She wasn’t wrong. Someone had to do something about this. And now…before more of our people were taken.
Chapter Ten
We returned the gathering area to find Gigi holding court among a number of the younger females and males as well. Samson went off to do whatever he needed to do—he muttered something, but I figured I’d catch up with him in a little while. First, I needed to find out how my grandmother, who had made a point of not coming, of staying home to keep Tris company, ended up here, chomping on a s’more—were they okay for people her age?—and telling some kind of tale to the others.
They were clearly enthralled, and also clearly had no idea what had happened. If so, they’d never have been sitting around the fire, smiling and laughing at her story. I didn’t want to interrupt because there were few enough times of happy relaxation in our pack lately, but what happened to not wanting to come and leave Tris alone?
She’d been happily settled with popcorn—did she come for more indulgent snacks?
I stayed out of the ring of firelight, listening to her tale of a time so long ago, not only was there no Internet, there was no power grid. I wasn’t sure why it was a relevant thing to bring up, but she seemed to think so.
The people in her story had arrived on this land long before the regular humans. They’d also come from across the waters somewhere—she didn’t say or maybe didn’t know where—and settled on what we now knew as the pack lands. They built homes from logs and, in some cases, dug into the sides of hills. Few, if any, of those original homes were still habitable, although I’d heard of some hermit types who dwelled away from the rest of the pack. Rumor said at least one lived in a dugout, so perhaps it was one of those.
As each of the others returned from the run, they joined the group, filling in in front of me until I could no longer see Gigi for the rows of seated and standing people. But her voice still carried to me, her tale-telling ability a revelation.
Or maybe not. I had vague memories of sitting on her lap while she regaled me with stories, of which I could draw up only a few shreds so many years later. Why we’d seen her so rarely? I accepted the distance factor, but it hadn’t mattered when I was very young. Sometimes, people did grow apart, but our family was not large, and it wasn’t as though we had anyone to spare.
Samson appeared through the trees then disappeared again, no doubt working on our current situation, and I thought I probably should follow, but somehow, I couldn’t move away from the storytelling. With all the chaos and all the ups and downs of our pack, this was how it was supposed to be.
For some reason, we had few elders in our group, and they tended to stay to themselves. I’d never seen something like this happen, and it touched me deeply. These stories needed to be shared with the younger pack members. We needed to know where we came from, our history and relationships with others. Every danger we’d come up against, every enemy or challenge, we faced with no precedent to go on.
We were repeating the mistakes of the past, with no knowledge of the solutions our ancestors had already found.
Despite myself, I wove through the crowd and found a flat rock miraculously empty near the front where I could sit and get a good view of my grandmother. The flickering flames cast her face in light and shadow, softening her wrinkles yet still making her look ancient. And wise. If a mien could show wisdom, hers did.
She could be so goofy and funny and naughty at home, but sitting here, surrounded by our packmates, she displayed little of that. Oh, certainly some of her tales held humor, but it was less slapstick than I was used to. I tried to remember the stories she’d told me when I was very little and whether I’d heard the one she currently shared, but it didn’t ring any bells.
“The people were very afraid,” she began. “They had been alone in this land for decades, maybe centuries, but new neighbors had moved in and brought with them a plague, or at least it had arrived at the same time. None of them were ill, but nearly half the pack was closed in their homes with burning fevers and watery, bloody bowels. Already a dozen had died, and it looked as if others would quickly follow.
“The alpha, Horace, had been sickened early on but recovered and now claimed those who died were just too weak and their deaths were a blessing in disguise that would, in the end, strengthen the pack. He was a hereditary leader, who had not been challenged when he took the office, his opponents all disappeared.”
Gigi went on describing the horrible winter when so many had died, finally the people recognized their leadership was not doing a thing for them, and they replaced them with the first alpha of the lineage that continued on to modern days, Samson, Tris, and Brandon’s ancestors. It sounded as if their father had started down the path toward the old tyrants, or perhaps he just enjoyed turning his family against one another.
Which would likely be the same thing.
“Grandmother”—the other pack members wouldn’t call her Gigi, of course, but the respectful term for a female elder—“were the enemies who brought the sickness ever vanquished”?”
She shook her head. “You’d have to ask them, since they are still
