Chapter 21: The Dawn Run

We went out the kitchen door at first light.

The lodge slept behind us, and the snow was blue in the half dark.

I shifted at the tree line.

It no longer hurt. It no longer felt like falling.

It felt like stepping out of a coat I had been wearing for twenty years.

Conall went down beside me, dark and huge, and bumped his shoulder against my flank.

I let him.

Then I ran.

The cold poured through my fur, and I could hear everything.

I heard the hares in their burrows and the creek under its ice.

I had thought I would be afraid of how fast I was.

I was not afraid. I was laughing, in whatever way a wolf laughs, with my tongue out and my paws throwing snow.

He kept at my flank.

When I veered, he veered.

When I slowed, he slowed, a half step behind.

He ran with the easy certainty of someone who knew where he belonged.

We ran for an hour, up the north ridge and over the saddle, to a place where I had never been.

I knew it anyway.

I stopped at the edge of a clearing.

Four black stones stood in a rough square under the snow, each the height of my knee.

Beyond them a chimney stood alone, broken off at the top, with a hearth gaping at its foot.

The Whitcombe house had burned twenty years ago, and nobody had touched it since.

I shifted back, shaking, and Conall was there at once with his coat around my shoulders.

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