Chapter 8: Training

"Again," said the left twin, looking at his stopwatch.

Auden's wolf lay flat on the pine needles at the top of the trail with his sides heaving.

He was a lanky, sandy-gold wolf, all legs, with a pale stripe through the fur over his left eye where the scar was.

He lifted his head and gave his brother a look of pure hatred.

"Don't look at me like that," the twin said. "Look at the watch. Over fourteen minutes."

"Piers did it in twelve at the spring games," the right twin said. "In the rain."

Auden put his head back down on the needles and groaned.

It was the third night.

We'd been on the ridge every evening since the Council.

The twins had turned up the first night uninvited with a stopwatch, a cooler and very strong opinions.

The second prince had turned up the next night, quietly, and run beside Auden as a pacer in his own dark wolf.

Nobody had asked them.

Nobody sent them away.

"He's not going to beat Piers up the trail," the second prince said.

He'd shifted back and was pulling his shirt on.

"He's faster on the flat. Piers is stronger on the climb. Eleven switchbacks is a lot of climb."

"Then he doesn't take the switchbacks," I said.

All three brothers looked at me.

I walked to the edge of the trail and pointed down.

Below the summit, between two shoulders of rock, a long gray gully ran straight down the mountainside.

Loose shale from top to bottom. It glittered in the moonlight.

"The chute," the right twin said. "Nobody runs the chute. You go up two steps and slide back one."

"Auden can," I said. "He's light. He's been running up it since he was twelve, the summer he fell off the temple roof."

Auden's wolf lifted his head sharply.

The twins looked at each other.

"How do you know that?" the left one asked.

"He told me," I said.

That was true. He'd told me in another life.

Auden shifted back.

He came up off the ground as a man, naked and steaming in the cold air, and grabbed his jeans off a rock.

I looked at the moon until he'd buttoned them.

"Even in the chute," he said, "Piers will just follow me up it. He's stronger. He'll catch me on the last pitch."

I turned to him.

"Piers won't make the last pitch."

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