The Spring Between Us

The water came out of the pipe warm.

That was the first thing I noticed, three hours before dawn, lying on my belly on a sandstone ledge with my chin scraped raw and my hands buried in red dust. The pipe ran down from the spring house in a long iron line, and where the elbow joint leaked, the water pattered onto the rock and steamed a little in the cold. Warm water meant the spring was alive. Warm water meant the Çöl pack was pulling it up from somewhere deep, which meant they were not starving, and which meant my own people were dying of a drought that was not a drought at all.

I had known that for six days. Six days of watching the cistern behind the Kızıltaş pack house drop another finger's width every morning, six days of listening to Ruth say the same thing at every meal, in her patient voice, that the canyon had gone dry before and would go dry again and the only water that mattered was on the other side of the border.

Ruth was my Beta. Ruth had been my mother's Beta too, for eleven years, and she had a way of saying things that made them sound like they had already been decided by wiser people than me.

I had the poison in my jacket pocket, wrapped in wax paper so it would not sweat through. Wolfsbane and a little something Mira had not asked about. Three pinches in the spring house and the Çöl pack would be sick for a month. Nobody dead. Ruth had been very clear about that, as if clarity were the same thing as mercy.

My mother would have had something to say about this plan. My mother had been in the ground for three weeks and I still caught myself turning to ask her things.

The ledge dropped away to my left, down into the dark where the canyon floor held a creek that had been dry since before I was born. I could smell it anyway, that old mineral smell of wet stone that never quite leaves a riverbed. To my right, the spring house sat in a nest of boulders, low walls of fitted rock, a tin roof, a door with a bar across it. Two wolves on guard, both of them shifted, one pacing a slow circle near the pipe and one lying flat on the warm stone with his nose on his paws.

They were not very good guards. The Çöl pack had held that spring for forty years and nobody had come for it in thirty.

I had come for it. I had a knife in my boot, the poison in my pocket, and a plan I had rehearsed so many times that I could not feel my own hands.

Then the wind turned.

It came down the canyon from the north, cold off the mesas, and it carried the smell of juniper and dust and something underneath both of those, something that reached into my chest and closed around my ribs like a hand.

I stopped breathing. The two guards lifted their heads at the same moment, the pacing one swinging his muzzle toward the wind, and I should have taken that as a warning and gone flat and still. Instead I lifted my own head, a small stupid movement, and breathed in again.

That scent. I had no name for it. It was not a smell like bread or rain. It was a hook, and it was in me now, and every part of me that had ever been a wolf was pulling toward it while every part of me that was a woman and a Luna knew exactly what it meant.

No. Not possible. Not this border. Not this night.

The pacing guard made a low sound and trotted off toward the spring house, and the other one stood up, shook himself out from nose to tail, and turned into a man.

He was not Hank. I knew Hank by sight. Every Kızıltaş wolf knew the Çöl Alpha by sight, from the Council meetings and from the border, and I had seen him twice from a distance, both times across a line of armed warriors, both times at enough distance that his face was only a shape. This one was younger and leaner, and he pulled a canvas jacket on over his bare shoulders and called out something I could not hear, and then he walked away down the track that led toward the Çöl pack house.

He left the door unbarred.

I do not know how long I lay there. Long enough for the sky behind the eastern rim to go from black to something like ink in water. Long enough for my knees to lock and my jaw to ache from clenching. The scent was still in the wind, fainter now, drifting, and I told myself it was nothing. A wolf's nose plays tricks in a dry canyon. I had been sleeping four hours a night and eating worse than the dogs.

I got up on my elbows. The spring house door stood ajar, and no one was watching it.

I was halfway down the slope, one hand on a juniper root, when he came out of the spring house with a tin cup in his hand.

He did not shout. He did not shift. He stood in the doorway with the lamplight behind him and he watched me come down the last twenty feet of rock, and when I stopped, six paces from him, with my heart going like a rabbit's, he lifted the cup and drank from it and said, "You are early."

I had a knife in my boot and poison in my pocket and I could not remember a single word of the speech I had rehearsed.

