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“You had your own.”

“I made yours.”

“A very ugly use of authority.”

She closes her eyes while she eats, and I stay until Birdie’s fist loosens in her hair.

Axan still has Colm. The patrol hasn’t returned, and the others haven’t gathered.

I have time to reach the trail, check its direction, and leave Axan a mark. A stripped branch where it turns would show up clearly against the bracken. Then I’d be back before he even gathers his group, with an answer Keer hasn’t given me.

I don’t need to follow anyone to do that.

I lift Birdie’s foot from my leg and set it against Mel’s skirt.

“I’ll take those.”

Mel opens her eyes. “You’re carrying plates.”

“Someone has to.”

“Someone always does. It’s never you.” She looks at me over Birdie’s head for too long. “What are you up to?”

“Dishes.”

“Mm.” She passes me the plates anyway, shifting her sleeping daughter higher. “Come tell me after, then.”

“I will.”

Keer glances up when I carry them past.

I steal a crumb off Eskan’s chest. “Saving that for later?”

My nephew sleeps through the theft. I kiss the top of his head and carry on.

I leave the plates by the washing tub, nod to a packmate hauling water, and take the path past my dwelling. Nothing hurried enough for Keer to look up twice.

As I walk, I damp down what I’m sending through the bond. I’ve been practicing on my brother for years. If he checks on me now, all he’ll get is full of cake and bored.

I listen to the talk behind me while I pull off my boots.

My clothes go on their usual peg inside the doorway, my belt with them, and I step bare into the trees.

The shift bends me low, pain running through my legs as the bones change, and I breathe through it until my hands are paws in the cool earth. Then I shake out my charcoal fur and stretch forward. That’s more like it.

Cooking smoke thins as I move away from the dwellings. A mouse stirs beneath a tangle of dead leaves to my left, and farther off a branch creaks under a bird settling for the night.

I know where my brother is. I know where the wind’s coming from. The slope ahead gives me firm ground and enough cover to reach the split birch unseen.

I’ll mark the turn, and I’ll come home.

I pick up speed beneath the low branches, and when the first trace of bear blood reaches me I angle toward it, leaving the familiar path.

At the split birch, I drop into the trail’s line at a run.

Chapter 2

I need both hands to lift the cache stone tonight.