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I keep my head high as I stepped into the ring beside Francesco.
I will show it to them.
“Our lives are braided,” I said to the Keeper. “Bind one, bind both.”
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The Keeper studied my face–the too–young Luna with the too–old eyes.
She lifted her staff. “By river and moon.”
A shallow bowl was ced between us, filled from the three converging streams.
Wolfsbane petals floated like dark stars.
The Keeper scored her palm and let three drops fall, one for each river. “Speak.”
Francesco’s voice didn’t change. “Henri’s council was corruption. We burned it so no one could sit there again and pretend it was a throne.”
No sting.
No choke.
The watery t and simple.
“My turn,” Dorian said. “Speak this: you will not im a second French territory within a year.”
Francesco didn’t look away from me when he answered. “I will not im any territory I do not have to save.”
The room went very quiet.
The bowl did not stir.
Somewhere in the back, someone’s chair groaned like ament.
Dorian’s eyes hardened. “What of Henri’s people?”
I spoke. “They chose. They chose breath over memory, safety over ceremony, the
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future over a portrait of the past. We will carry them until they can carry themselves. Then we will set them down gently, not drop them when they are useful no more.”
The water shivered–not in warning, but like a cat arching into a good hand.
The Keeper nodded once, satisfied.
She turned to the marsh alpha. “Renaud?”
The reed–braided woman’s mouth crooked. “I want something better than a promise.” She tapped a finger against her lips, thinking. “A charter.”
Alfonso straightened, instinctively touching the folio. “Drafted,” he said. “A Protectorate Charter–limited term, shared patrols, transparency of ledgers, external audit by neutral elders, automatic review at three moons and six. Sunset use unless the protected pack petitions to remain.”
Dorianughed, but it was too quick. “Paper.”
“Paper,” Alfonso agreed. “And signatures that bind teeth.”
Renaud’s eyes glinted. “I’ll sign if the river bears witness.”
The Keeper looked pleased in the way only very old arbiters do when children remember their lessons. “So it is.”
We broke then–not to adjourn, but to let the room breathe around the new direction the air had taken.
Audiences of wolves decide with their bodies before they decide with their mouths; I could feel the tension ease across shoulders, the angle of spines soften, the curiosity creep in where suspicion had hoped to set up shop.
Monica slipped a sk into my hand. “Drink.”
“What is it?”
“Something you can’t argue with.”
It tasted like stubborn herbs and care.
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I drank it all. Audrey watched the corners of the room with that predator patience she wears like a second skin.
“Dorian isn’t done,” she murmured.
“He shouldn’t be,” Marlow said from my other side. “Losing gracefully is a muscle he’s never bothered to learn.”
Luc approached then, his shoulders squared, palms empty.
He asked the Keeper’s leave with a nce.
She gave the smallest nod.
“I was Alpha Henri’s Beta,” Luc said to the room. “I didn’t do enough. I thought I could fix rot from inside the tree. I couldn’t. When the King cut the parasite’s head, it was only because I was toote to do it myself.” He lifted a leather ledger. “Names of those lost. ounts of where the food went instead of to our children. Schedules of the women who were taken to theke under pretense of ‘counsel‘. I will put this on the table for any elder to read.”
He ced it on a low stone b like an offering.
The room edged closer―not all at once, not eager, but the way wolves approach a new scent they think might be dangerous and necessary at the same time.
Renaud stepped to the b first.
She flipped a page.
Then another.
She did not look up when she spoke. “This will do.”
Dorian’s lip curled. “Confessions and cooked books.”
“Your problem,” Marlow said pleasantly from ten feet away, “is that you think everyone’s as bad at lying as you.”
Dorian’s head snapped; his wolf red up in his eyes like a match dragged too hard.
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He stepped toward the circle. “Trial by dominance, then. If your King wants to keep what he stole, let him take it with his ws where everyone can see.”
A murmur–hungry, eager–skittered over the floorboards.
Wolves love a fight the way thunder loves open sky.
Francesco didn’t move.
His aura rolled–calm, vast, inexorable. “I don’t make orphans to prove what my word already proves.”
“You refuse?” Dorian crowed.
“I choose a different trial.” Francesco lifted his chin toward the Keeper. “Trial by keeping.”
A hiss ran through the older wolves; the younger ones blinked.
The Trial of Keeping was old–older than Valmont, older than the three rivers, called only when and itself must decide.
It wasn’t a duel.
It was penance.
And work.
The Keeper’s eyes warmed a fraction. “Exin it for those who like their stories
short.”
Francesco’s voice was simple. “For three moons, we keep what we did not choose: the widowed, the fatherless, the elders, the fields. We mend what is broken and bury what will not mend. At the end, we open our gates. Those who wish to sign their names to our banner will do so. Those who don’t will go–fed, clothed, escorted, with their names returned to them instead of erased.” He tilted his head toward Dorian. “You maye count.”
Laughter this time–real, not sharp.
A few elders pped the table with the open–palmed approval of people who like
a solution that wears boots.
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Dorian looked as if he’d bitten pith. “And if at the end they stay only because they
fear you?”
I stepped forward. “Fear doesn’t build schools,” I said. “It doesn’t fill kitchens, or teach names back to children who stopped answering to them because no one spoke them with kindness. Come in three moons and ask the children if they are afraid. If they say yes, I will walk you to the gate myself.”
