Chapter 178
Chapter 178
Avery’s POV
“You look more glum than usual p>
My ears perked up as one of the pack members stepped behind the counter where I knelt, stacking pallets for the grocer who maintained the pack store.
I knew he wasn’t talking to me.
No one did.
But still, I couldn’t help strain to hear the grocer’s response. Now that I was persona non–grata within the pack thanks to Dierdra’s punishment, I found myself yearning to hear news about what was going on. I wasn’t quite listening at keyholes yet, but I did find myself paying close attention to the things that pack members said around me.
And also, to what they weren’t saying.
I had fallen far from my former privileged position as Luna. Now I was no one. A downcast wolf who was considered too hazardous to be allowed out into the village without an escort. Where once I had been invited to pack events, now I was specifically excluded.
No one wanted to be seen socializing with me, even if Dierdra, the current Luna, had allowed it.
I supposed in a way, it was nice to know that the guards were supposed to prevent others from talking to me. It allowed me to pretend in my head that was the reason no one had tried to approach me in weeks. I Lcould blame their interference, instead of facing the truth.
That I no longer had allies in Nightwolf pack. That I had been rejected by the Alpha, and that his Luna was out for vengeance and wouldn’t rest until she had secured my permanent eviction or death.
“Well, these are hard times,” came the grocers response, and I felt a small inner spark of hope.
Even though I had no direct news about what was happening within the pack, the drudgery I had been assigned by the Luna as punishment for my crime meant that I was often performing manual labor in the civic centers of the village.
I worked the fields, gathered garbage, cleaned latrines, did maintenance of the boiler rooms and kitchen equipment. My body bore bruises and callouses of all kinds, and my injuries still occasionally re – opened, reminders of the Rogue King’s attack so many weeks ago.
But being in the places that were the dirtiest, also meant being where the people were, and conversations like this, between a villager and the grocer, gave me the tiniest bit of insight as to what was happening in the pack as a whole.
“Hard times, I agree, ” the villager continued the conversation as the grocer rang up his goods for purchase, “ There’s been a bit of confusion down at the loading docks today p>
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Chapter 178
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“Confusion? Aye, we’ve seen a bit of that here too. Some confounding document that got sent out and got all my workers in a tizzy trying to figure out what it meant p>
“Oh, that order from the Luna? Yeah, we couldn’t make heads or tails of it p>
“ Seems like she’s a mite young to know what she’s talking about when it comes to pack business,” the customer complained, “Comes across a bit chaotic, if you ask me p>
“Well now,” I saw the grocer glance over at me, and then he lowered his voice. Drats! I was hoping to hear more about what it was that Dierdra had sent out.
It wasn’t the first complaint I had heard about this week, however. It sounded like there were quite a few people unhappy with the way she was meddling in pack business.
Ostensibly, she should have carried all the might of the Alpha with her orders. In practice, experienced tradesmen like these villagers were known to drag their heels when they received a command that didn’t make sense. Their balking was understandable, they knew their trade and the new Luna did not.
When I had been Luna, I had tried to have conversations with the people whose lives, and livelihoods, would be effected by my decisions. I knew where the gaps in my knowledge lay, and would often defer to veterans when I encountered something I didn’t understand. More than that, I was willing to sit down with them, or shadow them in their day–jobs, to try and better understand the struggles they faced.
It was hard to imagine Dierdra doing the same. She saw anyone questioning her decisions as an attack on her authority, and she chose to put down those queries quite negatively. Her inability to handle criticism, or to approach her knowledge gaps with the willingness to learn, meant that there was now a quiet backlash that was rippling through the community.
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