THE CHOOSING
993 Words
I had imagined this night for six years, and in none of those imaginings was I wearing a borrowed dress.
It was Sera's, of course. Everything good in our house was Sera's. The pale gold silk had been hers two seasons ago, before she outgrew the bodice, and now it pinched me under the arms and left a hem of bare ankle showing that the other girls would whisper about. I had let out the seams myself, in the dark, by candle, after my chores were done. I had told myself it didn't matter.
Tonight, none of it would matter. Tonight the Moon would choose, and I would finally be more than the wolfless girl who scrubbed the healer's floors.
"Stop fidgeting," my stepmother said. Morag's fingers were cold as river stones where they pinned a sprig of moonflower into my hair — a kindness so unlike her that I had been suspicious all evening. "You want to look your best when nothing happens."
"Something will happen."
"Lena." She smiled, and her smile never reached her eyes; her eyes were the flat grey of old coins. "You have no wolf. The Moon cannot bond a girl to a beast she does not have."
But she was wrong. She had to be. Because for six years, every time Alpha Theron passed me in the corridor, every time his shoulder brushed mine in a crowded hall, every time his voice dropped low and rough and said my name — Lena — something deep in my chest had pulled toward him like a tide toward the shore.
That was the bond. I knew it was the bond. It had to be.
The whole pack had gathered in the Hollow, a natural amphitheater of pale stone beneath the open sky, and torches threw orange light up the rock walls. Three hundred faces. Above us, fat and full and close enough to touch, the Choosing Moon.
I found my place at the very back, where the unranked stood. From here Theron was a distant shape on the high stone — broad-shouldered, dark-haired, crowned with nothing but the certainty of being born to lead. My heart climbed into my throat.
Choose me, I thought. Just once, let me be chosen first.
The Elder raised her arms. The singing began — that low, layered pack-song that vibrated in the teeth, in the marrow, in the soul. One by one, the unmated were called forward to stand in the moonlight, and one by one the Moon revealed their bonds: a gasp here, a sob of joy there, two young wolves stumbling into each other's arms as the silver light laced their wrists together like thread.
Then the Elder said my name.
"Lena Veyra."
The Hollow went very quiet. I felt three hundred pairs of eyes turn, and three hundred small, ugly thoughts: Why is she even up here? The wolfless one. The charity girl.
I walked into the moonlight anyway.
I stood beneath that vast silver face and I lifted my chin and I waited for the world to finally, finally tell me I belonged to someone.
And Theron rose from his stone seat.
My heart soared. He was coming. He was coming down, walking toward the moonlight, toward me, and I could see his face now — that beautiful, troubled face — and his eyes were fixed on—
He walked past me.
He walked past me so close that the wind of him stirred my borrowed hem, and he did not look down, and he stopped three steps beyond, in front of Sera, who stood in white because of course she did, who had known, who had always known.
"I choose you," Theron said, "as my Luna."
The Hollow erupted.
I did not hear it. I heard the blood in my own ears and the small wet sound of my own heart tearing loose from whatever it had been holding to for six years. Sera turned. She looked at Theron with shining eyes and a trembling, perfect smile — and then, for one half-second, over his shoulder, she looked at me.
She wasn't surprised. She wasn't sorry.
She smiled wider.
My knees went. I caught myself on nothing, on air, swaying in the moonlight while the pack cheered for the couple the Moon had blessed, and somewhere very far away my stepmother's cold voice was saying I told you, I told you nothing would happen, and I understood, with a clarity that felt like drowning, that she had pinned moonflowers in my hair tonight because she had wanted a good view of this exact moment.
They had all known.
I was the only one in the Hollow who hadn't.
I don't remember walking out. I remember the torches blurring. I remember a child laughing somewhere and not understanding why. I remember the cold of the corridor, and then the colder cold of the night beyond the den, and the moon — that traitor moon — following me up the path like an eye.
I made it to the ridge before my legs finally refused me, and I sat down hard in the frost-stiff grass, and I did not cry, because crying was a thing you did when you still believed someone might come.
Below me, the Hollow glowed gold with celebration.
Above me, the moon hung silver and enormous and silent.
And then — for the first time in my whole wolfless life — something in the dark behind it whispered my name.
"Lena."
I went rigid. The voice was not a voice. It was older than sound, a vibration in the silver light itself, and it knew me, it knew me, the way the bond was supposed to know me and never had.
I looked up at the moon.
The moon looked back.
And in the cold grass on the ridge above my ruined life, the skin of my bare arms began, very faintly, to glow.
- Writer
