Chapter 13: The Brown Wolf

Brigid refused to stay at the croft, so she rode back to the Keep in the truck with her grey cat in a laundry basket.

By Monday morning she had taught the cook how to roll pie crust, and the cook had let her.

Past the border stones on the county road, the hunter's horse stood in the sleet.

Ewan had put twelve wolves on the wall.

"He can't cross onto Strathmore land unless someone invites him," he told me. "Nobody here will."

"The Council promised no hunter for seven days."

"Then he's breaking their truce, and they'll have to answer for it."

"Will they?"

"If he steps over those stones, they will."

That left four days.

At ten o'clock a guard knocked on my door and said my sister was asking for me.

I found Daphne on a bench at the edge of the training field, in a borrowed coat and gloves, with her knees together.

I stopped ten feet away.

One touch had nearly emptied me, and neither of us said a word about it.

"I can't feel my wolf," Daphne said. "Not even a little. Every morning I reach and there's nothing."

"You're reaching for the wrong one."

"What does that mean?"

"You've spent eighteen years reaching for gold," I said. "It wasn't yours. Stop looking up. Look lower."

She stared at me.

"That's all you've got?"

"That's what I did. In the yard, when it hurt. I quit fighting it and went down toward the bottom of my back."

Daphne shut her eyes.

I watched her face work, and I wanted to look away, and I didn't.

She was my twin. She had my chin.

"There's a place under my ribs that's always cold," she said slowly. "I thought it was nerves."

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