“This has been the subject of discussion while I’ve been gone?” Seth looked up at his assembled pack, saw most of them nodding. “I’m glad. I’ve been trying to come up with a solution on my own, but a wolf alone is a wolf in trouble.” He smiled a little, seeing more than a few of the wolves present mouthing the words along with him. “Did you reach a consensus?”
“The patrols,” Grecia said immediately. “We put a stop to them—at least those that patrol the farthest ring.”
Seth frowned. The opinion clearly wasn’t universally popular—he could hear some uneasy murmuring from the crowd, saw a stricken look on his father’s face that needed no explanation. The patrols were an ancient tradition, handed down since a time before even the pack’s ancestral memory could reach. The network of trails that crisscrossed the entire valley was practical, but they were also of great spiritual significance to the pack. It was held important that each path was walked at least once a day by at least three wolves. What would happen if this duty was neglected had never been clear, not in any of the old stories, at any rate… it simply wasn’t a responsibility anyone had ever considered shirking.
Until now, that was. Grecia’s jaw tightened, and she turned to address the pack more directly, her voice trembling with the effort. “The halt need only be temporary—until we find out the cause of these disappearances, and put a stop to it.”
“The traditions keep us safe,” another wolf rejoined, his silver eyes flashing in the darkness.
“Do they?” Grecia snapped. “Tell that to my son. Tell that to the dozens of grieving parents, soulmates, siblings…”
“Enough,” Seth said sharply. The pack fell silent at once. He’d learned that tone from his father—just sharp enough to catch their attention, not so strident that they felt they were going unheard. “This decision affects all of us. I cannot make it alone. A vote, three days from now. Spend that time in reflection and conversation. I’ll be making myself available for discussion of any subject—the patrols, the disappearances, what I’ve learned of the dragons. As for the patrols of the outer paths… until the vote, I’ll take those on myself, and I won’t ask anyone to join me who doesn’t volunteer.”
He fielded a few more questions before calling the meeting to a close. He was swaying on his feet, aware that the exhaustion was creeping in… and he had a feeling the pack needed some time to process what they’d learned tonight. He only hoped it had been the right call, leaving the patrols to a vote. His father looked worried as he moved up beside him.
“Should I have made the decision about the patrols myself?” he asked in an undertone. “Did it show weakness, passing it off to the pack to decide?”
His father considered this for a long moment. Seth knew better than to hurry the old man when he was thinking. “Suspending an ancient tradition is a major decision, even for an Alpha of many years.”
“Yes. And I showed uncertainty.”
“Uncertainty isn’t weakness,” his father said firmly. “It shows you understand the weight of the decision. Small decisions, those are for the Alpha to handle alone. Big ones like this… you made the right call, putting it to vote.” His father sighed. “I only hope that the decision the pack makes is the right one.”
The days passed slowly. It took Seth longer than he’d expected to readjust to life above ground—compared to the ever-present imperceptible glow of the stone, the sun felt inconsistent and jarring, at times too bright, at times too dim. And as grateful as he was to have his pack around him again, he found his sudden lack of privacy a little jarring. Dragons, it seemed, valued their time alone—that was why their homes were so enormous, to afford everyone a great deal of personal space. Wolves, by contrast, didn’t mind living in each other’s laps. It was all he could do to move through the winding paths of the village without ending up in half a dozen conversations.
He told himself it was stress and exhaustion. He told himself it was concern over his missing pack members, the nameless, unidentified threat that was stalking them. He told himself it was the weight of the upcoming vote on whether to suspend the ancient patrols… but if he was honest with himself, at the heart of it all, he missed Lana. He missed her smile, missed the flash of her blue eyes, missed the way it felt when she threw herself into his arms at the end of a long day. He missed waking up with her in his arms, missed falling asleep happily exhausted with the scent of her in his lungs. He missed her strange accent, the bizarre questions she’d ask him, the way she didn’t quite seem to belong to this world in quite the same way as anyone else.
And though he knew it was impossible, he was beginning to wonder if he might just have met his soulmate after all. That’d be right, he thought sorely. He’d spent years coming to terms with the fact that he was just one of those unlucky wolves who didn’t have a soulmate… only to find one who he could never be with. He tried to put her out of his mind, to immerse himself in pack life instead… which was reasonably effective, most of the time. But it didn’t help late at night, when he was curled up alone with nothing to distract his racing mind from the memories of her. And it certainly didn’t help when he dreamed of her almost every night, always waking with an ache in his chest that made him feel like he was dying. But it was just something he was going to have to learn to live with.
