Chapter 19: The Eve

I changed back behind the flour sacks.

Trudy threw her parka over me before anyone could look.

Thane stood between me and Luther the whole time.

He did not turn around.

"Well," Luther said. "A wolf in a chair. That's a new one."

"You burned a winter store," Thane said.

"A storehouse caught fire. These camps are careless."

"You sent forty hunters to a camp of children."

"I sent them to collect what the Alpha's council is owed."

Luther spread his hands.

"Don't look so noble, Thane. You can't even keep a nosebleed off your shirt."

Some of his men laughed.

Trudy rolled my chair up behind me, and I sat down in it.

I was wrapped in her parka, with my bare feet showing.

I did not feel small.

"Count them," I said quietly to Hoyt.

He was counting already.

"Forty-one," he said. "Not one of them has a pole in his hand now."

Luther followed my glance and shrugged.

"The challenge stands," he said. "Tomorrow night, at the Winter Moon.

"Bring a champion, Thane, if you can find one who won't cry."

He looked at me for a moment.

"Or bring the cripple."

He turned and walked away.

His hunters went after him, and not one of them looked back.

The camp stayed quiet for a long minute.

Then the women came out from behind the fence and began to pick up flour.

Hoyt put a hand on my shoulder.

"That's thirty-one sacks," he said. "We'll eat.

"And I'll have a hundred wolves at the Moon tomorrow night, Luna, if you ask me for them."

"I'm asking."

"Then you've got them."

That night, Trudy slept at the camp's long house with the children.

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