Page 22 of The Bear Between Us

I give her more room that afternoon than I have since she arrived. Not distance exactly, she's still within the boundary and the escort rotation is still running, but the quality of the oversight shifts. Less monitoring, more presence. She's included in the afternoon threat assessment without having to argue her way into it, which she notices and receives without comment.

Torin runs the northeastern boundary report. The withdrawal pattern from last night is consistent with a coordinated stand-down rather than a retreat, they pulled back on instruction rather than because of anything we did. He puts the evidence on the table and walks us through it, and Elowen asks two questions during his briefing that redirect the analysis in ways that Torin, who is not easily redirected, visibly considers.

Brennan watches her from across the table.

"Asset," he says, simply.

"Yes," I say.

It's dark by the time the evening reports come in and what they show pulls everything back into sharp relief. The boundary tests have resumed, not on the northeastern section but on the southern perimeter, the one we thinned to reinforce the north. Adaptive, Brennan said this morning, and he was right. Whatever is directing the pressure on our boundary is watching our responses and adjusting.

I stand at the operations room window with the reports in my hand and the pleasant weight of the morning's shift up against the cold clarity of what's coming, and I understand, not for the first time and not for the last, that the personal and the operational are going to keep pulling against each other until this is resolved.

I put the reports on the table and start building the response.

Whatever last night was, whatever this morning was, it exists inside a situation that isn't finished and won't be finished for a long time yet.

I don't regret it.

But I don't forget what's outside the boundary either.

17

ELOWEN

The ward work takes most of the morning.

It's different from anything I was doing before the mark, more expansive, drawing on the territory's own energy rather than purely my own reserves. Maris walked me through the theory two days ago and I spent yesterday evening testing the approach on a small section of the eastern boundary before committing to the full northwestern run today. It held overnight. This morning I'm doing the real work.

Two pack members work alongside me, not magically, they don't have that capacity, but practically, marking the boundary posts I identify, keeping track of the sections I've covered, making sure I don't lose my footing in the rougher terrain along the ridge.

The magic moves differently out here than it does in the workroom with Maris. The territory has its own grain to it, a directionality I can feel through my feet and my hands when I press them to the boundary markers, and working with that grain rather than across it produces something more integrated than anything I've managed in a controlled setting. It still doesn't feel entirely mine. But it feels less foreign than it did.

By midday the northwestern section is reinforced and I'm tired.

Maris finds me sitting on a log at the boundary's edge eating an apple and looking at nothing in particular.

"How does it feel?" she asks, sitting beside me.

"Solid," I say. "Better than the eastern section I ran yesterday."

"You're reading the territory."

"I'm reading something."

She's quiet for a moment. "That's the mark integrating with the land. You're not just a practitioner anymore, you're a practitioner anchored to a specific place." She pauses. "Your grandmother would have had thoughts about that."

It's the first time anyone has mentioned my grandmother directly since I arrived in pack territory, and the reference lands with more weight than I expect. "She would have had many thoughts," I say. "Most of them delivered without being asked for."

Maris smiles. "The best ones always are."

I think about the journals in my workroom back at the shop. The ones I've been meaning to go through properly for two years, always finding something more pressing to do instead. My grandmother kept journals her entire life, detailed ones, and when she died she left them to me with a note that said only: when you're ready. I've never been ready. I'm beginning to wonder if she knew something about the timing of that readiness that I didn't.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. Nessa.

I answer it before thinking. "Hey."

"Oh thank god." Her voice is bright and immediate and so completely itself that something in my chest does something uncomfortable. "I've been texting you for three days. Are you okay? Maris said you were okay but Maris was being very calm about it which honestly made me more worried not less."