His Father's Last Word

st the walls to make room. Every wolf in the Schwarzwald pack was in that room. I counted faces as I came in: Greta by the kitchen door with a cloth in her hands, Rolf at the fr

with its curling lists of timber quotas and the roster

seat. He had washed and dressed, and his dark golden blond hair was slicked back a

e nights ago, and you know the coroner has examined him. What you do not know is that rumors have been spreading since t

one near the front shifte

s hand came up and touc

. "I have heard them from my own wa

nd cold, and I understood that whatever he had said to me i

ls

wind through a wheat field. Heads

the rain that night, before anyone else. You have been telling

ut of my pockets. M

no one anything. I examined the body as I examine every b

e at the

n him since I was a child. I brought him a branch of pine,

he coroner is the one who told my nephew that Anselm's heart was torn out. My nephew told

in rooms full of wolves who did not like me. "Your nephew came to my office and asked what I had

ent darker. "You ca

f with an imagination.

ly stifled. Rolf's iron-grey beard l

aks to an elder, Kon

aw something move behind the flatness there, something that l

ouncil when they arrive. Every page. Every observation. If my father died o

I had locked the night before, and on the last page I had wr

lf apart. If I lied, I would be lying to the Council of Alphas,

law says the coroner's report goes to the Alpha first, and the Alpha reads it alone. You have not as

l it change, the way the air changes before

ped forward fro

her platinum blonde hair was braided back now, severe and neat, and her emerald eyes were br

er to say plainly what she found, and she has not said it. She has given us law and procedure and a sto

ot an answ

ieving his father. He has asked one plain thing of the wolf who examined the body. If

warriors along the back wall shift their weight, and Greta by the kit

is hand, and th

id. "My study. B

door of the hall, and the pack parted for him. At the thr

you have lied to this hall

ce, and Rolf was already talking to his nephew with his hand on the young wolf's sh

the kitchen, and she touched my slee

e to me. There is something I have been meaning to tell you about yo

itchen door and let it

heart going hard, and the whole pack moved around me like