The Nameless Luna novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Summer Gathering

I broke the wax on the strip with the sun coming up behind me.

The handwriting inside was thin and shaky, and it was his own.

The Summer Gathering will be held at Coldfoot on June twenty-sixth, the first ever north of the Yukon.

The roll will come north with me.

I am told the Luna of Coldfoot runs a strip. I would be grateful for a landing slot.

Warrick read it over my shoulder.

"He's asking you for a slot," he said.

"He's going to get one."

"What about a wedding?" Gussie said, from behind both of us. "Since every pack in Alaska will be here anyway, and somebody's going to have to feed them."

The cook was standing behind her.

"I'll need more flour," the cook said.

By the twenty-fifth there were planes on every flat surface in the valley.

Floatplanes nose to nose along the lake beach. Wheel planes lined up on the strip shoulder.

Two Beavers, an Otter from Kodiak, a Cessna on tundra tires parked in the cook's potato patch, which she never forgave.

I ran the strip from the back of the base truck with a handheld radio and a clipboard.

"Kodiak Otter, you're number two behind the Cessna. Bethel Beaver, hold over the lake. Juneau, you're cleared to land, wind calm, mind the moose."

The white turbine Otter came in last, with the High seat's moon on the tail.

The enforcer who'd chained my Cub was flying it.

He greased it.

I told him so on the radio, and he said, "Thank you, ma'am," and the whole valley heard him.

The roll keeper came down the airstairs first, very small, with the book in her arms.

Then the High Alpha, in his chair, gray but upright, with a blanket on his knees in June.

My mother came in on a charter from Fairbanks with one bag.

My father met her plane, because I'd put him on the ramp crew.

I seated them myself.

Not at the front.

Not at the back table either.

At the long table by the stove, with the cook and the far-camp family and the girl who threw popcorn.

My mother looked at the place card. It said Tennant.

Then she looked at me, and sat down, and passed the bread when she was asked.

Annalise sat at the Coldfoot table, with Gussie and the trapper.

We got married on the riverbank at midnight on the twenty-sixth, with the sun sitting on the ridge and not going down.

I wore the navy wool dress Warrick had left at my hotel door in October.

I wore my flight jacket over it.

When he saw me, he put his hand over his eyes.

"You wore the jacket," he said.

"You said you would."

The roll keeper stood between us on the gravel, because there was nobody else either of us wanted.

Four hundred wolves stood on the bank behind her in the gold light.

The trapper played the fiddle, badly, and wept the whole time.

"What do I call you, child?" the roll keeper asked me, very quietly, so only the three of us heard.

"Teal will do," I said. "Tonight."

She nodded.

Warrick's vows were four lines long.

"I'll never use the voice on you. I'll never ask you to stay on the ground. I'll hold the bag. I'll eat the pie."

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