," he said. "Eleven across."

"You timed it."

"I timed it six times."

I laughed and leaned into his shoulder.

"Don't let me take it for granted," I said.

"You're not allowed to."

He turned my face and kissed me, slow and deep, in the cold, with the lanterns still burning.

He had lived at Snow Moon with me for a year.

Every morning I still woke up surprised to find him in the bed.

Margot's note about the mine gate was still folded in my coat, a year old.

I had never answered it, and I had never thrown it away.

"Gordon's at the Lodge," he said against my mouth. "Waiting for you."

"I know."

"Want me to come in?"

"No," I said. "This one is mine."

My father sat at the far end of the long table in the Lodge hall, where I had told him to wait.

His hat lay on his knee.

His hands were cracked, and he had lost weight.

He had split and carried wood to every door in the pack for twelve months.

The pack had watched him do it.

Cecily sat at my left.

The elder sat at my right with her staff across her knees.

"Gordon Winslow," I said. "I said at the next Winter Moon I'd tell you."

He stood.

"Yes, Alpha."

"Sit down. It's long."

He sat.

I looked at him, at the grey in his beard and the scar the axe had left on his thumb.

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