Ten feet down the ledge from Ysabet and Pip, Kiv had been kneeling by the canvas water-bowl with his three iron wolves while the kettle boiled. He hadn’t been eavesdropping on purpose, but the wind off the crag carried Pip’s low rasp—both—and Ysabet’s quiet answer straight past his ear.
Kiv looked down at old Siv.
All morning on the steep shale climb, the oldest wolf had been in a foul temper. Twice in the narrow chimney below the rookery, when young Moth had crowded up on Siv’s left shoulder to get out of the cold wind, Siv had whipped his scarred gray muzzle around and snapped his iron-shod teeth an inch from Moth’s ear—not a pack-leader’s measured correction, but a sharp, ugly snarl. Ten minutes ago, when Kiv had handed out their noon ration of dried horse-gristle, Siv had taken his strip into the shadow behind a juniper bush, dropped it half-chewed in the dirt, and lain down with the left side of his jaw pressed hard against a cold slab of slate.
In the temple kennels at the capital, a handler had a simple drill for a wolf that snapped at its trace-mate and refused its meat on a march: you straddled the beast’s ribs, jammed a horn pry-stick behind its canines to check for broken iron, and if you didn’t see blood right away, you tightened the muzzle-strap so it couldn’t bite the others.