What alternative did he have?
Chapter 15 - Lana
If anyone noticed that Lana went missing from her own coronation for a few hours, they certainly didn’t mention it. When she slipped back among the revelers a few hours later, they greeted her as though she’d never left. But something important had shifted in her, watching the sunset from the plateau down there. As much as she’d hated it, she had to face facts. Seth was gone, and based on what she’d learned about him and his pack over the last few weeks, she was unlikely to ever see him again.
It broke her heart, a little. Probably a little more than she was willing to admit. But what was she going to do, dwell on it? Absolutely not. Onto the next adventure, hadn’t that always been her motto? And so, with the wolves gone from the palace and her shiny new crown resting comfortably at her temples, Lana threw herself fully into her new role as Queen.
Conrad, since the coronation, had changed his silver crown for an even humbler bronze one to reflect his status as a royal advisor. He’d apologized sincerely for the miscommunication regarding the wolves, but after a long discussion on her first day as Queen, she was frustrated to acknowledge that he hadn’t actually been wrong in his assessment. Now that she’d been crowned, some slightly more honest feedback was beginning to come through to her about the decisions she’d made as Queen so far… and she was taken aback by just how vitriolic and distrustful her people were when it came to wolves. Conrad had been right. If Seth and his patrol had come to the coronation, there would have been an all-out fight. She couldn’t have put them through that.
She only wished the decision hadn’t been made without her knowledge. As the days went by, she became more and more certain that Seth was gone for good. Part of her had hoped to hear from him somehow—a letter, perhaps, a note, even a cryptic symbol carved into a piece of furniture would have been something… but there was nothing at all. He was gone without so much as a goodbye. The silence hurt, but she supposed it was only fair, given that they hadn’t said a word to him about the coronation.
“No news is good news,” Conrad told her a few weeks after the coronation, when she was complaining about the lack of communication from the wolves. “At least when it comes to relations between wolves and dragons. The fact that they’re ignoring us completely is a good sign, actually.”
“It doesn’t feel like a good sign,” she said, trying not to sound as petulant as she felt. She was the Queen, after all. It wouldn’t behoove her to throw a tantrum in front of a subject.
But she missed Seth sorely, that was the problem. She’d been hoping that being Queen would be the kind of job that would take her mind off things. Now and again on her travels, she’d picked up the occasional part-time job in a restaurant or a bar, usually as a way of meeting people, and she’d been astonished by how completely the work would occupy her mind. Sometimes she’d forget to eat or drink for hours at a stretch, especially when it was busy. She’d been hoping that might be true of this work. But unfortunately, it seemed that most of the real work was done by people much further down the command chain than she was. Much of her day-to-day schedule, in fact, was completely clear. She’d hang about in the offices with her crown on, but there was rarely anything to do besides distracting Conrad from his own interminable tasks. And that left a lot of time free to think about Seth.
The mornings were a little exciting, at least at first. Every morning, she would sit in her throne and hold court. This largely took the form of overseeing a series of ritualized announcements, speaking a few ceremonial words in an even more ancient form of Draconic than the one she was used to, and then opening the floor to audiences with anyone who’d made an appointment. But more and more, as the routines of the court became predictable, she found her mind straying back to Seth. What was he doing, she wondered? Was he back home with his pack already? Had he told them about her? Were they all terribly insulted not to have been invited to the coronation?
“I want to send them a royal letter,” she told Conrad one afternoon. She was lying on her back on one of the desks, tossing a scrunched-up ball of paper up and down—she’d rapidly given up on conducting herself like a monarch, at least when she and Conrad were alone. He knew her well enough to know when she was faking her queenliness, so why bother?
“A royal letter?”
“Apologizing for not inviting them to the coronation. Inviting them back for… diplomacy.”
Conrad sighed, setting down his quill and rubbing his forehead gently, the way he did when she suggested things that were going to generate paperwork. “And how would we deliver this letter?”
“We’ve got wings, Conrad. All of us. I’ll take it myself, if I have to.” She gritted her teeth, frustration seething through her. “But they’ll probably refuse, won’t they?”