great Forest of Dean was falling fast to the humans’ rapacious desires for lumber and grazing and iron, and with her Pack on the edge of starvation, Ælfrida had sent Seolfer back to Wulfric. She knew what waited for the girl, but submission was better than death—at least that’s what Ælfrida told herself.
Seolfer said nothing; her head was bowed low.
“How are you, Seolfer?”
“As you see, Alpha.”
“Hmm. I don’t need you to translate. I need you to make what I say palatable to the old fart. Gea?”
The Seolfer that Ælfrida had known would have laughed, but not this one. She just nodded and bent her head lower, trying to avoid Ælfrida’s attempt to catch her eye. She didn’t have much time, so Ælfrida coughed a little and started her set speech. “The time of the wolves in this country is over. It is now the time of the humans.”
She waited for the girl to translate. Wolves, both wild and in skin, came close to listen to the rugged cadences of the Old Tongue. Ælfrida wrinkled her nose and sniffed; even human, she could smell the sick sweetness of rot. Something was definitely wrong in Wessex.
“The land in Mercia is dying, and with it, our Pack. It is the same everywhere: Anglia and Sussex and Gyrwe.”
“It is not the same here,” interrupted Wulfric, looking at Seolfer to translate, but Ælfrida waved her off.
“How can you say that? When I was last here, just fifty years ago.” Seolfer stumbled over the word year, and Ælfrida waited for her to translate it into six hundred moons, a span Wulfric would understand. “The last time I was here,” she started again, “I ran into a tree to avoid a deer. Now there are neither. The same is true of Mercia, which is why I have arranged for a boat to take my Pack to the Colonies. I am asking you to join your bloodlines with ours. Make a truly great Pack in the New World.”
“Landbuenda?” Wulfric repeated, missing the larger point in his fretting about the whereabouts of these “colonies.”
“America,” Ælfrida said irritably.
“Omeriga?” Wulfric echoed, still confused.
“Oh, by the Moon, Wessex. Vinland.” Recognition dawned on Wessex’s face, then he laughed, and Ælfrida knew that for Wulfric, Vinland was still nothing but a rumor west of Iceland. “It is real,” she snapped. “I have talked to humans who have been there. It is a great land, a wild land. There are vast forests that we could buy and have legal title to and—”
Before Seolfer had even finished translating we could buy, Wulfric interrupted.
“Why should I travel across the water to buy land, when I have land here. Land that has been ours for centuries.”
“You have lived here for centuries, but it belongs to Worthing, and the humans will have it.”
“And since when does a wolf care what humans think?”
“Since they have become stronger than we are, you sodding ass.” Seolfer glided without comment over the last bit. Ælfrida’d had a long and depressing fortnight, and her patience for Pack obstinacy was nearly exhausted. “Since they have armed themselves with weapons that will kill us from afar. Since they tear down our woods to build their ships and graze their sheep. Since they rip up the very ground to find rocks to melt into those guns and bullets. It is time for you to face the truth and do the hard thing. Do the right thing. Be an Alpha, and bring Wessex to America with us. Let us start something great and new.”
As soon as Seolfer had finished translating. Wulfric signaled impatiently for Ælfrida to follow him toward a stone shed with a sod roof. The tall Alpha of Mercia had to fold herself nearly in half to get inside.
Wulfric looked at her smugly. “You see, Mercia. I have faced the truth.”
It took time for the weak eyes of her human form to adjust to the dim light, to see the neat rows of muskets lining the walls. To make out the shelves below loaded with flint and powder and cartridge.
“But…how did he get these?” she asked, turning to Seolfer. “Tell me you didn’t help him do this.” The girl shook her head firmly. “Then who negotiated with the humans? How—?”
Ælfrida froze as she sensed another presence enter the shed, someone with a new and terrifying stench. She turned to the man who was only slightly taller than Seolfer and then bent down, sniffing him. Just to be sure. Just to be sure she wasn’t mistaken in