For half a second Mara forgot how to move.
Corin's voice came up out of the dark below the ravine, ragged and near, and it hit her in the chest harder than the gunshot had. It was him. It was definitely him. She knew the rough edge in his voice from a hundred kitchen arguments, from summer nights behind the sheds, from the year after their father died when every sentence out of him sounded one inch from breaking something.
"Corin!" she shouted back.
Lucan's hand shot out across her ribs before she could go farther down. Not gentle. Not cruel. Just fast and absolute. He caught more of her than he probably meant to coat, side, the lower edge of her breast for a brief stupid second before his grip corrected lower. Heat flashed through her so sharply she almost gasped from anger alone.
"Don't," he said.
She shoved at his wrist. "Take your hand off me."
Below them brush cracked. A stone skidded. Corin swore.
Rhett, still up on the bank with the paper bundle under his arm, called down, "Corin, answer proper. Are you hurt?"
"Not yet," Corin snapped. "Get her away from him."
Mara froze again, but this time from fury. "I'm not a sack of grain anybody's carrying off."
Lucan took his hand back at once, like the touch had burned him too. Maybe it had. Maybe not in the same way. His voice stayed low and flat. "Corin, come up slow."
"No."
The word came quick and hard and familiar. Corin had been saying no to walls since he was old enough to kick one.
Mara tried to see him in the dark. Lantern light didn't reach far enough below, only caught at wet branches and the shine on torn mud. She could smell him now, though. Sweat, wet flannel, a thin bright thread of blood, and under it all the shared pack scent that meant home no matter how badly a person behaved.
Then he emerged partway from behind a thorn thicket, one hand braced on a slick rock. Gray-and-red over shirt ripped at the shoulder exactly where the snagged strip had come from. Mud to the knees. Blood running down the side of his neck from a cut near the hairline. Not deep, but ugly in the lantern light.
Mara's breath went out of her. "You're bleeding."
Corin made a face. "That observation help?"
"Don't start."
"You started three hours ago, probably."
That was Corin. Injured, cornered, still unbearable.
He climbed two more steps and stopped when he saw the bundle tucked under Rhett's elbow. His expression changed all at once. Mara felt it happen before she understood it. Not fear exactly. Worse. Recognition.
"Give me that," Corin said.
Lucan followed his stare. "So you know what it is."
Corin's jaw hardened. "I know what it isn't. It isn't council business."
"You shouted not to let me read it."
"Yeah, no one misses much around here tonight."
Mara said, "Corin."
He didn't look at her. That was the problem. He kept looking at the papers like they were a lit fuse and all of them too close.
Up by the trail, somewhere beyond the marker stone, another voice called out. Pavin, maybe, or Teren. Hard to tell through the trees. Then boots moving, more than one set. The lodge was spilling itself toward the woods. Of course it was. Gunshot in the yard, delayed rite, council breathing down their necks, and now half the pack was probably coming to crowd the ravine with opinions.
Mara wanted one simple thing so badly it made her dizzy: she wanted the papers in her own hands before ten more people turned them into law, gossip, proof, betrayal, whatever fit their needs first.
She said, "Rhett. Toss it to me."
Lucan said, "No."
Corin said, at the same time, "Don't."
Rhett looked miserable. "I really miss ordinary fence duty."
Corin climbed another step. His left leg hitched oddly when he put weight on it. Mara saw it and hated that she saw it, hated that the part of her built to catalog practical damage worked even while her mind was running in circles.
"You're limping," she said.
"I slipped."
"You never slip."
He shrugged one shoulder, then winced because the torn one didn't like that. "Good thing I'm broadening my range."
Lucan spoke over both of them. "Who fired the shot?"
Corin finally looked at him. In the lantern light his face looked older than it had yesterday. Not wiser. Just more used up. "Brannik."
Mara blinked. "At who?"
"At a shape in the yard. He missed on purpose if he shot at all."
"That sounds like him," Rhett muttered.
Lucan's mouth flattened. "And the howl?"
Corin spat into the mud. "Boy from Red Mill ridge. Or someone built like him. Couldn't get close enough."
Red Mill. Mara felt that name settle badly. Not quite a rival pack, not quite not. The sort of neighboring line that traded salt in autumn and teeth in spring if given a reason.
More voices now, louder, coming downtrail. Teren first, by the sound of it, because only Teren managed to sound anxious and annoyed in the same breath. Mara looked back and saw lantern movement through the branches.
"No," she said, and then again because the first one didn't feel like enough. "No. We are not doing this with a crowd."
Too late.
Teren came into view, breathing hard, with Pavin behind him and Aunt Silla behind both of them because apparently old age and common sense had finally parted ways. Pavin's sleeve was torn open from wrist to elbow and he had a birch twig stuck in his hair. Nobody looked pleased to be here.
Aunt Silla took in the ravine, the blood on Corin's neck, the packet under Rhett's arm, and said, perfectly plain, "Well. This looks guilty."
Mara nearly laughed from pure nerves. "Can you not."
"I can, I just won't."
Teren stepped down the bank a little. "Corin."
"Don't use that voice on me."
"What voice?"
"The one where you act like I'm already tied up in the root cellar."
Pavin, who was usually smart enough to stay out of family conflict, said, "If it helps, I'd rather tie up the alpha and sleep."
Nobody answered that. Not because it wasn't rude. Because it was a little funny and a little true.
Lucan ignored it. Mostly. "Red Mill sent a runner onto our line on council night. That's not random."