"Early for what," I said.

"For the water." He had black hair, cut short and pushed back off his forehead, and a face that gave nothing away. His eyes were the amber of a winter fire, and they were not angry. That was the worst of it. I had expected anger. I had built my whole plan out of the belief that the Çöl Alpha would be furious and stupid when he caught me, and instead he was standing there in a wool shirt with the sleeves rolled and looking at me the way a man looks at weather coming in.

"Hank," I said. "Alpha."

"Derya." He said my name without any particular weight. "Luna of the Kızıltaş. You are a long way from your mesa."

"So are you."

"I live here." He gestured with the cup at the spring house, at the boulders, at the pipe running its warm line down into the dark. "This is my pack's land, and that is my pack's water, and you are standing on it at an hour when honest wolves are asleep. I would like to know why."

The wind came down the canyon again. I smelled him properly now, at six paces, and the hook went through me so hard that I put a hand out and caught the juniper trunk to keep from swaying. Juniper bark under my palm. Rough, real. I held onto it.

His head tilted. Just slightly. He had caught it too, then. I watched him take a breath, and I watched him go still the way a deer goes still, and something moved behind those amber eyes that I did not have a name for.

"There is no drought," I said. It came out flat and ugly and I was glad of it. "My people have been hauling barrels from the creek bed for six days and finding mud. My mother's pack is drinking from a cistern that will be empty by the end of the month. And your pipe is running warm."

"It is."

"So you admit it."

"I admit that my pipe is warm." He came down the two steps from the door and set the cup on the stone wall, and I made myself stand my ground. "I also admit that a pack with a spring does not usually let its neighbors dry out, because a neighbor with nothing to lose is a neighbor who comes over the border at night. I have been wondering when yours would come."

"Here I am."

"Here you are." He looked at my jacket, at the pocket, and I saw his nostrils flare. "With wolfsbane in your coat."

I did not answer.

"Three pinches in the spring house would put half my pack on their backs for a month," he said. "The old ones might not get up. Did your Beta tell you it would only make us sick?"

The canyon felt very quiet. Somewhere far down the dry creek bed an owl was working, and the warm water pattered on the rock, and my knees had begun to shake in a way I could not stop. "How do you know what my Beta told me?"

"Because Ruth has been trying to buy water from me for two years, and last spring she started asking what would happen if the spring ever failed." He said it without heat, the way a man reads a bill of lading. "She has a particular way of asking questions. She makes them sound like a favor she is doing you."

My hand was still on the juniper. The bark had cut into my palm and I could feel the blood warm against my fingers, and I did not let go.

"Take your hand off the tree," Hank said.

"No."

"I am not going to hurt you." He took a step closer, and then another, and the hook pulled so hard that my wolf, my late, stubborn, half-wild wolf who had been sleeping all winter, came awake in my chest with a sound I had never heard her make. "Derya. Look at me."

"I am looking at you."

"You are looking past me." His voice had gone quiet. "I have smelled you since you came over the rim, an hour before dawn. I know what I smell. You do too, or you would not be holding onto that tree like it owes you money."

I should have run. I had four routes off that ledge mapped in my head and I should have taken any of them, and instead I stood there with my bloody hand on the juniper and let him come close enough that I could see the small scar at the corner of his mouth and the grey threads at his temples that the lamplight had not shown me from a distance.

"You knew," I said. My voice had gone strange. "Before tonight. You knew."

He stopped. Something in his face changed, and for the first time all night he looked away from me, out at the eastern rim where the sky was turning the color of a bruise. "Three months ago," he said. "At the Council gathering. You came in with Ruth and your mother and you stood behind the chair, and I was across the hall, and I knew."

Three months. My mother had been alive three months ago. I had stood behind her chair in a borrowed dress with my hair pinned up and eaten lamb off a tin plate and complained afterward about the long ride home.

"You knew for three months and you did not say a word."

