Claiming the Spare Twin novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: The River Land
The schoolhouse on the river land had a tin roof and one stove.
Its bell had rung wrong since before I was born.
Eighty children sat on its benches the next morning, scrubbed and silent, because their alpha had come to visit.
Their alpha was me.
I still was not used to it.
Dorran stood at the back by the door with his hat in his hand.
In the stove, a fire crackled.
I held the paper in both hands.
It was the old debt of the river, signed by my grandfather and sealed in red wax.
It had stood between Cold Creek and Ironwood for sixty years.
Hester had brought it down from her chest in the early dawn and put it in my hand without a word.
"Is that the bad one?" a small girl asked from the front bench.
"That's the bad one."
"What does it do?"
"It says this room belongs to somebody else," I said. "From today it doesn't."
An Ironwood elder stood up at the back.
He was lean and stiff, with his arms folded, and I had expected him.
"Alpha Marrow," he said. "With respect. That paper is the treaty's price. It protects my pack's claim on this ground, and you're about to put it in a stove."
"I am."
"On the word of a clause nobody has read in sixty years."
"Hester read it," I said. "So did your alpha."
"And if the clause is wrong?"
"Then you'll tell me which of your wolves wants to take a school from eighty children," I said, "and I'll listen to the answer."
He opened his mouth.
"He won't," said Dorran from the back of the room.
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