Chapter 23: Red Mesa and a Winter Seat

We ran until the lodge lights were a smear behind the trees.

Two hundred wolves poured into the forest, grey and brown and black, their breath rising in white clouds.

They ran well, for a pack that had been taught to fear the moon and had just been told to stop.

I ran ahead of them all.

My legs ate the snow, and I could not feel the cold.

The pines streamed by in the blue dark, and the air tasted of resin and wood smoke.

I had never been so fast, and I had never been so happy.

Something dark came up beside me.

It was a wolf almost as big as I was, black along the spine, with grey at the muzzle.

Its eyes were brown with a ring of gold.

I knew him at once. I had been waking up beside that wolf's man for four years.

I had only never seen him run.

He matched my stride without trying. He bumped my shoulder with his, hard enough to nearly send me into a drift.

I snapped at his ear.

He laughed, in the only way a wolf can, and veered away up the ridge, and I went after him.

We left the pack behind us in the trees.

At the top of the ridge the pines opened, and the whole valley lay below us under the moon.

The lodge was a small gold square in the dark.

We stood side by side and looked at it.

Then I let the shift run back through me, and I stood in the snow in nothing at all.

The cold hit me, and I did not care.

Corwin was a man again beside me a breath later.

He pulled me into his arms, and his skin was burning hot.

I pressed my face into his throat.

"You said you had an answer," he said.

"I do."

"I'm ready."

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