"One of what?" I said.
Crewe was already pulling the blanket up over Cade's chest. He'd fallen asleep, or passed out, his head tipped against the logs.
"Not tonight."
"Bettany. One of what?"
"Not tonight, I said." She turned and fixed me with her pale, wet-stone eyes. "The elders are sitting at seven. They've heard you're back. Half the lane saw you walk in, and Dellah Tiller couldn't keep a secret if you sewed her mouth shut. They'll send for you. When they do, you go, and you sit, and you let them talk first."
"And then?"
"And then you remember that they need you more than you need them." She picked up the stone bowl. "Wash your hands. You've got his blood on your cuff."
I looked. I did. A rust-brown smear on the wool, the only proof any of it had happened.
They sent for me at quarter to seven. A boy of about fourteen with a lantern, too nervous to look at me.
The long hall stood at the top of the Hollow, built of whole larch trunks gone black with two hundred years of smoke. I'd been in it twice in my life. Once for my naming. Once when I was eleven and broke the Garricks' window with a stone and had to apologise in front of everyone.
The table ran the length of the room. Water had been poured into pewter cups at each place, which is the old form. You pour water when you're bargaining. Wine is for when the bargain's done.
Elder Mabry sat at the head, tiny under a heap of shawls, her eyes bright as a sparrow's. Garrick beside her, forearms like hams. Four others I knew by face. And in the Alpha's chair, at the right hand, Royce Ashby.
He'd aged. The grey had spread from his beard into his hair. But he still had that stillness, the patience of a big man who's never needed to hurry. He nodded to me as if I'd come about a fence.
"Wren," he said. "Welcome home."
I didn't sit. "Is it?"
"Sit down, girl," said Mabry. "My neck's too old to look up at you."
I sat.
They let a silence go long. I let it. Crewe had told me to let them talk first, and I've worked enough night shifts to know that whoever fills a silence is usually the one who wants something.
Garrick cracked first.
"You'll know about the border," he said.
"I know Fenmark's been raiding. I know my mother's being blamed for it."
"Fenmark's done more than raid." Garrick leaned in. "The stones on the east ridge have always held. Fenmark wolves can't cross them in their skins, not without being sick as dogs for a week after. Every pup knows that. Three months ago they started crossing anyway. Walking straight through, like the stones were fence posts."
"Since August," Mabry said quietly. "Since your mother went."
I picked up the pewter cup so I'd have something to do with my hands.
"We've lost eleven," Garrick said. "Two of them children. Cade took a blade at the river crossing trying to hold the ford with five against twenty."
"And you think I can fix your stones?"
"We think," Mabry said, "that Bettany Crewe sent for you, and that Bettany Crewe has never once in sixty years wasted a stamp."
"She doesn't use stamps."
"Then she's never wasted a messenger." The old woman folded her hands. "We're not fools, Wren. The Holloway women have always walked that ridge. Your mother, every new moon, with a lantern, alone. Her mother before her. Nobody asked why. Perhaps we should have."
Royce said nothing. He was watching me over the rim of his cup.
"So. The table." Mabry ticked it off on her knotted fingers. "You stay. You walk the ridge with your mother's lantern. If it comes to fighting, you fight with us. In return, the rejection's struck from the pack record as unlawful, made before witnesses under the old forms. Your exile's lifted. And Ilse Holloway's name is cleared of treason, publicly, at the next moot."
It was everything. Everything I'd lain awake wanting in Mrs. Pell's back room, with the gulls going and the radiator ticking. Laid out on the table between the water cups like wages.
That's how I knew how frightened they were.
"And if I say no?"
"Then you walk back out the way you came," said Royce, mildly. First time he'd spoken. "No one will stop you."
"Royce," Mabry said.
"I'm only saying. She's not pack. She hasn't been for four years. She owes us nothing." He smiled at me. He had a nice smile. Cade had got it from him. "I'd understand."
I put the cup down.
"I'll stay," I said. "I'll walk your ridge. I'll fight."
Garrick let out a breath. Someone down the table actually laughed with relief.
"One condition."
The laughter stopped.
"Cade rejected me in the circle, in front of everybody. So when he's well enough to stand, he asks my pardon. Himself. On his knees. In the circle, in front of everybody. The old words, all of them."
The hall went so quiet I heard the fire tick.
Royce set his cup down very gently.
"My son," he said, "is the heir of this pack. He doesn't kneel."
"Then I don't stay."
"Done," said Mabry.
Royce turned his head and looked at her. Just looked. The old woman looked straight back, chin up, a sparrow staring down a hawk.
"The pack's bleeding, Royce," she said. "Your boy's bleeding. Done."
I was nearly to the door when Royce caught up with me.
He didn't touch me. He didn't need to. He just fell into step at my shoulder, close enough that I smelled cedar and pipe tobacco on his coat, and walked me out into the cold.
The lantern boy had gone. The lane was dark except for windows.
"You've got your mother's mouth," Royce said pleasantly. "She always did like to set terms."
"Somebody has to."
"Mm." He stopped at the top of the steps and looked out over the valley, the lake, the black line of the east ridge against the stars. "I'd be careful with that, if I were you, Wren. I'd hate to see you end up where she has."
I turned.
"Where is she?"
But Royce Ashby was already walking away down the lane, hands in his coat pockets, whistling the three falling notes of a lullaby my mother used to sing me when I was small.