Wren
Three trucks come up the ridge road. Ashfall said one.
I count them twice from the porch step. My coffee goes cold in my hands. Three.
Tam is already standing. She was standing before the second one cleared the bend, up on the balls of her feet, silver stacked to the knuckle on both hands.
"Three," she says. "He sent three trucks. For a conversation."
"I can count."
"I'm saying it out loud so we both heard me say it first."
The valley on the north edge of our land has water on it all year. Ashfall's doesn't. There's a vote coming that decides who keeps it. Merrick has spent a year buying the votes he can't win honestly.
He can't take it with teeth. Pack law doesn't allow that. He loves the law when the law is useful to him.
So he takes it with paper. Paper is what he sends people for.
I don't stand up. Standing up says you're not sure the ground is yours.
The trucks pull into the yard and park badly, nose in, too close to the shop doors. Four men get out of the first two. They don't come any farther. They're dressed for a job they've been told they won't have to do.
Della comes out of the shop with a coolant hose over her shoulder. She looks at the trucks. Looks at me.
"They're blocking the bay," she says, and goes back in.
Then the third door opens. A woman steps down into the gravel.
She looks around the yard, unhurried. Gold at her ears and stacked up both hands, catching the last of the light. Band shirt gone soft at the collar. She takes in the shop, the fence line, the generator housing, the woodpile. She's smiling before she's found me.
It hits me under the ribs and goes up.
My mouth goes dry. My heart comes up into my throat. Nothing has scared me. My hands are still on a cup I have to think about holding.
I know what this is. Every wolf does. They tell you before you're old enough to want anything.
I don't say a word.
She crosses the yard. Tam steps into her line without being asked. She goes around Tam without looking at her. Comes up to the porch. She doesn't wait at the bottom of the steps.
She sits down on the step beside me. Uninvited. Close enough that I can smell the road on her, six hours of it, warm vinyl and dust and something underneath that my body reacts to before I decide anything about it.
"Sable Reyes," she says. "I negotiate for Ashfall."
"I know who you are."
"You know what I am. Those are different." She stretches her legs out down the steps. Crosses them at the ankle. "Nice place. Honestly. I expected worse. Merrick talks about you people like you're living in a hole up here."
"And?"
"And you've got a better shop than he does, which I'm going to enjoy not telling him."
I look at her. She looks straight back, nothing held, no edge on it at all. That's the problem. I can handle a man who comes up my road square shouldered with his jaw set. I've been handling that for years. I don't have anything ready for somebody who sits down next to me and is glad to be here.
"You're not staying," I say.
"I've got three days of talking to do. You've got the only road in."
"I have a road out, too."
"You do." She nods. Agreeable. "Can I say the boring part, or do you want to keep doing this bit? Because I'll keep doing it. I've got nowhere to be."
Tam makes a sound behind me.
"Say it," I tell her.
"He'll offer you the water rights and not the ground. Two years, renewable. He'll put it in writing. He's authorized to go higher than he's told me to go." She says it like she's reading me a delivery schedule. "You're going to say no. I know you're going to say no. He knows. He sent me anyway because a refusal stated plainly before the vote makes you look unreasonable to eleven people who've never met you."
"Then you already have what you came for."
"I've got what he came for. I haven't got what I came for."
Her voice is dry from the road. I can hear it under the words.
I hand her my water bottle off the step.
I do it before I decide to. It's out of my hand into hers. She looks at it. Then at me. For the first time since she got out of that truck, she's not sure what her face is doing.
She drinks. She puts it down between us on the step, careful, like it's mine and she's giving it back.
"Thank you," she says, quieter.
"Don't make it a thing."
"I'm not making it a thing. You made it a thing. I'm just holding it."
The light is going. Down at the gate one of Merrick's men says something to another one. They both laugh. The sound comes up the yard too loud, the way it does when men are bored and want you to know they're not scared.
Sable doesn't look at them.
"You know the season law," she says.
"Everybody knows the season law."
"Say it to me anyway."
"Why."
"Because I want to hear which part you say first."
I set my cup down. "Nobody moves once it opens. The ground seals. Whoever's standing on it when it seals is counted to it until it closes."
"Counted to it," she repeats. "That's the part you said first. Merrick says it as nobody moves." She tips her head. "You people are very interesting up here."
"It opens in three days."
"I know when it opens."
"Then you have three days to have your conversation and get off my ground."
She picks the water bottle back up. Turns it once. Sets it down in exactly the same place. I watch her do it. I have no idea why.
"Here's the thing I actually came to say," Sable says. "The one that isn't his."
"Say it."
"I'm not going to have the conversation in three days." She stands up off the step, unhurried, gold sliding down her wrist. She brushes the gravel dust off the back of her jeans. "I'm going to have it after."
It takes me a second.
"You can't be here after."
"I can't be moved after. That's a different sentence." She's already walking down the steps. Halfway across the yard she turns. Walks backwards a few paces so she can look at me while she says it. She's smiling again. It isn't cruel, which is worse. "This is your ground, Alpha. I heard you."
"Reyes."
"In three days, it's going to be mine too."
I stay exactly where I am until the trucks have turned around and gone back down my road. That's what you do. It takes me until the taillights are off the ridge to understand she wasn't threatening me.
She was telling me what she'd already decided to survive.
