Finding Her Paws

Corbie clamped her jaw hard, resisting the unaccountable urge to sigh as she watched the stranger drop to the ground. Well, they were in the soup now, make no mistake. She'd known when she'd challenged for this pack to begin with, when she'd set it up as a sanctuary, that it would be only a matter of time before she ran afoul of one of the darker packs. This it seemed would be it. Could she justify putting her own moral quandary before the safety of her pack? Avalon was small, relatively weak compared to other packs, and she'd promised them safety for their families that she'd already failed to provide when simply raided by another - did she have the right to bring home this particular stray and ask them to risk themselves protecting her from a much larger, much more well connected pack? But her whole soul rebelled against the idea of simply returning the woman to a pack that had held her as slave and, it was clear, had abused her. Nor could she feel justified in letting Alarr alone bear the weight of this.

That sigh traitorously escaped after all.

"We'll bring her to the barn," she told Alarr in resignation. "It's further from the border, and safer. When she regains consciousness, we will offer her sanctuary." It was the right thing to do - to do anything else would be to betray her vision of what Avalon was to be, and would not be true to herself. Shaking her head just briefly, she readied herself to do whatever Alarr needed her to do to get the stranger safely where they needed to go.