Chapter 20: No Toll

Torin's POV

Cedric said he would speak to his pack at noon.

He said it on the logging road, with blood in his eyebrow and his hands shaking.

He said it to Morven, not to me.

"I'll be on the dais at twelve," he said. "I want you to hear every word. After that you can do whatever you want to me."

She had her daughter against her shoulder.

She looked at him for a long time.

"I'll think about it," she said.

I stood three feet away and watched her say it.

I watched him look at the baby.

I watched the old pull move between them, the one I could not see.

I could feel it in my own teeth, and I thought: there it is.

I had known it would come.

A wolf's first bond does not die when the words are said.

Everyone knows that.

It sleeps, and then something wakes it, and she goes back across the river to the father of her pups.

I had been waiting for it since the bridge.

That night I could not sleep.

At two in the morning I walked down to the Ironwood end of the bridge, to the little toll hut my men keep by the gate.

I sat on the bench inside it with the book on my knee.

It was my second ledger.

The first one held the moonbane.

This one held the toll.

For six years every Black Fir wolf who crossed onto the Ironwood bank had paid a day's wage to my guards.

It was legal under the old border law, and I had made it hard on purpose.

I had told myself it was fair.

It was not fair.

It had turned away mothers with sick children and old men who wanted the Ironwood market.

I had counted the money every month and called it justice for my brother.

I was reading the last page when the hut door opened.

Morven stood there in my old canvas coat, with her hair down.

"The housekeeper has them both," she said. "I couldn't sleep either."

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