Chapter 11: The Mill

Cale didn't argue with me.

He sat in the hot water and looked at me for a long time.

"Then I'll get used to it," he said.

I got out of the pool and wrapped my towel around me and walked out without looking back.

Behind me, the water stirred as he moved.

In the morning, I went to work.

Alder's order still stood under Cale's.

Wolves who earned nothing could be called rogues, and rogues could be driven off, and Morwenna would find a way.

So the squad needed a job.

A real one, on the pack's books, with pay.

"Give us the worst thing you've got," I told Cale in the acting Alpha's office.

He didn't even have to think.

"The mill," he said.

The old mill sat on the river below the Great House.

It had ground the whole valley's grain for a hundred years.

Then the spring flood after I left had torn out the wheel and filled the ground floor with four feet of mud.

The room over the mill was gone.

The one I'd offered to live in, in my letter.

Nobody had touched the place in two years, because the pack was arguing about who should pay.

"Done," I said.

"Sorrel, it's a ruin."

"So were we."

The squad looked at it for a long time from the riverbank.

The wheel was lying in the shallows on its side.

There was a dead heron in the doorway.

"I love it," said the youngest.

"You would," said the left twin.

We dug the mud out first.

It took six days.

We shoveled in shifts, the way we'd held the slot in the gorge.

The cook kept a pot going on a fire by the door.

The brothers argued about the best angle for a shovel until Edda threw one of them in the river.

The other one jumped in after him to keep arguing.

Cale came every afternoon after his office closed.

He shoveled.

He didn't talk to me much.

He didn't need to.

I knew where he was the whole time.

On the seventh day, the brothers and the tracker and Cale stood in the river to the waist.

They hauled the wheel back onto its axle with ropes and a borrowed ox.

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