Silence.
Not hostile.
Considering.
Renaud shrugged one shoulder, reeds whispering. “The marsh epts the Charter. For three moons, then six. After that, we let thend speak.”
Others nodded–the river brothers together, an elder from the mountain pass, a woman whose crest was a white hound and whose gaze measured like a tailor’s hands.
Dorian did not.
He looked at me, then at Francesco, then at the Keeper. “The Valois reserve judgment.”
“The Valois may reserve what they please,” the Keeper said, staffing down with satisfaction. “The Charter will be sealed in the river. The Conve stands.”
We signed by water.
The Charter parchmenty atop a t te at the bank where the three rivers met.
The Keeper pricked each signatory’s finger; a single drop fell and sizzled faintly as it touched the wet stone.
Names in ink meant something to the young.
Names in blood meant something even to the wind.
the
Francesco signed first, then Alfonso, then Renaud. When it was my turn, Keeper looked at me for a heartbeat as if to ask whether I knew what I was doing.
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“I do,” I said.
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“Luna,” she said, and the word felt like a mantle and a soft scarf both.
Monica squeezed my hand after and pressed a square of linen to my finger. “Hold,” she said. “You always bleed more than you need to.”
“I have people to tell me that now,” I said, and she smiled the way women smile when they pretend they have not been crying on other nights.
Dorian did note to the river. He watched from the shadow of a por, calcting angles as if the tree might tell him a geometry that could undo the arithmetic of what we’d just made.
On the road out of Valmont, the air felt thinner, the light cleaner.
Our horses picked up their pace like they, too, preferred work to the politics that
talk themselves in circles.
“Three moons,” Alfonso said, already organizing his thoughts into lists. “We’ll need grain, carpenters, midwives. A magistrate from the neutral circuit. Scribes.”
“And bells,” Audrey said.
“Bells?” he asked.
“For Eine’s boots,” Monica said, straight–faced. “In case she gets ideas.”
Damn them!
Marlowughed, a short, honest bark. “We’ll put it in the annex. Line item.”
Francesco reached across and brushed his gloved fingers over my wrist, a touch so light it might have been only air.
Proud, the bond hummed–no word, just the weight of it.
I let the warmth settle in my ribs.
We camped that night where two hills shouldered each other and looked down on a line of willows threading a stream.
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The warriors posted sentries out of habit. The rest of us ate bread and cheese like a feast. Stars stitched themselves into cold cloth overhead.
When sleep came, it came fast. I woke once near midnight to the sound of the stream telling the dark the same story it has told since before any wolf had a name. Across the coals, Dorian’s envoy–who had kept his distance all day–rolled over in his nket and drew it higher, as if the night had teeth.
At dawn, a raven settled on Alfonso’s saddle and left a single ck ribbon on the horn–a courtly little bit of theater packs sometimes use to say we are watching. Alfonso tucked it into his ledger with a sigh that said he would prefer ravens to send rice instead.
When we rode through the rebuilt border markers at home, the air tasted different–like smoke that wasn’t a warning, like bread rising, like clean sweat that belongs to work worth doing.
Children chased our horses along the fence line and then peeled away,ughing, because someone had told themughing was allowed again and they were eager to practice.
The first thing we did was take the Charter to the kitchen.
“Here?” Alfonso asked, baffled. “Not the study?”
“The kitchen,” I said. “Where the truth lives.”
Bethany cleared a space on the thick scarred table. Monica set a bowl of rosemary water beside it. Audrey leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, a sentry who could finally set her weight somewhere soft.
Francescoid the parchment t.
We all pressed our palms to it, not in ceremony–not only–but because paper behaves better when the warmth of hands teaches it not to curl. The Keeper’s river stamp had dried a deep gray–blue, like a bruise healing.
“Three moons,” Francesco said.
I looked past him to the courtyard where frames for new houses stood like bones waiting for muscles, where the old council ash had already been forked into the
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Luc was there, sleeves rolled,ughing with a boy who held a hammer in two hands like a treasure. Renaud’s scouts had arrived at dawn; their reed–braided captain swapped stories with our guards and pretended not to be impressed by Monica’s ability to terrify warriors into hydration.
“Three moons,” I echoed. “And then we open the gates.”
“And then?” Audrey asked.
“Then thend answers,” I said. “And the children answer. And if anyone still prefers the story that makes them feel brave in taverns, they can keep it. We will have something that can be touched.”
Francesco’s mouth curved, that small, private smile that always undoes me more than crowns or vows. “And if monsterse?”
I turned my hand so our fingersced, palm to palm. “Then we keep.”
He nodded once, as if we had just settled a matter of inventory: grain, hammers, hope.
The wolves outside shouted something to each other and thenughed. A hammer struck true. A baby wailed and then quieted. Somewhere, the willow by theke shook one green hand as if remembering a dance and deciding to choose a gentler one.
Rumors still ran.
They always would.
But the truth had learned how to stand, and it stood here, in kitchens and courtyards, in ledgers and oaths, in hands that bled a little and kept working
anyway.
Three moons.
Then we would see what stayed.
Then we would see what left.
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And in the seeing, the world would learn whether the story of a king hungry fornd could survive the sound of a childughing on a morning that smelled like
bread.