She met the Keldra representative on Friday, alone, at a coffee shop in the nearest human town.
His name was Dray Voss — mid-fifties, the deliberate geniality of a man who had been in territory diplomacy long enough to know that geniality was a tool and had made peace with using it. He was not hostile. He was not warm. He was a professional conducting a preliminary assessment.
So was she.
"The mediator's office," he said, looking at her letter of representation. "Not the pack."
"Not the pack," she agreed. "I'm not Ironvale's advocate. I'm not Keldra's advocate. I'm the in-between, which is what both sides agreed to use."
"The in-between." He considered the phrase. "You grew up Ironvale."
"I grew up in the valley," she said. "I've been in Carrow for three years. I work with the mediator's office on an as-needed basis. My status with Ironvale is — complex."
He looked at her over his coffee. "How complex?"
"I'm not formally aligned with the pack," she said. "I wasn't pushed out. I stepped out. The difference matters, practically — I have no obligations to the pack hierarchy and no ongoing claims on pack resources. I'm here because my aunt needed a specific skill set and I have it."
He seemed to find this satisfactory. Or at least not unsatisfactory. "The skill set being?"
"The in-between spaces," she said. "I exist in them professionally. I understand how Ironvale reads a situation and I understand how you probably read Ironvale. I can help both sides hear each other's actual positions rather than the adversarial versions."
"Our actual position is that the 1960 accord language is clear."
"Your actual position," she said, evenly, "is that you have three families with established homes on disputed land and you need a resolution that doesn't require them to move, and the 1960 language is the best legal instrument you currently have for achieving that. Which is a practical, reasonable position. Not a bad-faith one."
He looked at her.
"Ironvale's actual position," she continued, "is that they don't want those families to move either, because displacing established residents is expensive and generates resentment, and what they actually need is a boundary clarification that protects the original territorial logic without requiring anyone to be physically disrupted." She paused. "Those two actual positions are not incompatible. The legal argument about which document is authoritative is a proxy war, not the real issue."
A long pause.
"You've been doing this a long time," he said.
"No," she said. "I've been thinking about it for a long time."
He looked at the table. Then: "Who would be at the Monday meeting?"
"Alpha Ashford, in a representative capacity rather than a formal alpha engagement. The mediator's office — myself and possibly my aunt, depending on the structure. And whoever you choose from Keldra. I'd recommend not your formal territorial lead, at this stage. Someone who has authority to listen without authority to commit."
He considered this. "My daughter," he said. "She's been working the territorial portfolio for the past year."
Sera nodded. "Good."
---
She was walking back to the parking area when she heard footsteps behind her that weren't Dray Voss's. She knew without turning around, which was a wolf sense she had not lost in three years and probably never would, and which was responsible for a specific quality of irritation she was experiencing.
"You shouldn't be here," she said, without turning around.
Caden Ashford fell into step beside her. He was in human clothes, completely ordinary, which should have made him less noticeable. It did not.
"I needed to know how the preliminary went," he said.
"I would have reported it to you through the proper channels."
"I know."
She stopped walking and looked at him. He stopped too, which placed them on the main street of a small human town with people flowing around them, and he met her eyes with the same quality of attention he'd had in the mediator's house.
"You don't trust the proper channels," she said.
"I trust them for most things."
"But not for this."
"Not for my read on how the preliminary actually went," he said. "Not for the things that don't make it into reports."
She looked at him for a moment. The irritation was still there. But it had become less simple.
"It went well," she said. "Dray Voss is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. The 1960 argument is a tool, not a conviction. Monday is viable if you come in correctly."
"And how do I come in correctly?"
"You've been asking me that since Wednesday," she said. "You've already decided you can modulate your authority. You don't actually need me to tell you."
"I need you to tell me if I'm reading the room wrong when I think I can."
She studied him. This was, she recognised, a genuinely unusual thing for an alpha to say. The entire architecture of pack hierarchy was premised on alphas knowing the room without asking.
"You'll be fine," she said, and meant it, and was then somewhat irritated by how much she meant it.
"Thank you," he said. He looked at her for one more moment — that quality of attention again, the one she still hadn't named — and then stepped back and let the crowd move around them. "Monday," he said.
"Monday," she agreed.
She watched him go and then stood on the pavement for a moment, in the noise and the human indifference and the very specific discomfort of having met someone she was going to have to think about.
She had known, coming back, that it would be complicated.
She had not quite known it was going to be complicated in this particular direction.
She walked to her car and drove back to the valley, and thought about in-between spaces, and how her entire skill was navigating them, and how she had absolutely no plan for navigating this one.
