Moon's Debt

Chapter Six : The Weight of a Name

Sera's POV

Ren finds me in the kitchen the morning after the temple door test, elbow-deep in a bowl of oats I made for no one in particular, and tells me to be in the eastern yard in twenty minutes.

"For what?" I ask.

"Training," he says, like it's obvious, like I should have already known, and maybe I should have. "Dax wants you to be able to put a wolf on the ground by the time anyone from Ashveil decides to stop asking questions and start doing something about the answers."

I set the bowl down slower than I needed to. "That's a very specific threat to build a schedule around."

"We're a specific pack." Ren grabs an apple off the counter without asking, because apparently that's just a thing he does, and bites into it on his way back out the door. "Twenty minutes, Sera."

I'm there in fifteen.

The eastern yard is nothing like the training grounds at Ashveil, which were manicured and roped off and watched by an audience even during practice, because appearances mattered there more than function ever did. This yard is packed with dirt and old wood, training posts worn smooth by three generations of hands, and nobody is watching except the wolves who are actually going to hit me.

There are four of them. Cas, who I've shared breakfast with twice now and who grins at me like this is fun. Pria, quieter, assessing. Two others I don't know yet, broader, older, clearly here because Ren put them here and not because they have any particular opinion about me one way or another.

"Rules are simple," Ren says, tossing the apple core somewhere behind him. "You go until you can't. We'll tell you what you did wrong. You go again. We're not being gentle. Gentle doesn't help you."

"I didn't ask for gentleness," I say.

Cas's grin widens. "Good. Because you're not getting it."

She comes at me first, and I go down in about four seconds, flat on my back with the wind knocked clean out of me and dirt in my mouth.

"Again," Ren says, from the sideline, not unkindly, but not warmly either. Just factual. Like this is the weather.

I get up.

I went down eleven more times in the first hour. Each time is a little different, a hip check I don't see coming, a low sweep that takes my legs out before I've even registered someone's moves, a hold I can't break because I don't know yet what my own body is capable of doing to get out of it. By the twelfth fall, I'm angry in a way that surprises me, not at Cas or Pria or the ground, but after three years of being told, in a hundred small careful ways, that I wasn't built for this. That omegas didn't fight. That my place was quiet corners and lowered eyes and making myself small enough that nobody would think twice about where I was standing.

Something in that anger sharpens instead of scattering.

The thirteenth time, when Pria comes at me low, I don't think about it. I move.

I don't win the exchange, not exactly, but I don't go down either, and for one full second I'm holding my ground against a wolf who's been doing this her entire life, and the look on her face tells me she felt it too.

"There," Ren says, and for the first time all morning there's something like approval in it. "That's what we're looking for."

We keep going until the sun's high and my arms feel like something borrowed and returned in worse condition than I got it. When Ren finally calls a stop, I'm bent over with my hands on my knees, breathing hard, and Cas hands me a water skin without a word, which somehow means more than if she'd said something kind.

"You're not bad," she says, once I've drunk half of it. "For someone who's apparently spent three years being told she was."

I laugh, short and surprised, because it's the first time anyone's said that plainly, without wrapping it in something softer.

"I had a lot of practice being told a lot of things," I say.

Pria's watching me with an expression I can't quite place. "Doesn't look like it took, though. Not all the way."

I don't have an answer for that. I'm still turning it over when Ren, coiling a length of rope over one shoulder, says something to the older wolves that I only half catch something about timing, about the council, about “three weeks” and my whole body goes still ,in a way that has nothing to do with the training.

"What's in three weeks?" I ask.

The yard goes quiet. Not dramatically. Just enough that I notice it, the way you notice a sound stop rather than a sound start.

Ren's face does something complicated. "That's not mine to tell you," he says, which is its own kind of answer.

"Ren."

"Sera." He says my name the way you'd hold up a hand. "It's Dax's to say. He should be the one."

"He should have already said it, then," I cut in, and I heard my own voice come out sharper than I meant it to, sharper than I've let myself sound at anyone since I crossed that border. "If there's a council hearing in three weeks that has something to do with me, I would like to hear about it from the person it concerns, not overhear it in a training yard from someone else's mouth."

Cas and Pria got very interested in the dirt.

Ren sighs, and it's the sigh of a man who knows he's already said too much to walk it back. "Mira Voss filed a formal grievance with the Neutral Pack Council," he says finally, flatly, like ripping something off fast is kinder than doing it slowly. "Naming the Hollow. Saying we're harboring a cursed bloodline in violation of the continental accords."

The words land somewhere under my ribs, cold and precise.

"She's using me," I say. Not a question.

"She's using the situation," Ren says. "Which currently happens to be you."

I look past him, toward the packhouse, toward whatever room Dax is in right now, and I feel something that isn't quite anger and isn't quite fear settle into my chest instead of something steadier than either. Three years at Ashveil, I would have swallowed this. I would have waited for someone to decide when I was allowed to know the shape of my own life.

"I need to talk to him," I say.

I don't get the chance.

Hoof beats come fast up the eastern approach, hard and uneven, and every wolf in the yard turns toward the sound at once, training forgotten. The rider who comes into view is one of Dax's scouts, a young man I've seen twice in passing, and he's pale in a way that has nothing to do with the ride.

He doesn't dismount so much as fall off his horse, catching himself, already talking before his feet are fully under him.

"Ashveil rider," he says, breathless, the words tumbling out of him faster than he can properly shape them. "In the neutral markets. Asking after her." His eyes find mine, and something in them makes my stomach drop before he finishes. "Asking by name. The Ashveil girl. Seraphina Cole."

The yard goes utterly silent.

Ren is already moving, already shouting for someone to find Dax, and Cas has a hand on my arm without seeming to decide to put it there, and all I can think, standing in the dirt with my knuckles still raw from the morning's fighting, is that three weeks was never going to be soon enough.

They already know where I am.