Chapter 12: What a Break Costs

Hester brought the book up the hill herself, at dusk, wrapped in an oilcloth.

It was the old Council ledger of bond law, with a cracked leather spine and pages gone brown at the edges.

The Moon Stone of Shadowfang stood at the top of the hill in a ring of pines, tall and plain and grey.

Ansel walked up behind us with his hands in his pockets.

Hester sat on a flat rock, opened the ledger on her knees and ran a floury finger down a column.

"This is why I asked you to wait," she said.

"I wanted to be sure I wasn't an old woman seeing patterns. Come here, Danica."

I sat on the cold ground beside her.

"Wolves lend each other strength in a bond," she said.

"It's the oldest law we have, and nobody teaches it anymore, because nobody breaks a bond more than once."

"Both mates put a share of themselves into the thread. That's why a mated pair is stronger than two single wolves."

"That's what Carson's mother used to say."

"She was right. Now here is the part they leave out."

Hester tapped a line of old, cramped writing.

"If one mate cuts the thread by choice, the cutter's share does not go back to him. It stays with the one he cut it from."

"A bond is a loan, and the lender walks away poorer."

I read the line twice.

"A mate who breaks a bond loses a slice of his strength," Ansel said quietly, standing behind me.

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