Lilly wandered slowly through the grey woods. Something important was going on back at the mountains. Conn had called a meeting of the leaders of the entire pack. It was a meeting Lilly had been barred from. Though Conn would have liked to see her there, his lieutenants had other ideas and refused to have the foreign wolf – they had ceased calling her a 'mongrel' and had now moved on to the equally charming epitaph, 'fiendish white devil' – anywhere near their war council. So, for the first time in countless months, Lilly had been left to herself.

She had never been this far in the woods before. She did not know if she could make it back on her own. It would have been natural for her to be scared by the possibility, but after how her life had turned out, she could not care less. So she just wandered. The sun was shining brightly at the birth of day and the merry morning birds were making their marvelous music, but somehow the forest still seemed forbidding. Whether it was because the grey mists which rolled through the area and lazily caressed everything they encountered or the pensive melancholy of her own mood, Lilly could not help but feel that a certain gloom was revealing itself among the darkened trees.

And then, suddenly, she heard music. Not the music of the birds, but it seemed to be coming from a creature of her own species. She followed the noise, the low but persistent humming, "Hm-hm-hm-hm-hmmm-hmmm-hmm," until she reached a spot where a tree had fallen over and come to lean on another one at such an angle as to form a natural seat for anyone adventurous enough to climb into it. And in that seat was, to Lilly's surprise, none other than Cyril, comfortably laying on his back and looking up to another tree nearby.

Lilly came to a quiet halt as soon as she saw him, but she must have made some noise or other, for Cyril was immediately alerted to her presence. The moment his eyes alighted on her, they seemed to fill with a sparkling warmth and charm. "Why, flower," he said, "what are you doing out here?"

"Oh, um, I'm sorry," Lilly began, looking away in embarrassment. "I didn't mean to disturb you or anything. I was just out wandering. I'm sorry, I'll go away."

Cyril quickly leapt off the trunk of the fallen tree and with surprising agility landed right in front of Lilly. "Nonsense! I could always use more of your charming company."

Lilly looked around cautiously. She did not know how to react. "Well… um… okay, I guess?"

He smiled. "You're probably wondering what I'm doing out here by myself so early in the morning, eh?"

"Well, um…"

"Trust me, I do have a very good reason." Cyril pointed to the top of the nearby tree, to the very spot on which his eyes had been affixed when Lilly arrived. "Up there is a nest of bluebirds that make the most remarkable music. I come out here every morning to watch them as they prance about the branches and I listen to their remarkable song. Take a listen for a moment, flower."

Lilly closed her eyes and just concentrated on listening to the bluebirds and their song. As she heard it, a whirling rush of blue colors flashed before her mental sight, inspired by the sweet strain of the birds' song. She smiled.

Cyril smiled as well. "What did I tell you, eh?"

Lilly opened one eye a bit. "It's beautiful!"

They stood there and listened together until the bluebirds flew away to collect their morning breakfast. At this point, Cyril and Lilly also commenced wending through the forest.

"You never answered my question before, flower," Cyril said, after a long period of silence.

"Hm?" Lilly said nervously, thinking she had accidentally been rude. "What question?"

"The one I asked you when I first saw you today. What were you doing out here so early in the morning?"

"Oh, that," Lilly said, her voice trailing off as she began to characteristically study her paws. "Well, their having a meeting of the pack leaders and… and…."

"They forgot to mail you an invitation, is that right?" Cyril asked.

"Something like that," Lilly answered sadly.

"Cheer up, flower!" Cyril said. "Why would you want to go to some stuffy old pack meeting anyway? There's too much life to be lived out here to worry about any of that."

"But… but… I just want them to respect me."

Cyril looked at her as one might a silly child. "They'll never respect you. You're too beautiful. They don't respect beauty."

"Besides," Lilly said, not really paying much attention to what they just said. "I think they're talking about war."

"Then you definitely don't want to go," Cyril said confidently. "Trust me, all that war-planning and tactical discussion and strategy is too tedious. Better to avoid it all. Life's too short to be boring."

But Lilly was not quite listening to Cyril's talk. She had something else on her mind. "Do you think there will really be another war?" she asked.

"Oh, there's always another war," Cyril answered matter-of-factly.

Lilly shook her head slightly. "It was all for nothing, then. Everything I did was all for nothing."

Cyril eyed her as though he was trying to figure out a particularly hard problem. The attention embarrassed Lilly and she turned away her face so that he could not see it.

"And why do you care, if I may ask?" he said. "This isn't your pack. This isn't your home. If anything, you should want them all to be destroyed for what they did to you and yours."

Lilly now vigorously shook her head, so vigorously that the bangs fell over her left eye. It was her old hair-style, the type she had not worn since she married Garth. But now she did not have the energy or the concern to push it out of the way.

"I don't… I don't want anybody to have… to have… to die," Lilly said, fumbling over her words a bit as she tried to explain. "I know I'm supposed to hate them… but they're wolves too and nobody deserves to be killed."

Cyril nodded. "If you say so. But it should be quite a show, at any rate."

"You really don't care about them at all, do you?" Lilly asked.

Cyril shook his head. "Fortunately, flower, I don't share your misplaced concern. Like I said before, let them all die."

"But what about your family?" Lilly was hesitant to ask this, in case it was a touchy subject, but she did not know another way of getting through to Cyril. "You must have family around somewhere."

"I'm sure I do," Cyril answered.

Lilly looked at him, her one visible eye full of sympathy. She tilted her head slightly. "Do you mean, you never met them?"

Cyril shrugged what would pass on a wolf for eyebrows. "I guess I must have met my mother sometime. She was probably with me when I was born, I figure."

Lilly could not help but chuckle at this remark. Cyril smiled to see it.

"But in all seriousness," he continued, "I don't remember any of them. Maybe I could if I wanted to. But for some reason, I have the impression that they were all terribly tedious people, so I don't bother."

"You're not like any wolf I've ever met," Lilly said, without fully realizing that she was saying it out loud.

Cyril chuckled at what he took to be a compliment. "That goes for both of us," he responded. "But let's get you home. I'm sure they're done playing soldiers for now and we can learn what they've decided – as if we didn't know! But I wouldn't want Conn to think you'd tried to escape your gilded cage or he might never let you out again."

"That could be trouble," Lilly muttered quietly.

"You don't know the half of it," Cyril responded.

What did the pack leaders decide? Is war coming to the Cascade Pack?

Read on.