Chapter 18: Heir Law

My father moved before I did.

He turned his body so Josie was behind his shoulder, and he looked at Ransom over the top of her knitted hat.

Every hunter at the doors shifted their weight.

"Dad," I said. "Don't."

"I wasn't going to do anything."

"You were going to do something."

"I was going to stand here," my father said, "very large."

The oldest Council member raised her hand.

"Pack law is pack business," she said. "The Council has no say in it."

She looked at Ransom with no expression at all.

"But this Council has a long memory, Mr. Ardell."

Ransom smiled at me across the Hollow. It was the patient smile, the one for new pack members.

"Blackfen meets on Sunday," he said. "Bring her. Or I'll send someone for her."

He walked back out into the snow.

I didn't sleep for three nights.

I lay with Josie on my chest and read the heir law out of a book Emmett brought me from the Cold Spring archive.

It was old. It was short.

An Alpha's firstborn belongs to the pack, and is raised in the pack's house.

Unless the mother stands before every wolf of the pack and gives the pack up.

Then the pup goes where she goes.

"Every wolf," Emmett said. "Out loud. In their hall. It's meant to be hard. It's meant to cost her the pack."

"I don't want the pack."

"I know," he said. "That's why it's going to work."

On Sunday I walked into the Blackfen lodge alone, with Josie in the sling.

My father and Dagny and Emmett waited outside in the snow.

Hunters don't go into a pack's hall, and Emmett said Cold Spring shouldn't either.

"Twenty minutes," my father said. "Then I come in."

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