Chapter 175 Chapter 176

Chapter 175 Chapter 176

Amara's POV

Vera gives us three days.
She organises it herself. Each morning a different elder or tradition-keeper sits with me in the council room while I listen and write. Alaric attends the first session and then withdraws to work with Vera on the governance questions — the pack’s regional standing, the formal documentation that will be needed for the covenant connection to be legally recognised. He knows his presence in the tradition sessions would change their quality.
He says, before the first morning: I will be more useful with Vera than in that room.
I say: yes.
He says: bring me anything that has governance implications.
I say: everything has governance implications.
He says: bring me the ones that are urgent.

The first morning is songs.
Not performance — working songs, the kind that are sung while doing other things, that carry memory in their structure because the rhythm makes them easy to hold over generations without formal teaching. The elder who leads this session is a woman named Bray, perhaps seventy, who has been the pack’s memory-keeper for forty years.
She says: we do not call them songs about the covenant. We call them work songs. But the things they describe — what the land was, what it felt like, what could be done in it — those are covenant descriptions.
I say: how do you know.
She says: I did not know until you arrived. But the things the songs describe match what you described last night. The warmth. The quality of the territory. What changed when it went.
I transcribe everything she sings.
Some of it I recognise from the founding documents. The specific phrasing of territorial protection, the description of what the covenant’s field felt like in the land — these are in the records, differently worded, and finding them here in song form tells me the original covenant’s language spread wider than the formal documents.
Some of it I do not recognise.
One song describes a function I have no record of: a practitioner who could read the land’s health and communicate it to the pack leader through a working that sounds nothing like any Oris practice I know. Not the Kelvar maritime tradition. Something else. Something that apparently operated in the southern territories and whose practitioner lineage the songs call the land-readers.
I say: who were the land-readers.
Bray says: we do not know. The songs remember them but not their names. They were not wolves. They came from somewhere south of here.
I write: fifth bloodline. Unknown. Associated with territorial health reading. Origin: southern territories.
I put a question mark after it.
Essa is going to want to know about this immediately.

The second morning is stories.
Three storytellers, each with a different section of the pack’s oral history. They take turns without discussing the order among themselves — they have apparently been telling these stories in this sequence for long enough that the sequence is automatic.
The stories give me things the founding documents do not have.
The specific experience of the covenant’s field from inside a wolf pack’s life rather than from a practitioner’s perspective. What it felt like to hunt in territory that was covenant-supported — not a magical enhancement, something subtler, a quality of rightness to the land that made everything easier without being identifiable as any one thing. What it felt like when that quality began to fade.
One story describes the specific year when the pack first noticed the change.
The storyteller, a young man who cannot be older than twenty-five, tells it as his grandmother told him and her grandmother told her: the year the winter lasted too long. Not a catastrophic winter, just a winter that should have ended and did not. The land not responding the way it always had. The pack not understanding why.
That year was exactly three years after Alaric’s birth.
Three years after the baby curse weakened the covenant’s primary parties.
I write: documented correlation. Covenant weakening in primary parties = detectable change in tertiary territory within three years.
I say: your grandmother noticed the change in the land. Did she know what caused it.
He says: she said something left. She did not know what.
I say: something did leave. I can tell you what it was now.
He says: yes. Please.
I tell him.

The third morning I ask to meet the eldest member of the pack.
Vera hesitates.
She says: she is ninety-four. She does not always know where she is or what year it is. Her clarity comes and goes.
I say: I would like to try. If she is not clear, I will not push.
She is sitting in a chair in a small room that faces the southern hills. Her name is Ota. She looks like she has been in that chair for a significant portion of ninety-four years and has made herself entirely at home in it.
She looks at me when I come in.
She says: you are the covenant woman.
I say: yes.
She says: I wondered when you would come.
I say: you knew I was coming.
She says: I knew someone would come eventually. The covenant does not end. It waits.
She says it with the specific certainty of someone who is not making an argument but stating a thing they have known for a long time.
I say: what do you remember about it. When you were young.
She says: the land was different. Better. Not better as in more comfortable — better as in more itself. The land knew what it was.
She says: it still knows. It has just been waiting to be reminded.
She says: you are here to remind it.
I say: yes.
She says: good.
She looks at the southern hills.
She says: the covenant does not end.
She says: it waits.
She closes her eyes.
I wait.
Her breathing is even. Her face is relaxed.
Vera, who has come to stand in the doorway, says quietly: she sleeps like that sometimes. In the middle of things.
I say: yes.
I look at her for a moment.
Ninety-four years and the land was better when she was young and she has been waiting for something to come and it came and she said what she needed to say and now she is asleep.
I close my notebook.
I have enough.