Chapter 15: The Elders

Six elders stood in a half circle around the kitchen well, and not one of them looked pleased to be there.

"You said alone," I said.

"I said come alone," said the woman with the white braids. "I didn't say I would."

She was the oldest wolf of the Iron Clan, and the others had called her Mother Elder in the hall.

Up close she smelled of pine smoke and old wool.

"This is the seamstress?" asked the biggest of them, a man with a neck like a tree stump.

"This is a Cardross," she said.

"A claw proves nothing," he said. "Any cobbler can polish bone."

"Then I'll show you a better one."

I held out my hands in the lantern light and let the claws come.

They slid out of my nail beds with a small cold ache, long and curved and pale as frost.

The stump-necked man stopped breathing.

"Gods," said another, an old man who leaned on a cane.

"Eyes," Mother Elder said.

I looked at her, and felt the silver rise behind them.

The lantern light changed.

Something in the yard went very quiet, even the well rope.

She nodded slowly.

Then she reached into the front of her gown and drew out a ring on a leather cord.

It was a plain band of silver, worn thin on one side.

"The last Cardross alpha gave me this on the night they burned his hall," she said. "I've kept it forty years. Put it on."

It slid onto my smallest finger.

It was warm.

The elders shifted their feet.

"What do you want, girl?" asked the man with the cane.

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