The Alpha Threw Me To The Hyenas

Chapter Three: Backwards

I should explain what a binding does, because I did not know either.

Nobody tells you. It is one of those things everybody in a house like that assumes you already understand, the way people assume you know how a stove works. I had carried trays past eleven of them. I had never once been told what happens on the inside.

Here is what happens.

There is a place behind the breastbone that you go your whole life without noticing. Kael put his hand round my wrist and said the second half of the words, the half nobody says out loud unless the first half has been answered, and something reached into that place and set a hook in it.

That is the closest I can get. A hook, set from the outside, in a part of me I had never had a reason to think about.

And then it pulled.

The horror of it was not the pain. I want to be very clear, because for a long time afterwards people asked me if it hurt and I could never make them understand. It did not hurt. It felt like agreement. It felt like my own body turning round to face him and saying yes on my behalf, in my voice, using something of mine, and me standing behind it with my mouth open and no way to reach the front.

I had said no twice in front of six hundred people and my own chest was saying yes.

I want you to sit with that for a second, because I have had to.

I could see his face. He had his eyes shut. Whatever it took out of him to do it, it took something, because there was sweat coming up along his hairline and his jaw was locked and his hand on my wrist had gone tight enough that I felt the bones move.

And then it reached the bottom.

I do not know how else to say this. The hook went down through the place behind my breastbone, looking for the thing it had come to fasten to, and it went past where a wolf would have been, and it kept going, and there was so much further down there than there should have been.

Then something at the bottom of me woke up and took hold of the line.

Not the way you catch something. The way you close a hand around a rope that has come into reach after a long time.

It was not a wolf. I knew that immediately and I knew it in a part of my head that had no words in it. Whatever came up the line towards Kael Varro was older than everyone in that room put together and it did not care about any of us, and it had been down there my entire life, and it was awake now, and it was interested.

The room noticed before I did.

That is the detail I remember most clearly. Nobody in that hall could have told you what was happening. But the three people standing nearest to us stepped back at the same time without appearing to decide to, and a young man at the end of the front row dropped his eyes to the floor and could not get them up again, and all the way down the length of that room I watched wolves who had known me since I was a child turn their faces very slightly away from mine.

Their bodies had answered something. Their bodies had answered before anyone's mind had caught up, and every single one of them was going to spend that night trying to work out why.

Halvard Varro did not step back. Halvard Varro leaned in.

Then the line went the other way.

I did not do it. I have said this in a hundred rooms since and nobody has ever believed me and it remains true. I did not do it, I did not know how to do it, I did not know it was possible. The thing at the bottom of me took the hook that had been set in my chest and it ran back up the line into the man who had put it there.

Kael went off his feet.

He did not stagger. He came off the ground entirely and went backwards across the floor of that hall for about ten feet and hit the base of the dais with his shoulder and the side of his head, and the sound it made was flat and wet and wrong, and six hundred people made one sound together for the first time all evening.

The grip came off my wrist as he went. I felt the hook come out of me, and it came out the way a splinter comes out, dragging.

Then it was quiet again, and I was standing on my own in the middle of the floor, and my hands had started to bleed.

Not from anywhere. That is the part I need you to understand. Nothing had cut me. Nobody had touched me except Kael and he had only had me by the wrist. The blood was coming up through the skin of both my forearms, out of the two short lines they put under me at three days old, the marks that made me Ilthar. It came up out of the house marks and ran down over my palms and off my fingers onto the floor, and it went on coming, and it did not stop.

I turned my hands over and looked at them. I remember thinking, with a kind of distant practical irritation, that I would not be able to get it out of the dress.

Someone screamed. Just one person, quite far away.

Kael was trying to get up. He had got as far as one knee with a hand on the step behind him and there was blood at his temple where he had gone into the stone, and he was looking at me with an expression I would not see again on any face for four months, until a woman in the Bone Country looked at me exactly the same way and told me who my mother was.

Ivette Sarn was on her feet. She was the last person in the hall to stand and she did it slowly, and she was not looking at Kael at all. She was looking at the floor under my hands.

Ilyas had crossed half the room. I never saw him move.

And Halvard Varro stood four feet away from me with his hands still behind his back and blood running off my fingers onto his floor, and the man was not afraid. Not one part of him. He looked down at my arms, and then up at my face, and there was something in his eyes that I was too young and too frightened to read at the time, and it took me one hundred and forty-four days and a great deal of dying to work out what it was.

It was recognition.

Six hundred people in the house of Ilthar watched the marks they had given me open by themselves and bleed. Six hundred. Every one of them saw it. There was not a person in that room, not a servant, not a cousin, not a single one of the men holding Mira back in the aisle, who could ever afterwards say they had not been there.

And that, more than the word I said twice, is what none of them were ever going to forgive me for.