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“The moonbright drove us at them. Once it was in a wound, we stopped knowing what we were doing. They could run us straight into a trap, and on that moon we didn’t have the strength to break out.”

One claw’s digging into the cloth over my knee, and I lift it before it goes through.

“The wolves had their strength. You know what that moon does to your people. They were stuck on four legs, but they had their teeth. They could have fought. They knew we needed them.”

I wait for her to argue. The pool trickles behind the bend, and she doesn’t say a word for them. She won’t.

“My father told me to run.”

I can hear him say it over my own breathing.

“Run. That was the last thing he said to me.”

I was good at doing what he told me.

Kestria sits down on the other hearthstone, careful of her shoulder, and leans toward me.

“So I ran, with Jouni behind me. One of the hunters put a spear across my ribs on the way through.”

I put my hand to my ribs. The scar’s easy to find, a bare line through the pale fur.

“Jouni kept up. We were eleven, both of us. He was a brother to me.”

His hand was around my ankle in the mud, with that bear standing over us. I pulled him up afterward.

My ears turn back toward the empty passage.

“He stopped in a narrow place behind me and roared at them, so they’d come after him instead. He was as weak as I was.”

I breathe in and can’t get the next part out. She waits while I look down at my hands. The blood on my wrist flakes when I rub it, and I stop with a piece caught under my thumb.

“I didn’t turn around. I listened for him the whole way, but he never caught up. They were all back there.”

I wanted to turn around. I can hear her breathing now that I’ve stopped talking. She lets me sit there, and I rub the dried blood off my thumb.

“I’ve been here two hundred years. Their things are still here. I mend the cloth when it starts to go. Keep it dry. I know their names. All of them. I keep those too.”

I look toward the inner passage, then back at her, and I’m out of things to say.

She pushes herself up off the stone one-handed, and I lift my head when she comes around the hearth.

She gets down on her knees between mine and lifts her good hand. Her palm’s warm on my cheek, and her fingers push into the fur along my jaw. I can feel the rough spots the bowstring left on them, and I don’t want her to take her hand away.

“I’m sorry.”

Nobody’s ever said that to me about them.

I shut my eyes and lean my head into her hand, and she lets me.

There were children on a cloth at the edge of that field. The woman with the white hair had her hand down to catch one of them.

I can’t do it.

“I won’t burn it.”

Her thumb stops against my jaw.

“The field. Mel can keep it.”