Chapter 16 Sixteen
Elara's POV
The camp broke before noon.
Draven gave the order with the same economy he practiced in all things, two words to his second and then the camp was just in motion, tents coming down and packs gathering up and the low fire being properly quenched with the care of people who knew that when you lived amongst ancient woodlands you didn’t make twice a mistake regarding flame.
Selene materialized next to me already garbed in appropriate traveling getup, a heavy wool cloak of dark green and studded boots that fit well enough to be an educated guess or pure luck. She offered me a matching set without comment.
I slipped the cloak on and instantly sensed a difference. The morning cold had been resting on my skin since I climbed out of the tent and I had been absorbing it without completely registering what was happening, too busy with all the many other things to give the temperature its proper due.
"Better," Selene said, watching me.
"Better," I agreed.
A long file moving north through black pine and frozen ground, quiet and fast in the way Draven’s pack just seemed to do everything, efficiently without any of the sound that usually accompanied a group this size moving through terrain. No barked orders. No stragglers being shouted back into line. No rank-based jockeying for position.
I waited to feel frightened.
The fear didn't come.
I studied its absence the way you study a wound that should hurt and doesn’t yet, searching for the numbness that comes before all of that, waiting for when the reality of what I had done would land with its full weight and knock me sideways. But as we drove further north, my breathing came easier and each mile separating me from Silvercrest’s wall loosened something in my chest that I hadn’t fully realized was tight until it started releasing.
I started noticing things.
The way the column advanced silently, no voice raised in a shout, as if everything between them were telegraphed with glances and minute gestures: a tilt of the head from a forward scout that told his immediate fellows that they would adjust their route slightly left and it passed back along those miles of humanity without uttering it. The way the food was given out at the very first short stop to rest casually, with none of the rank-based sequencing that dictated all meals served up by order of arrival in Silvercrest, where however quickly you were served told you exactly how you stood.
No one stared at me with pity.
That was what I noticed most. The wolves surrounding me had evidently already been apprised of the circumstances in whatever manner Draven informed his pack of newcomers, but they watched me as they had each other, with the pragmatic focus of individuals contemplating another element in their environment rather than with the delicate care of a being protecting something fragile. One of them, a short-haired female scout who had to have been only a few years younger than I was, handed me a filled canteen at the rest stop and told me that the frozen creek crossing three miles ahead was solid enough to bear our horses but to keep far over on the left side because there was a weak patch on the right that wouldn’t be visible from the surface.
Then there she was gone again, returning to her old station before I could do anything more than thank her.
I carried the canteen and considered three years of careful handling.
By noon we arrived at the second frozen creek, wider than the first and fringed on either bank with reeds locked in place with ice that rattled softly in the breeze working through the pine corridor. Draven called the stop for the horses to water from the unfrozen section upstream and the column splintered into small clusters, people stretching and eating and talking in low easy tones of a group comfortable with one another.
Draven appeared next to me, unannounced.
He gave me a strip of dried meat and said nothing for a moment, gazing out at the creek in that way he sometimes seemed to gaze at things, with an attention that didn't seem to need comment to feel complete. Then, if the weather held, he said they would reach the settlement by night.
I gazed through the pine canopy in the sky. Heavy and pale, that specific white-gray of clouds holding something they had not yet given up.
"What is it like," I said. "The settlement."
He was quiet for a moment.
Not the silence of someone drafting a diplomatic response, or weighing which truth might serve best to reveal. The silence of someone actually giving the question serious thought because they would’ve decided it warranted such.
“Nothing like any pack you’ve ever seen,” he added. "No Luna title. No hierarchy based on bloodline or the luck of who your father was.” He looked at the creek. “You earn your place based on what you can do. What you can contribute. You are ready to move.” He paused. "Rank exists but it moves. And who that is goes to whoever has the best fit for what the pack requires at the time it needs it.”
I reflected on three years of a title that signified everything in ceremony and nothing in practice. One I had filled entirely and been removed from with under twelve hours notice because my worth had been quantified in the sole thing I couldn't give.
“I’m like, where do I fit in that system?”
He turned his head and stared at me peripherally.
"We will find out," he said.
I ought to have found that disquieting. The openness of it, the uncertainty of a guaranteed spot, an undefined role awaiting me to grow into. Every instinct that three years of pack hierarchy had instilled in me screamed that an unassigned wolf was a vulnerable wolf, and vulnerability was best remedied as swiftly and formally as possible.
Instead my wolf rolled the words around for a while, as if you were rolling something over in your hand to measure its weight, and what she discovered was warmth.
Above us, the pine canopy shifted.
One flake fell and rested on the back of my hand and I looked at it, then up to the sky, again to the sky because what I thought was just a shift in light was nothing at all like that.
The snow came all at once.
Not lightly. Not the slow onset of a storm that allows you to prepare for it. It fell hard and fast like a curtain, sudden and absolute, the temperature plunging several degrees over the course of a minute, the visibility through trees shrinking rapidly.
Draven looked up.
He muttered something under his breath that was short and flat, the kind of word chosen for its efficiency as opposed to its politeness.
I looked at him.
His jaw was clenched and he was scanning the tree line like a man rapidly recalibrating a plan against new contingencies.
“How far to the settlement,” I said.
“In this,” he said, “we’re not going to get there tonight.”
I saw the snow falling through the pine canopy, already starting to settle on the hard ground in a way that would alter our footing and cover up trail markers and lower visibility to a fraction of what we had been moving in.
“Where are we,” I said, although part of me already suspected the answer.
He looked at me.
“Three miles into the dead zone,” he said.
The dead zone. The borderless stretch of country between whom anyone referred to as pack land and the land where rogues roamed, the ground that had become a no-mans-land because the council had written it off and the packs no longer patrolled it because maintaining control cost more than whatever value such territory offered.
The Feral Wolves prowled in the nighttime.
I looked at the snow.
The snow did not stop.