Chapter 30: A Road Across the Lake

Jasper did not answer me that night.

He lay awake beside me with his hand on my hip, and in the morning he was gone from the bed.

I found him on the Lodge steps in his shirtsleeves, watching the sun come up over the ice.

"I have a hundred and fifty wolves and a mine," he said, without turning round.

"I have a beta who thinks I can't boil an egg."

"I can't either."

"She says that about me."

"I know." I sat down beside him on the cold step. "So say no, if it's no."

"I'm saying I need a better question."

"What?"

"You asked if I'd stay." He looked at me. "Ask me if I'll build something."

My heart went up in my chest.

"Build what?"

"A road," he said. "Across the lake. Packed ice in winter, a causeway in summer. Forty minutes around is too long to get to you."

I laughed, and my eyes stung.

"Will you build a road?" I said.

"I'll build a road."

He kissed me on the steps in the early light, where anybody could see.

I did not care who saw.

At noon I called the pack to the Lodge hall again.

This time Jasper's beta came across the ice with a folded paper in her coat.

She read it aloud in her dry voice, and the hall got quieter and quieter.

It was a compact between two packs.

Ironwood and Snow Moon would share the winter barn and the mine's snowflake seam.

Neither Alpha would sit above the other.

Each would answer to a joint count, aloud, in this hall, once a year.

"It's a long way from the treaty," the beta said.

"It is," I said.

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