Brennan's response arrived in four days.
It came through Hessa in the coded format they had established, and Vera decoded it at the desk in her room on a Friday morning with the particular focus she gave to correspondence that mattered. Hessa's encoding was clean and consistent, the work of someone who had learned quickly and applied what she learned without requiring correction.
The response was positive. Brennan accepted the northern passes proposal in principle and wanted to discuss the implementation in detail. He had already begun the internal groundwork, meeting with his senior wolves under the cover of ordinary administrative business, gauging the state of his pack's relationships with the neutral packs that had used the passes before Morgana's influence closed them.
He had also added something that hadn't been in any of the previous correspondence.
