Rejected Under the Blood Moon

The wedding banners went up three weeks early, and I was the one who hung them. Red silk across the north gate, gold thread chewing loose along the border where the wind had got in. My cousin's boys held the ladder and called me miserable aunt for the joke of it, and I let them, because the banners were for my own mating and I had stopped pretending I minded the work. You can learn a great deal about a pack by what it paints before a wedding. We painted the date. No names. There was only ever one name that needed painting, and mine had been on the alpha's list for four years. I sewed my dress that same winter. White silk, moonstone clasps at the shoulder, wolf embroidery running down both sleeves. I stitched the three wolves nearest the cuff myself, because my hands shook when I was tired and I wanted proof later that I had been steady on the night I said his name out loud in front of the moon. My mother hated that dress. She hated it more than she hated the tonics, or the late nights in the apothecary with the alpha's cup between my hands, or the way two of his councilors had started calling me Luna before anyone had asked the moon to agree. "A girl who sews her own wedding cloth is begging for a wedding," she said, grinding his winter medicine as she said it, and I remember thinking it was hard to take prophecy seriously from a woman with mortar dust on her sleeves. Isla Rowan. Twenty-two. Healer's daughter. Promise-bearer. Alpha's claimant since I was eighteen and a boy came up out of the river shivering with a comb held over his head like a trophy. Roman Hale had dived after it because the current took things you wanted back, and he climbed out with water in his ears and hair flat on his forehead, demanding one kiss as payment for a rescue nobody had asked him to perform. I gave him three. That is the whole of my romance if you want it honestly. One comb, three kisses, four years of being told that a girl from a house with a leaking roof had drawn the luckiest year in Hale Ridge. My grandmother's comb, that was. Not mine. It had come down to my mother, my mother had kept it in a flour tin for eleven years because a tin is safer than a drawer when you are poor, and on the morning I turned eighteen she had put it in my hair and said the only two words she ever said about it. "Keep it counted." I did not know what she meant. I have thought about it every day since. The tonics started the autumn after my mother's cough did, and I did not think about the order of those two things then either. Every month from the equinox I measured the powder into the alpha's cup: iron root, deer antler ash, the pale flake of moonmoss that had to be ground the same hour it came in or it went dead in the jar. Roman drank it without wincing, which I admired, because it tastes like a nail left in rain. His wolf was failing. Everyone knew it, nobody said it at table, and the saying of it would have cost him two of his three bannermen, so we all kept our mouths shut and let the healer's daughter make his medicine in a back room with the door closed. That was the arrangement I was proud of. I want that on the record, because pride is what got me to the temple steps with my hands still smelling of iron root. I was proud that the alpha of Hale Ridge needed my house to stay standing. The morning of the blood moon naming, I dressed in gray. Not the white silk. Not on a day when the pack had put a woman on my grave. My mother had been dead eleven days and I had promised her I would not be hurried, and then I had been hurried anyway, because Elder Corvin said the mourning year could be set aside for a claimant and set aside it was, and now I walked onto the temple terrace in my grandmother's best gray with the moon going red above the braziers and half the pack pretending not to look at me. The terrace seats were cut into black rock in six rings, and the braziers burned blue at the bottom of the bowl. Blood moon naming is old law. An alpha names his mate where the moon can hear, because the moon has been the only honest witness this bloodline ever had. I stood at the near mark. There was a mark. I had polished it. Corvin's voice carried down like a stone dropped in a well. "Alpha of Hale Ridge, name the claimant the moon has kept for you." Roman stepped to the far mark and did not look at me. He looked past my shoulder at the second ring, where the bannermen's families sat, and I watched him do the arithmetic one more time, and I want to be exact about this: he did not look nervous. He looked like a man closing a account. Then he said the name, and it was not mine. "I, Alpha Roman Hale, name Sloane of Coldwater my chosen mate under the blood moon, and I release Isla Rowan of no house from every claim of bond, title, and portion." The sound I heard after that was the braziers. Just the braziers, going up and down in the wind, and four hundred people learning how to breathe quietly. My mother had been dead eleven days. I had been barren for about nine of them. That was the second half, and I nearly laughed at it, because he had brought the charge properly: filed before the naming, witnessed by the temple healer, entered on the court roll in his own hand. Maud had drawn my blood three times that winter for pairing tests, and I had sat on the paper stool holding the cotton to my arm, thinking a princess gets pricked for a wedding too. She had never let me see the vials. "Barren," I said, and my voice came out level, which everyone later described as the frightening part. "You are calling me barren in front of the moon on the strength of tests you ordered." "I am calling you unbound," he said. "The ground is the pack's concern, not yours." Sloane stood beside him in white. She was not wearing my white. I checked. Hers had come from Coldwater, and it was a good dress, and I have hated myself for that relief more than for anything else that night. She was nineteen and pale and she had her hand up under her ribs where a woman's hand goes when she means people to look at her belly, and every wolf on the terrace decided in the same second what that meant. Corvin's old face did not change. "The claimant may speak." Four hundred wolves, and the wind, and a man I had given three kisses to in the rain. I looked at Roman, and I was hoping to feel the bond drag, that hook beneath my name he had used for four years like a finger on a light switch, and I did feel it. Faint. Far off. A rope between my chest and his, slackening as the moon listened. So I said the smallest true thing I had. "Your banners," I said. "I hung them on the north gate myself. The wind had chewed the gold. When you sent me out to do it in the sleet, was that before or after you wrote my name off the roll?" Someone in the fourth ring made a sound like a bark. He had an answer for that. I watched him find it, and he found the one he always found when the truth was expensive, which was to become beautiful and cold and speak softly enough that the crowd had to lean in and therefore agree with him. "You were a kindness I outgrew," Roman said. "I am sorry to spend the moon on it." That is the sentence that undid me, and it worked because it was the kind of sentence people quote. A kindness he outgrew. My mother would have ground that down and swallowed it before spitting out the bitter part. The bond went slack, then slack again, then something in my throat closed like a door. And in the second ring, behind the bannermen, a boy I had raised on broth and bad jokes threw his bench over and came down the rock steps with his fists already swinging, and they had him on the ground inside four seconds, and I heard the alpha's own voice say, calmly, as if he were settling a boundary dispute, "Rowan's debt. Hold him." My brother's face was in the dirt and his arms were not. "Tobin," I said. "Eleven days out of mourning and already borrowing from the wrong purse," said one of them, and they laughed, and then they took him down the temple stair, and I stood on the mark I had polished and did not follow, because following would have cost me the last thing I could still spend. The banners knocked against each other overhead, red silk on red silk, patient as a tongue. Sloane stepped forward to take my place at the near mark, and reached up, and took my grandmother's comb out of my hair with one courteous pull, and handed it to Roman, who put it in her box without looking at me at all. Keep it counted. "Alpha," I said. He turned. He was gracious even then. He had time for one more line, and he knew the moon was listening, and he had already decided what I was going to be: the cautionary story girls hear before they learn not to want too much. "What did you mean by that," he said, "about my banners." The braziers went blue, then white, then blue again, and I did not raise my voice at all. "I meant," I said, "that you are going to have to take them down yourself."