Free Compromising Positions by Selena Kitt

yesterday, hadn’t he? When she’d mentioning stopping and seeing him praying. But he hadn’t told her its history, not like Moira had.
    “It reminds me of home.” Sibyl gave a little half-smile and she peeked into one of the rooms. “Your home, I mean.”
    “’Tis yer home, as well, banrighinn .” Kirstin squeezed her hand, peering into the room and seeing it had once been a woman’s room. Dried herbs, old, hung on lines. There was an old table in the center of the room with a few old, cracked mortars and pestles. But the room smelled of healing, a familiar, welcome scent.
    “This was a healer’s room,” Sibyl remarked, sniffing the air. Even she could smell it. “I wonder if there is any dried silvermoon in here?”
    “Whatever they left here will’na be of any use anymore.” Kirstin looked around. “’Tis all cleared out. They planned their move.”
    “It’s not as big as the mountain,” Sibyl observed
    “Not as safe, either.” Kirstin imagined the possibilities.
    The entire pack could get trapped in a den like this. In their mountain, they were safe within, and they had a valley where they had a running stream and sunlight and they could raise their sheep for wool and meat. In a den like this, they’d have to go up top to hunt. No wonder the MacFalons were wary of the wulvers, she thought. They’d once been much closer neighbors—and she imagined her ancestors had made a meal of a few of Donal’s. The wulvers hadn’t hunted and killed humans for meat in generations, but they had, once.
    “You always have such giant kitchens,” Sibyl exclaimed as they reached the end of the passageway that opened into a wide space. A large fireplace took up almost all of one wall, and a long table where all the wulvers had once sat to sup together spanned the big room.
    “Wulvers like t’gather in one place.” Kirstin smiled and could almost picture her wulver ancestors tussling and laughing and playing and eating here. Many of the wulvers slept in the kitchens together in a big wolf pile by the fire at night, especially before they were paired off. Kirstin had spent many a night in a big, warm, fuzzy pile of wulvers. There was nothing else like it.
    “Moira said the spring was near the kitchen.”
    “Aye, ’tis likely,” Kirstin started across the open space. “Water’s life. There’s always a spring in a wulver den.”
    “Through here, do you think?” Sibyl edged around the corner of a rock wall and they both heard the sound of running water. The passageway got lighter as they went through it, making the torch unnecessary.
    “Beautiful!” Sibyl put the torch into a notch on the wall as they entered the grotto, looking around in wonder. “I wondered how anything could possibly grow down here.”
    “Someone carved that into t’rock t’let the light in.” Kirstin looked at the running body water where a slant of sunlight lit its clear surface. It came from high above, an opening in the deep rock. She wondered at the construction of it. Where did it come out, she wondered, on MacFalon land? Had anyone accidentally discovered it before? But there was a grate—metal bars—over the opening.
    “Moira gave me a picture of silvermoon.” Sibyl dug into a pocket in her plaid, searching for it, but there was no need.
    “It’s righ’ there.” Kirstin pointed to the plant growing up between the rocky crags at the edge of the spring.
    “Why do they call it silvermoon?” Sibyl wondered, squatting to gather it.
    “’Tis silver in t’moonlight.” Kirstin glanced up at the skylight above. “The leaves’re reflective. You can see’t clearly at night if the moon’s full.”
    “Really?” Sibyl rubbed the leaf of one of the plants between her fingers. “I’ve never seen it before.”
    “’Tis an ancient wulver plant,” Kirstin told her “I’ve only e’er seen pictures of it. Like the huluppa ye found growing on the borderlands.”
    The huluppa was the other plant, mentioned in what was