Corin wiped blood from his jaw with the back of his hand and stared at the smear like he was surprised to find it there. "No."
"Then tell me what it was."
Corin's silence dragged.
Mara knew that silence. Had known it since childhood. Corin went silent when he was ashamed, when he was angry, when he was lying badly, when he was trying not to say the thing that would force the room to change around him. It was not a useful silence. It was repetitive. He lived in it too long.
She said, quieter now, "Tell me first, then."
His eyes cut to her at last.
For one second he looked like her brother again instead of a problem being assessed from three sides. Just Corin. Muddy, stubborn, bleeding a little, wanting to put the whole world off with his shoulders. It pulled at her in a way she resented because there was no time for softness and family made softness whether you wanted it or not.
He said, "I went to the lower ford."
Lucan: "Why."
Corin: "To meet someone."
Aunt Silla made a little noise in her throat. "That is never good after dark."
Teren rubbed a hand over his face. "Who."
Corin looked at the papers. Not at Lucan. Not at Mara. At the bundle. "Man named Elric."
Nobody said anything for a beat. The name was enough. Council attached. Not full envoy, not noble enough for that, but one of the men who moved records and grain marks between houses. The sort of man you forgot at first glance and regretted later.
Lucan's voice went colder. "Why would a council clerk be at our lower ford?"
Corin gave a short, ugly laugh. "Because he knew Father."
Everything in Mara pulled tight.
Wind moved through the trees and the lantern flame bent. Somebody up by the trail coughed. The ordinary little sounds kept happening. The birch twig in Pavin's hair stayed there. Rhett shifted the packet because his arm was probably going numb. Small stupid details, while the world narrowed again.
Mara said, "Don't."
Corin snapped, "You wanted the truth."
"I wanted your name clear."
"Well, bad timing."
Lucan took one step down the slope toward him. "What did Elric want."
Corin's eyes flicked up to Lucan, then away. "Same thing you do."
"That's not an answer."
"No, it's a category."
"Corin," Mara said, more sharply.
He looked tired then. Not in a dramatic way. Just like a man who had been carrying a wet sack too long and finally set it down in the wrong place. "He wanted Father's copies."
Mara stared at him. "Copies of what."
Corin said nothing.
Lucan's patience thinned in the air. You could feel it. Rank, pressure, the delayed rite still hanging behind all this, the council woman in silver waiting back at the lodge no doubt calculating insult into future consequence. Every minute here was costing him somewhere else. Mara knew that. She still couldn't care first.
She stepped farther down the bank until she was near enough that if Corin bolted she could catch his sleeve. "What copies."
Corin swallowed once. "The grain transfers. Winter before last. Some blood registry pages. I don't know, all right? I never saw all of it."
Mara felt suddenly cold under the coat. Her father's shelves. The missing tallies. The council knot on the wrong bundle. Things she had half understood were now standing up into shapes she didn't want.
Lucan said, "Did you promise him those records?"
"No."
"Did you tell him where they were?"
Corin hesitated.
That was enough answer for everyone.
Teren swore under his breath. Aunt Silla said, "Idiot boy," with no venom at all, which somehow made it worse. Pavin finally pulled the twig out of his hair and looked at it like it offended him personally.
Mara could barely hear over the rush in her own ears. "Corin."
"I didn't give him anything."
"You led him here."
"I led him away from the lodge."
"That is not better."
"It was the best I had."
The fight in him and the shame in him were mixed up now. Mara knew the look because she had it herself too often. He kept circling the same defense and it kept failing in the same place.
Lucan held out his hand to Rhett without looking back. "Give me the packet."
Mara moved before she thought. She got there first, snatching the bundle from Rhett so abruptly the older wolf yelped in protest. The paper edges cut her palm a little. Not deep. Enough to sting.
Lucan's eyes went to her hand, then to the packet clutched against her chest.
"Mara," he said.
"No."
"You don't know what's in there."
"Neither do you."
"Which is exactly why—"
"No." Her voice came rough and repetitive and not under control. "No, because every time I hand something over in this pack it stops belonging to us. It becomes process. It becomes review. It becomes something said over a table while the people it will ruin are told to wait outside."
The words hung there. Too much truth in them to soften now.
Lucan stared at her. The others did too, but their looking blurred out. Only his felt sharp. He seemed very still. Too still. Mud at his hem. Wet dark in his hair from mist. That stupid blue thread at his cuff again. She was so angry at him for being the one she needed to make sense of this.
More pack voices were coming through the trees behind them. More lanterns. More witnesses.
Lucan said, lower now, "If Elric is on our land, I cannot protect you with closed eyes."
"And if I let council hands touch this first, I can't protect my family at all."
He took that in. She saw him do it. Duty pulling one way, pack another, politics a third. And under it, something rawer and harder to trust. Something that kept making him look at her like she was both wound and responsibility.
Corin whispered, "Mara."
She didn't look at him.
Up the bank, voices parted. A new lantern came into view. Not pack yellow this time, but the whiter steadier burn of council oil.
The silver-cloaked woman descended the trail in clean boots that would not stay clean long, one hand lifting her hem from the mud. Beside her walked a narrow man in a dark traveling coat, spare and forgettable in the face until you looked twice.
Elric.
Corin's breath caught. Mara felt it as much as heard it.
Elric stopped three steps above them and looked, not at Lucan, not at the blood on Corin's neck, but directly at the packet in Mara's hands.
Then he smiled a little and said, like he had every right in the world to be here, "Ah. So that is where your father hid the mating register."