The Body on the Border

The body lay exactly on the line, and Rosa Quill understood at once that this was the whole point of it. She crouched at the edge of the clearing where the coven's wards ended and the pack's territory began — a line drawn a hundred years ago in a treaty everyone's grandparents had signed and nobody's grandchildren entirely trusted — and she looked at where the dead woman had been arranged. Because *arranged* was the word. The body had not fallen here. It had been placed, with care, so that the head lay on coven ground and the feet lay on pack ground, so that no investigator from either side could claim it was none of their concern. Whoever had done this wanted both peoples looking. Rosa filed that thought somewhere cold and careful, and did not like the shape of it at all. She heard the wolf coming before she saw him, which meant he had let her hear him, which meant it was Garran. Garran Hale always announced himself. He considered stealth, where Rosa was concerned, to be beneath the dignity of the occasion — and the occasion, for ten years now, had been the two of them despising each other across this exact border with a thoroughness that had become almost a kind of routine. "Witch," he said, by way of greeting, stepping into the clearing. "Enforcer." She did not look up. "You're standing in my evidence." "I'm standing on my own land, which is a thing I get to do." But she heard him stop, heard the careful shift of his weight, and when she did glance up Garran Hale was looking down at the dead woman with no trace at all of their usual routine on his face. He had gone still. Pack-still. The stillness of a predator that has just understood it is also, somehow, prey. "You see it too," Rosa said. "Head on your side. Feet on mine." His voice had dropped. "Somebody wants this to be a fight." For ten years Rosa Quill and Garran Hale had agreed on precisely nothing. They had argued the treaty, the border, the wards, the hunting rights, the one bad winter, and the precise tone in which the other one said good morning. She had a whole catalogued life's worth of reasons to distrust everything that came out of his mouth. And she watched him crouch down across the body from her, careful not to disturb it, and look up to meet her eyes — and she found, to her considerable annoyance, that she believed him completely. "The coven will say it was a wolf," Rosa said quietly. "The throat. The way it was done. They'll say it the moment they see her, Garran, and they will not be entirely wrong to wonder." "And the pack will see her dumped on coven ground and say your people did it to frame mine." He dragged a hand down his face. "By tomorrow night both councils will be calling it an act of war. By the night after that —" He did not finish. He did not need to. They both knew exactly what the night after that looked like; their grandparents had signed a treaty specifically so that their grandchildren would never have to find out. The wind moved through the clearing, carrying the green smell of Rosa's wards and the wild smell of Garran's forest, the two scents meeting along the line of the body like the border itself made into air. "Whoever killed her," Rosa said slowly, working it out as she spoke, "didn't kill her because they wanted her dead. They killed her because they wanted *us* — all of us, both sides — at each other's throats. Which means the murder isn't the crime, Garran. The murder is the bait." Garran Hale looked at her across the dead woman on the line. Ten years of mutual, reliable, almost comfortable loathing sat between them — and on top of it now sat something far less comfortable, which was the dawning, unwelcome recognition that they were the only two people on this entire border who could currently see the trap. "The councils won't listen to either of us alone," he said. "Your coven thinks I'm a brute. My pack thinks you're a snake." "Then they're going to be extremely unhappy," Rosa said, and stood, and brushed the dead leaves from her knees, "because the only thing that stops a war on this border is a witch and a wolf solving a murder together — and I cannot believe I'm about to say this to you, Garran Hale, but I think you and I had better start being on the same side before somebody makes us bury everyone we know."