Chapter 24: The First Snow

The first snow came down on the family hill at ten in the morning, soft and wet and slow.

Lucan stood at my shoulder in a black coat, with my hand in his.

I felt him through the mark all morning, steady and warm, a second pulse in my chest.

He had felt me lie awake at four, and he had not said a word about it.

He had only made tea.

Real tea, from a tin, in a kettle I watched him fill.

"The Beta moved the eight last night," he said quietly, as the pack filed through the gate.

"Emmett's wolves found two of them in the pines with rifles."

"Where are they now?"

"In the hall cellar."

"And Corwin?"

"Gone from the lodge at dawn. Two of the night watch at his gate let him out. They weren't among the eight."

"Then who is he coming here with?"

"Nobody now." Lucan looked at the sky. "He never trusted anyone else to do it himself."

I breathed out and watched it cloud.

Three hundred wolves had come.

They stood in rows between the gamma elders' stones, with snow in their hair, and they did not talk.

Kerensa was beside me in a red scarf, blowing her nose.

"I'm not crying," she said. "It's the cold."

"It's the cold."

"It's absolutely the cold."

Four wolves carried my mother's stone up the slope on a litter of cedar poles.

Emmett stood at the back with the lanky woman from patrol.

The broad quiet man had come too, with his arm still in a sling.

They set the stone down in the new place, on the high ground, under a bare maple.

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