Chapter 20: The Wish Returned

My father stood in the middle of the old hall with his hands open.

He looked smaller than he had on the night of his birthday, and he had just said the first true thing I had heard from him in ten years.

"You were seventeen," he said, at full voice, and every wolf could hear it. "You woke up and you were the Voice, and I was nothing."

"I sat at my own table and every order I gave fell on the floor."

"I couldn't bear it, and I couldn't bear that you were what I wasn't."

"So I hid it, and I hid you."

"I'm saying it so that no wolf in this hall can say I was kind."

I could hear his heart.

It was a frightened, honest thing.

For ten years I had wanted him to say it.

Now that he had, I did not feel what I had imagined.

I only felt tired.

"Father," I said. "On your birthday, you made a wish."

"I did."

"No more noise, and no more daughter."

"Yes."

"I'm going to give it back to you."

A ripple went through the three hundred.

"I'm granting it," I said. "Your wish, in full, with terms."

I walked to the middle of the floor, until I was an arm's length from him.

I did not use the Voice.

I spoke at the volume of someone who means every word and does not need anyone to obey.

"You wanted no daughter," I said. "You have none."

"Not until you've earned one. I'm not your child in this hall. I'm the Voice, and you're a wolf of the Shore."

His face tightened, but he did not look away.

"You wanted no noise."

"You'll get your quiet. You'll sit at the back of every council with your mouth shut."

"But whenever I ask you a question, you'll answer it aloud, at full voice, in front of the pack."

"Nobody will ever have to lean forward to hear what Arne Bostrom thinks again."

"And in a year, if you can stand in a hall and say, out loud, what you did to me, we'll talk about a daughter."

His mouth worked.

"That's the whole of it?"

"That's all of it."

"It's more than I deserve."

"I know," I said.

He nodded.

Then he reached into his jacket pocket and took something out and held it in his closed hand.

He set it on the table in front of the three Alphas.

It was the den key, the old iron key I had put down on the supper table with the candle still burning.

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