The Silver Wolf novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Rule One

I waited until supper.

Cormick ladled stew into two bowls and sat across the table, and I watched him eat for a full minute before I said it.

"Alder said to ask you something."

"I heard him."

"Why were you at the clearing?"

He kept his eyes on the bowl.

"To see whether your wolf would wake," he said.

"That's all?"

"Your mother asked me to watch for it."

"You said she was dead."

"She was. She asked me before."

"And you didn't tell me."

"You'd have asked me to tell you the rest."

"What's the rest?"

"It's late."

He answered every question straight away.

He didn't stop or think.

I noticed it, and then I told myself that a man who lived alone on a mountain would be short with people.

It was a reasonable explanation, and I took it.

Under my ribs, Hesper said, dryly, "You are choosing to believe him."

"I'm choosing to be tired," I muttered.

"Say it again later."

I went to bed in the shed.

I lay awake for a long time, listening to the rain start on the roof.

In the morning it was still raining.

Cormick took me out to the cliff ledge anyway, the narrow one over the gorge.

"Today you spar," he said. "I come at you, and you stop me."

"With my hands?"

"With anything you've got. Wolf if you need it."

"On this?"

"It's the point."

The ledge was wet black rock six feet wide, with nothing on one side but the sound of the river.

I put my back to the cliff wall and my hands up.

He came at me slow at first.

I blocked one, I ducked one, and I took a shoulder in the ribs that knocked the wind out of me.

"Again," Hesper said.

I got up.

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