"What would I have said? Alpha of the Çöl to Luna of the Kızıltaş, a border and forty years of bad blood between us, and I come to your gate with a claim like that?" He turned back. "Your mother would have had me driven off the mesa. Ruth would have made sure of it. And you would have paid for it, whether you wanted to or not. So I said nothing, and I waited, and I told myself the bond would fade if it was never answered."

"It does not fade."

"No." He looked at the cup on the wall. "It does not."

The mark chose that moment to arrive.

It began at my wrist, a small heat, like a coal held to the skin. I looked down and saw the underside of my left arm where the sleeve had ridden up, and there was nothing there, and then there was a line, thin and pale as a scratch, curling from the base of my thumb toward the pulse. It did not hurt. It burned the way a mouthful of whiskey burns, warm and bright and almost welcome, and I heard myself make a sound I had never made before.

Hank reached out and caught my arm before I knew my legs had gone.

His hand closed around my wrist, right over the mark, and the whole canyon went white.

I do not have a better way to describe it. There was the heat of his palm and the smell of him at arm's length and then there was a surge that started where his skin met mine and ran up my arm and down my spine and into my teeth. I heard him take a sharp breath. My wolf, my stubborn half-wild wolf, rolled over and pressed herself against the inside of my skin like a dog against a door.

When I could see again, he was holding me up with one arm and staring at my wrist with a face gone very still.

"Three months," I said. My mouth was dry. "You waited three months."

"Three months is not so long." His thumb moved across the mark, once, and I felt it in my ribs. "Derya. Your hand is bleeding."

I looked down. My palm was a mess of juniper cuts and red dust, and there was blood on his cuff now, and the poison was still in my pocket, and the spring behind us was still running warm and steady into the dark.

"I came here to ruin you," I said.

"I know."

"I still have the wolfsbane."

"I know that too." He let go of my wrist and stepped back, one pace, then two, and the space between us felt like a canyon of its own. "So here is what I am going to do. I am going to walk to that spring house and bar the door and stand in front of it. You are going to take the poison out of your pocket and hand it to me. And then you are going to come inside and drink something hot, because you have been lying on a rock in the cold for three hours and you smell like a wet dog."

I almost laughed. I do not know why. It came up out of me like a cough. "You are giving me orders."

"I am offering you a drink." He picked up the cup and held it out. "The orders come later."

I should have refused. There was a canyon full of reasons to refuse, and every one of them had a name and a rank and a debt attached to it. I thought of Ruth at the pack table with her careful voice. I thought of my mother's grave, still raw and mounded with red earth. I thought of the mark on my wrist and how it had felt to have his thumb move across it.

I reached into my pocket and brought out the wax paper packet, and I put it in his hand.

"One condition," I said. "My people need water. Not a favor from the Çöl pack. A share, on paper, with terms I can take back to my warriors."

Hank looked at the packet in his palm for a long moment. "And if I say no?"

"Then I will drink your coffee and go home and come back with a knife instead of poison."

"That is a terrible plan."

"It is the only one I have."

He smiled, and it was a small, unwilling thing that he seemed to regret almost immediately. "Come inside, Luna. I will find paper."

I followed him through the door of the spring house, and the warm air of it closed around me, and behind my ribs my wolf began to settle for the first time in three weeks. I was not sure I liked that. I was not sure of anything, except that the scent in the canyon was not a trick of a tired nose, and the man in front of me had known it before I did.

He set the lantern on a shelf and turned, and his face was serious again. "There is one more thing. The wolves who saw you come over the rim tonight will talk. By noon tomorrow, both packs will know the Kızıltaş Luna crossed the border, and Ruth will want to know why."

"Let her want."

"She will not ask you." He glanced at my wrist, at the mark the lamplight had turned to a pale shine. "She will go to the Council."

The word sat in the warm little room like a stone dropped in a well. I opened my mouth to answer him, and out in the canyon a wolf began to howl, long and high and wrong, and another answered it, and another, and Hank's head came up as if someone had shouted his name. The howl broke off. Then a second started, closer, and beneath it I heard a sound I knew from the border raids of my childhood, the sound of many feet moving fast over dry ground.

Hank was already at the door. "That is not my pack," he said.