They Never Wanted a Female Gamma, So I Built the Pack That Beat Theirs novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Seat
At the Moot's closing supper, Tomas and Peter say the pack will not have a girl in the Gamma's seat; Zosia drops her mother's pin in Tomas's wine, takes her father's shovel and walks out past the Crown's arbiter.
Tomas Baran stood up at the head table with his wine glass in his hand and said the pack would not have a girl in the Gamma's seat.
He said it in the voice he had practiced since we were eleven, and he did not lower it.
Eighty wolves sat at the long tables of our pack hall, and three visiting delegations sat along the north wall with their ledgers open.
I was standing alone in the middle of the floor in a black funeral dress, holding the seat-scroll in both hands.
I had buried a wolf that morning, and there was still shale dust under my nails.
The Gamma is the pack's third rank, the one who digs the graves, carries the dead and reads their names at the burying.
My father had held the seat for thirty years, and he was in the county hospital, dying.
I had trained for it since I was six years old.
I could dig a grave in forty minutes through shale.
I could name every wolf in the cemetery on the hill by the stone alone.
I had carried a full-grown wolf out of a flooded pit on my back when I was twelve, and it was my mother.
Peter Hudak got up next, at Tomas's right hand.
Peter had eaten Sunday dinner at my father's table for twenty years.
He had cried on my porch the day we buried her.
He looked at the tablecloth and said the pack had to think of how it looked to the Crown.
"A Gamma has to be seen to be strong," Peter said.
"We can't afford to be seen otherwise."
Neither of them looked at me.
Down the head table, the Alpha's wife looked into her wine.
The old Alpha studied the ceiling beams.
Somebody coughed.
A woman at table six began to clap, uncertainly, and then stopped.
I understood that I was being told in front of the whole hall, and that every one of them already knew.
They had known before they sat down to eat.
I thought about the three of us on the strip-pit bank at eleven years old, our palms cut and pressed together.
Three together, we had sworn.
Alpha, Beta, Gamma.
Nobody gets left behind.
Tomas finally looked at me.
His gray eyes were red around the rims, and I thought, good, you should be sick.
"Zosia," he said, "this isn't about you."
"It is exactly about me," I said.
My voice was steady, and I heard it from somewhere outside my own head.
I put the seat-scroll down on the nearest table, carefully, so that it would not roll.
Then I unpinned my mother's rank pin from my collar.
It was brass, a pickaxe and a shovel crossed, and her fingers had worn the edges smooth.
Marta Dzurenda had pinned it on my dress the morning she died, because I was twelve and had asked to wear it to school.
I walked up the length of the hall.
The floorboards creaked under my shoes, and every head in the room turned with me.
I stopped at the head table, across from Tomas.
He had gone pale.
I held the pin over his wine glass, a tall cut-crystal one that had been his grandmother's, full of red.
I let go.
It dropped with a small, clean sound, and the wine closed over it.
"I decline the Gamma's seat," I said to the hall.
"Bury your own dead."
Nobody moved.
The Alpha's wife, Ilona, lifted her face from her glass, and something crossed it that I had no name for yet.
I put the seat-scroll in her gloved hands, and she took it without a word.
Then I went to the wall behind the head table, where the pack's tools had hung since before I was born.
My father's shovel hung there, long-handled, with my grandfather's initials burned into the ash haft.
Thirty years it had stayed on that wall between his burials.
I lifted it off its pegs and set it on my shoulder.
The weight was exactly right.
It was the only thing in that room that had ever been mine.
"Zosia," Peter said, and his voice cracked.
I did not turn around.
I walked down the length of the hall with eighty wolves watching, and not one of them said my name.
The side door stood open to the September dark.
The arbiter's table was set against the wall beside it.
The Crown sends one man to every Keystone Moot to keep the ledger and favor no pack.
I had not looked at him all night, and I had thought only that he was young for the job.
He was standing now, in a gray suit, with a small silver key pinned to his lapel and a black ledger open under one long hand.
He had watched the whole supper.
He had not written anything down until I put the pin in the glass.
Now he wrote a single line, and the pen did not hesitate.
Then he lifted his head, and his hazel eyes held mine and did not move.
I stopped in the doorway with the shovel on my shoulder.
The air outside smelled of coal smoke and cut grass and the cold coming up off the strip pit.
I looked at his ledger.
I looked at his face.
"Write that down," I said.
He did.
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