Chapter 17: At the Border

The path went uphill through the cedars, and I took it at a run.

Everything was loud and bright.

I had forgotten what it was to have four legs and a nose, and my body remembered all of it at once.

The ground came up under my paws, and I stopped thinking.

Halfway up the ridge, two shapes stepped out of the trees ahead of me.

They were wolves, rust-colored and big, with Hale's gray stitched collar bands around their throats.

Scouts.

They had been posted to watch the path, and they spread out to either side of it.

I did not slow down.

The first one jumped for my shoulder.

I turned under him and hit him in the ribs with my whole weight, and he went sideways into a trunk and slid down it, winded.

The second came at my flank.

I caught his foreleg in my teeth and bit down hard enough to hold, not hard enough to break.

He yelped and twisted.

I dragged him off his feet and pinned him with my paws on his chest, and I put my face an inch from his.

I showed him my teeth.

He went limp and whined, and I let go.

I did not kill either of them.

Killing them would have been easy, and I knew that, and I knew I didn't want to be anything Beatrix had called me.

I left them in the leaves and ran.

The trees thinned at the top of the ridge.

Below me was a wide stream running fast and brown with snowmelt, and that was the line between Cedar Ridge and the Hale lands.

On the near bank stood a flat gray rock.

Beatrix was on it.

She had her coat buttoned to the chin, her cane in one hand, and Finlay on her hip in his nightshirt with the wolf blanket around his shoulders.