Chapter 12 Twelve
Draven's POV
I watched them emerge from the old-growth trees and told myself I hadn’t been waiting.
I had been camped at the eastern border crossing for practical reasons, wholly pragmatic ones. The summit was approaching and the eastern crossing was the better way through to the council territories, not only did this mean that the camp needed to be set up sooner rather than later it meant that they had to ensure they made ground there before any other packs started moving into it. These were logistical facts. I had decided the way I decide most things, quickly and practically and without looking too closely at the fringes of it.
I did not investigate why, of all the potential campsites along the eastern crossing this stretch of forest had called to me. As for why I had held the watch myself both nights rather than rotating it to my lieutenants as I would on a stationary camp, that is something I did not investigate. It did not occur to me to look at how, consistently throughout conversation, my attention had pulled north toward Silvercrest whenever it did so at intervals unrelated to tactical concerns.
I was not waiting.
And then she came walking out of the trees.
Silver-gray wolf, already returned to human form, bare feet on frozen ground, dark hair a wild fan from running, olive eyes locking on me in the torchlight with an expression that was not fear and not relief but something more complicated than either. The other woman, half a step behind and slightly to her left, emerged from the tree line. She was taller, darker, sharper-eyed and when she registered my guards she put herself forward as instant instinct so clean, immediate that it took no thought to put her body between Elara and the camp.
That, I respected.
I held up two fingers to signal my wolves. They bent relatively without backtracking, and this was the correct response: available but not forceful.
I looked at Elara.
She was cold. Both of them were, bare-footed and without cloaks, the run had burned off whatever heat they had accumulated during their passage beneath the wall. I knew about the passage. I knew most of the things Silvercrest believed were lost to history, which was one of the benefits of spending years collecting data other people had already deemed irrelevant.
I gestured toward the fire.
She approached it without thinking.
The other trailed, looking at me with the eyes already doing the work of cataloguing everything they could see, the layout of whatever camp we were in and the number of wolves involved and exits and equipment and what it all meant. Not a seasoned strategist but smart enough to do it by instinct. I filed that away.
I led them into the biggest tent and summoned food and dry clothes for them hither, without explanation. My wolves acted fast and without complaint, because they’d been around long enough that they knew I didn’t give explanations for orders that didn’t call for them, and asking questions about things that weren’t their concern was a shortcut to less hairy assignments.
Elara sat next to the low fire in the middle of the tent and pulled a dry blanket around her shoulders and stared without looking at anything with the fully investedor reflective expression of someone still coming to terms with everything that had happened, effectively, over last several hours. She didn't speak.
Her companion sat opposite her, took the dry clothes with a nod that was grateful and also deeply suspicious at the same time, then turned that sharp gaze back on me.
“Why should we trust you,” she said.
Not a question exactly. Mere the opening move of somebody who had so decided that the only way to go was direct and he made up his mind on it entirely.
I looked at her.
“Selene,” Elara said, in a low voice.
“No,” Selene said, not taking her gaze off me. “We wandered into the camp of an exiled king who crashed private pack event he wasn’t invited to, hit on a married Luna and then is ‘surprise surprise conveniently camping at the very location we ended up running. I think the question is a fair one.”
I studied her for a second.
“You don’t want to trust me,” I told him.
She blinked. That is not what she had expected.
"Trust is earned," I said. "I haven't started yet. You have no obligation to give me what I haven’t worked for.” I leaned over and poured water into the cup next to her untouched plate. “But the food isn’t poisoned and the cold outside is real and you both are adults capable of making your own choices about what happens after you’ve eaten and warmed up.”
Selene stared at me for a long minute.
Then she picked up the bread and ate it, still watching me, this time with those narrow calculating eyes of hers, and I liked her more for doing two things at once.
Elara had still not spoken.
I let the silence sit. I had learned long ago that silence was not a void to fill and that the particular silence of someone holding themselves up toward a difficult question deserved patience, rather than noise.
The fire smoldered low between us.
Then she looked up.
“Why did the Elder Council really exile you,” she said.
Not the diplomatic version of the question. Not the softened approach. Just the question itself, flat and direct, her eyes on mine with that special quality of attention she had, the kind that made you aware that if what came out of your mouth did not match what was going on inside your head she would be able to tell.
I was quiet for a moment.
Beside Elara, Selene's hand moved. A slight tremor, to go down and to the right, at least the kind of thrust that could have his fingers close to some grip of a blade. Subtle enough that she most likely didn’t know she’d gone there. I sensed it the same way I sensed everything in a space I was charge of, reflexively and without response.
“The Elders made a decree,” I said. “A half-breed pack on the northern border. Deformed Wolves Over Two Generations With Human Bloodline Mixed In including Living Outside Pack Territory. The Elders had determined that they were a pollution. A threat to bloodline integrity." I remained fairly flat in my voice, because the other option was something I didn’t want to enter my voice as I told this story. “They told me to take my pack and go north and kill them. Every wolf. Every child. Anyone with mixed blood running through their veins.”
Neither woman spoke.
“I stood in front of the full council and I told them no,” she said. I stared into the fire. "That was the crime. That was all of it. Everything else in the official record is window dressing.”
There was a silence in the tent.
Then Elara said: “The archive record indicated the bloodline you protected was not random.”
I looked at her.
She’d unearthed more in those scrubbed files than I had expected. Someone had been diligent in scraping away the personal details, the real names, the specific connections. She’d read enough between the lines to know what the right question was.
"No," I said. "It was not random."
I sat with that for a moment. I did not talk about this. I hadn’t spoken of it in years, not since the exile, not since I had forged the pack that I now led from the rubble of all that came before. My wolves knew the outline as all Outer Wolves knew the outline. None of them were familiar with its interior.
“That was the family of the only woman I ever loved,” I said.
The words sounded flat and plain the way facts do when you’ve carried them long enough that their sharp edges have worn down into something you can say without ripping yourself open in the middle of someone else’s firelight.
Selene had gone very still.
“Elara” is a Netflix release I think; I couldn’t find it on YouTube, but anyway you can probably watch it there. Elara looked at me as if she had not seen an expression on her face before. Not softness exactly. Something more precise than that. Moving behind her eyes like weather shifts behind glass, quiet and real and asking nothing from me in response to it.
“What did they do to her,” she said.
I held her gaze.
"She didn't make it," I said.
I got up before either of them could reply.
"Sleep," I said. "Both of you. The survival blankets are dry, and the tent retains heat. I will hold the watch tonight.”
I stepped toward the tent opening before Selene could coalesce another question, and Elara could ask another one some quiet bit direct and hit precisely the thing I least might have expected to find.
Outside, the cold struck me sharp and direct.
I made my way to the northern edge of the camp and stood between a pair of trees and looked out through the darkness in the direction of Silvercrest, its wall invisible at this distance but somehow there as things are when you know exactly where they are and how far away.
I reasoned the woman sitting beside my fire was a pragmatic concern. A Luna who’d left a powerful pack under serious political pressure, who had information about Silvercrest’s inner workings that might be useful in the run-up to the summit, who had a wolf strong enough to move through old-growth forest at night and evade a pack pursuit without losing herself.
The trace of amber from her scent still lingering in the chill air at the perimeter of my own camp was nothing, I told myself.
I told myself I was unmoved by how she had looked at me when I said the words that had not left my mouth in years.
I waited in the cold for a long time.
I was not fooling myself about any of it.