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Love-
Mom
Nice dreams. With a nice scent.
Except that the wolf-of-silver had killed her other child.
She had doodled a little frowny face next to her statement about the wolf being silver.
“She knew your name,” I said softly. Sterling’s name in the lupine tongue literally translated to silver.
Sterling looked the card over while I tried to process it. He folded it, and said soberly, “She saw the chess pieces too. So if her dreams had a good scent, the rook is the chess piece, not the swindler.”
My heart tried to break. The dreams have a nice scent. “We also aren’t the raven. So we don’t know what’s actually going on.”
And I only had eight months left.
My fingers twisted, my throat closed, and the plantains tasted like nothing. I set down the fork and took the journals to the couch. Sterling came and sat close, drawing me against his side. I breathed in his scent, tried not to drown in the grief.
He caressed my cheek. “You have not lost me yet, beautiful wolf, and I am much harder to kill than Alan appreciates. If silver couldn’t do it, what makes some worldly Alpha think he can?”
The laugh tore itself out of my throat. He kissed me gently and touched the journals. “I want to know what other nice things your mother had to say about me.”
“Arrogant.”
“She approved of me.”
Except she had not seen the wolf-of-silver kill her son. I swallowed hard and caressed his cheek. “I think she would have, but I don’t know why she would have left me these. Or why she left me a string of seashells. Hamid recognized them and said that variety are called limpets, and they’re known for not letting go of whatever they attach themselves to.”
“Your mom collected seashells?”
“No, even Spring had no idea. She said Mom had a limpet when they were growing up, but that was all. The string was thirteen matched limpets. I gave them to Spring to keep. And she left me these earrings.” I lifted the earrings that were attached to a piece of twine mixed in with the journals. “I loved these, but she never wore them even though I begged her to. She always wore lapis earrings.”
“And your mother never talked about seashells?”
“Montana is land-locked. Hamid said that they aren’t found in Alaskan waters or in freshwater. I guess she could have acquired it at a Meeting but… why? The parcel was even put under her wax seal as Luna so it wouldn’t be disturbed. Like a diplomatic envelope.” I frowned. “She needed me to have this, but… I don’t think it’s for warm fuzzies.”
“Your mother went through a great deal of trouble to make sure you, and only you, got these items.”
Mom had left all of this to me for a reason, and that reason hadn’t been a dramatic (and expensive) scavenger hunt so I could casually peruse the most private corners of her mind and dreams. “Spring thought I’d come to FrostFur to ask about BlizzardFall.”
“BlizzardFall? Who are they?”
“Well, more like, who were they. The BlizzardFall was a large pack up in Alaska years ago. BlizzardFall, SilverPaw, and FrostFur formed a triangle of claimed territory in the Alaska interior. A large river provided a natural boundary, and all the packs agreed that the river could be neutral territory. It became an ice road in the winter, and a major waterway in the summer, so humans were around often enough it wasn’t worth fighting over. BlizzardFall decided at some point they wanted the river and tried to take it. SilverPaw and FrostFur allied to keep the status quo. It exploded into full scale war. BlizzardFall was declared a dead pack.”
“And that’s established history?” Sterling asked.
These days, who was to say. “It’s the only version I’ve ever heard. Dad could have scrubbed it clean, but why bother? It was territory, and might makes right. BlizzardFall was dead before I’d even been conceived. Jerron would have been… two. Maybe three.”
“Peculiar. So did it have anything to do with your father moving SilverPaw’s heart to Montana?”
“I have no idea at this point, but that was almost ten years later, so I can’t see how they’re related. The reason I heard we moved was because flying the mail in had gotten to be too expensive and difficult and slow, but I think a lot of the work as guides and outfitters had dried up, not so much pipeline work, and the hunting was just lean.”
“Still,” Sterling said, eyes narrowing, “the BlizzardFall would have also been around the time of my registration.”
“Give or take a year.” I didn’t know the exact dates of the war. It was too contemporary, so I hadn’t been allowed in those Collections, and I hadn’t bothered reading the contemporary Volumes, because those were boring as hell. I just knew it had happened, and the thing with werewolf wars was that nobody declared war. It was this slow realization that a conflict had escalated to war, and then a slow realization that the other side was mostly dead. So dates were always a bit murky.
Still, Sterling’s point was good: Dad had been really busy twenty years ago.
