Chapter 25: Summer Roots

By the time Lena was three months old, she had opinions about everything.

She had opinions about the timing of meals, which she communicated with impressive volume. She had opinions about who was allowed to hold her and for how long, adjudicated through her evaluative process with the consistency of a judge applying established precedent. She had opinions about the communal kitchen — favorable — and about the eastern patrol schedule briefings — also favorable, because they involved Fen and she had decided, apparently, that Fen was one of her preferred people.

She had opinions about the carved wooden wolf, which had been moved to a position she could see from her crib and which she regarded with the focused attention of someone identifying something important.

Grace watched her daughter's personality emerge with the specific, ongoing wonder of someone who had been promised a person and was watching that person arrive.

Summer established itself over Silverbrook's territory with the warm authority of a season that knew what it was doing. The old-growth forest was dense and green and fragrant, the river running lower and warmer over its stones, the pack's rhythms shifting into the longer-dayed pace of the warm months. Grace had always loved summer in wolf territory — the way the pack expanded outward, spending more time in the forest, more time shifted, the human and the wolf existing in easier balance when the weather was kind.

She shifted for the first time since before Lena's birth on a warm June morning, leaving Lena in Dara's reliable care and taking to the forest alone for two hours. The shift came back to her the way breathing did after a long time holding your breath — with enormous, gasping relief, the wolf emerging fully and running through the summer forest with the uncomplicated joy of a creature doing exactly what it was made for.

She came back to the compound and her daughter and her human life with the specific equilibrium of someone who was now complete in a way she had not been for months.

Fen shifted with her the following week — not planned, but both of them had been heading for the forest at the same time and the suggestion had been natural, the easy synchronicity of people whose rhythms had aligned without either of them arranging it. Running with another wolf was intimate in ways that exceeded most human equivalents, the specific physical grammar of two animals who trusted each other expressed through speed and direction and the particular closeness of two wolves moving through the same forest.

They came back to human form in the clearing by the river, and Grace sat on the flat rock and put her feet in the water and felt extraordinarily, simply happy.

'I missed that,' she said. She meant shifting. She also meant this.

Fen sat beside her. 'It shows,' he said. 'Your wolf is lighter.'

She looked at the water. 'I've been thinking about the future,' she said. 'Not in the anxious way. In the — planning way. What I want to build here.'

'Tell me.'

She told him. A permanent territorial defense institute — not just for Silverbrook but as a resource for regional packs, the accumulated knowledge of the past year organized into training and methodology that could make every pack in the region more secure. A position that matched what she had done informally since arriving. A home that was chosen fully rather than arrived at by necessity.

He listened with the full attention he always gave her, asking precise questions in the places where they added to the picture.

'Nolan will say yes,' Fen said, when she finished. 'You know he will.'

'I think so too,' she said. 'I wanted to think through it first. Make sure it was what I wanted.'

'And is it?'

'Yes,' she said. Simply. Without qualification.

She looked at him in the summer light, at this man who had shown up quietly and stayed, who had held her daughter and made a wolf for her out of wood and told her difficult truths because they were true.

She leaned her shoulder against his. He leaned back. The river ran past them in its indifferent, continuous way.

'Fen,' she said.

'Mm.'

'I'm glad you were at that training yard on my first week. That you nodded at me.'

He was quiet for a moment. 'I remember that morning,' he said. 'I thought — this one's going to be something.'

'And?'

'I was right,' he said.

She laughed. The summer forest held them, and Lena was in the compound being adored by everyone in her orbit, and the border was secure, and Grace sat beside someone she was choosing as deliberately and completely as she had chosen anything.

It was a very good day.

It was one of many.