The Alpha's Claim on the Border Ledger novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Widow Fund
Rhona Tarn finds the pack treasurer is robbing the widows she pays, runs nine miles to the rival border with the ledger, and when Mirefold's warriors catch her at the gate, speaks the claim words herself and Alpha Torin Reave bites her in front of both packs.
One of my widows had been dead for two winters, and she was still drawing her stipend.
I found her on the last night of the quarter, in the treasury hall at Mirefold, with a candle and a pot of cold tea at my elbow.
Her name sat in my own handwriting on the third line of page forty, as it had every quarter.
Beside it was a payment of eleven silver marks, signed for with a mark that was not hers.
I turned back a page.
Then another.
Fourteen widows, nine orphans, and a blind old drover who had been buried in the spring.
All of them paid on paper.
None of them paid in coin.
I had kept the widow and orphan fund for six years, since I turned eighteen, and every line in it was mine.
Every line had been dictated to me by Alpha Osric MacIlroy, in his soft voice, across this same desk.
I had never once checked his sums against the vault.
I did it now, with my hands shaking so badly the ink blotted.
The vault held a third of what the book said it did.
Six years of the pack's one-in-twelve coin, taken from the people who could least spare it, and I had written down every theft with a steady hand.
"Still at it, Rhona?"
Osric's voice came from the passage, easy and fond.
I closed the book and put my elbow over it.
The door opened, and he leaned on the frame with his oiled hair combed back and his gold signet ring catching the candle.
"It's late for a girl with no wolf to be wandering," he said. "You'll catch cold."
"Quarter's close," I said. "I'm nearly done."
"Good girl."
He went out, and I listened to his boots all the way down the passage.
Then I took the book, took my green coat from its hook, and buttoned the book inside it against my ribs.
I left the flask Luna Lorna pressed on me every evening on the desk.
I went out through the mill yard, past the race running black and loud under the wheel.
Then I took the forest path north.
It was nine miles to the border river and then another mile up to Hawkscar's gate.
I walked it in the dark, with the book digging into my ribs and my glasses fogging every time I stopped to breathe.
The river was waist deep and cold enough to stop my heart.
I crossed it with the book held over my head.
On the far side the path climbed through pines, and somewhere behind me a horn sounded long and low.
They had found the empty hook.
By the time I came out under the torches of Hawkscar's gate, I was soaked to the chest and the horns were close.
The gate was a wall of black timber, and in front of it stood twenty Hawkscar wolves with crossbows lowered at me.
"Stop there," one called. "State your business."
"I'm Rhona Tarn of Mirefold," I said, and my teeth chattered so hard the words came out in pieces. "I need to see your Alpha."
"Mirefold's not welcome at this gate."
"I have proof that my Alpha is robbing his own dead."
Nobody moved.
Then the horns behind me broke out of the trees and Mirefold's warriors came down the path in a wave, twenty of them, with Osric's Beta at the front.
The Beta pointed at me.
"That woman is a thief," he said. "She has stolen from the treasury of Mirefold, and by pack law she is ours to take."
Hands closed on my arms before I had breathed.
Someone wrenched my coat open, and the book was nearly out of it.
I clutched it with both arms, and a warrior twisted my wrist until I cried out.
"Wait," said a voice above me.
A big man had come down the gate steps.
He was taller than any wolf there, broad in a sheepskin coat, with black hair to his shoulders and a thin braid at one temple.
His eyes were the palest green I had ever seen on a living thing.
Alpha Torin Reave of Hawkscar looked at me the way you look at a bill you did not order.
"Pack law lets Mirefold take her from Mirefold ground," he said. "This is my ground."
"She's a thief," the Beta said again.
"Then bring a witness and a charge to my council."
"We don't have to," the Beta said. "She has no wolf. She belongs to the pack that raised her, and nobody at this gate can stop us."
They had me by both arms and the book was sliding.
I was an accountant.
I knew every law the two packs had ever signed, because they were all written in the ledgers I balanced.
And I knew exactly one law that took a woman out of any pack's hands.
"Alpha Reave," I said, loudly enough for both packs. "I am unmated and I have crossed the border of my own will. I claim your protection under the border law, and I ask you to mark me."
Torin Reave went completely still.
"You don't know what you're asking," he said, very low.
"I know the law," I said. "I've read it forty times."
His jaw worked.
The Mirefold Beta said, "He won't."
Torin crossed the ground between us in three strides.
He took me out of their hands, turned my left shoulder toward the torches, and pulled my wet collar aside.
Then his mouth was on my skin, and his teeth went in.
It hurt.
And then my heart beat twice.
Once in my own chest, and once in his, a heavy, slow, rolling thud I could feel against my ribs from a man who stood a hand's width away.
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