Chapter 23: Visitors at the Border

The north ridge was bare rock and frozen scrub, and forty strange wolves stood along it.

Rowena came up the slope in her own skin, with Lachlan on her left and half the pack strung out behind.

Junie walked at her right shoulder, chewing a strip of dried apple.

"Don't you dare shift before I give the word," Junie muttered. "I want to see his face first."

At the top a tall man in a leather coat stepped out of the line.

He was fifty, perhaps, with a shaved head and a grey beard cut short. He did not smile.

"Alpha of Ironwood," he said to Lachlan. "I'm sorry for your trouble."

"I'm not the Alpha," Lachlan said. "She is."

The man's eyes moved to Rowena and weighed her.

"A girl," he said. "Eighteen. Raised in a clinic."

"Eighteen and nine days," Rowena said. "I like to be accurate."

A ripple of quiet laughter ran through her own wolves.

The stranger did not laugh.

"The news travels, girl. A Council that murdered a family. A Beta in flight."

"A seat with no heir but a child who only found her wolf nine days ago."

"A good many people would call that a valley with no owner."

"And you'd like to be a good many people?"

"I'd like to be reasonable." His voice stayed even.

"I have forty wolves and a hard winter. You have a hundred and ten, and half of them are crying."

Lachlan took a step forward, and Rowena put a hand on his arm.

"Let me," she said.

She walked to the line of scrub that marked the edge of Ironwood land.

It was only a stripe of lichen and a few cairns, and it ran straight across the ridge.

She stopped on the near side of it.

"Do you know what this is?" she said.

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