The Luna He Failed to Protect novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Ash Line

Sorrel reaches the border garrison, where Edda's squad of discarded wolves takes her in and shows her seven graves, until Garth summons her to his quarters alone.

I tore the orders in half before the truck hit the river bridge.

Then I picked the halves up off the floor and folded them into my father's field book.

A wolf doesn't throw away proof.

He'd taught me that, back when proof meant who ate the last of the honey.

The drive south took ten hours.

The pines thinned out first.

Then the green went gray, and then it went black.

The Ash Line was forty miles of burned ridge country, where the fire had come through twenty years ago and nothing had grown back right.

It smelled like old smoke and wet charcoal and rogue.

My wolf knew that last scent before I did.

She came up under my skin with her hackles raised, and I had to sit on my hands to keep them from changing.

The garrison sat on a bald hill behind a log wall.

A watchtower, a mess hall, two long bunkhouses and a square stone house with a flag on it.

The driver stopped by the gate and didn't turn off the engine.

"Out," he said.

I got out.

He was gone before my boots finished sinking into the ash.

A wolf on the gate looked me up and down.

"Ravelston's girl," he said.

"Vardy," I said.

He grinned and pointed at the stone house.

Garth Coldwater met me on his porch with a letter in his hand.

I knew the paper.

Morwenna ordered it from the city, thick and pale blue, with the Luna's moon pressed into the corner.

Garth was fifty and built like a bull that had learned to stand up.

His face was red from wind and drink, and his sandy hair was going gray at the sides.

He read the letter to the end while I stood in the yard.

Then he folded it and looked at me, and he smiled.

It wasn't a big smile.

It was slow and satisfied.

"My sister writes that you've got a mouth on you," he said.

"I've got orders," I said, and held out the two torn halves.

"I can see the seal's broken."

"I broke it."

"So she was right." He tucked the letter inside his coat, against his chest. "Welcome to the Line, Sorrel. Bunkhouse two. Report when you're called."

He went inside.

The door didn't close all the way.

I could feel him watching me through the gap across the yard.

Bunkhouse two had a hole in the roof and a woodstove that smoked.

It also had nine wolves in it, and every one of them stopped talking when I came in.

The tallest one stood up off her bunk.

She had a red braid as thick as my wrist, freckles all over, and a nose that had been broken at least twice.

"Look at those boots," she said. "Somebody bought those boots."

"The Alpha did," I said.

"Well, he can't have them back." She stuck out a hand. "Edda Kestrel. Sergeant of the garbage."

"The what?"

"That's what the commander calls us." She jerked her chin around the room. "Everybody here got sent by somebody who wanted them gone. We don't take it personal. Mostly."

A big gray man by the stove lifted a spoon.

"I'm the cook," he said. "Don't touch the pot."

Two young men with the same face waved from the same bunk.

"We're the twins," said the left one.

"We're twins," said the right one. "Nobody calls us the twins but her."

"Everybody calls you the twins," Edda said.

There was a thin woman missing half an ear, who nodded and went back to sharpening a knife.

There was a quiet man who tracked rogues.

There was a woman who'd been a schoolteacher in a river pack, and two brothers who argued about everything.

Nine wolves.

Not one of them had been born in Greyhollow.

The twins had been taken in as pups when their own pack burned.

They'd been struck off the roll at nineteen for brawling with an elder's son.

The cook had been a rogue once, before Alder's father let him in.

The rest had come from packs that broke, or had married into Greyhollow and fallen out of favor after.

Edda had been fostered in from a downstream pack at sixteen, and sent south at twenty-three for breaking the nose of the Luna's favorite guard.

"He deserved it," she said. "Still does."

"What did you do?" asked the right twin.

Every face turned to me.

I could have lied.

"I wrote a letter," I said. "To the Alpha's son."

"What kind of letter?"

"The kind his mother read out loud at his oath dinner."

The schoolteacher put her hand over her mouth.

The left twin whistled low.

The cook ladled out a bowl of stew and pushed it into my hands.

"Eat," he said. "Then you can cry."

"I'm not going to cry."

"Then eat twice."

I laughed.

I didn't mean to.

It came out of me, and Edda laughed too.

Then the brothers were arguing about whether the stew had turnip in it.

They gave me the bunk under the hole in the roof.

"New wolf gets the stars," Edda said. "It's tradition. We made it up last week."

After the stew, she took me out behind the mess hall.

She didn't say why.

There was a strip of black ground there, raked flat, and seven wooden stakes stood in a row.

No names were cut into them.

Just a notch at the top of each one.

"Greyhollow wolves," Edda said. "Sent down here by the same house as you."

"Rogues?"

"Some of them, maybe." She put her hand on the last stake in the row. "Not this one."

She kept her hand there a long time.

"This was my friend," she said. "She was twenty. She lasted five months."

"What happened to her?"

Edda looked toward the stone house with the flag on it.

She didn't answer.

She didn't have to.

We walked back in silence.

At the bunkhouse door, she grabbed my sleeve.

"If he calls you, you come get me first," she said. "Understand?"

I understood the words.

I didn't understand them yet.

I lay under the hole in the roof that night and watched the stars and didn't sleep.

Somewhere north, Cale was wearing his oath ring.

I hoped it pinched.

At midnight, somebody knocked on the door of bunkhouse two.

The whole room went still.

Edda sat up on her bunk.

The knock came again, and the door swung open on a skinny wolf with a lantern.

The commander's runner.

He didn't come in.

He looked straight past everyone else, to me.

"Commander wants Ravelston's girl in his quarters," he said. "Now. Alone."

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