The Alpha Rejected Me, So I Built My Own Kingdom

THE REJECTION

They make you stand in the center.

That is the cruelty of it — not the words, though the words are bad enough. It's that they form a ring, the whole pack, three hundred wolves shoulder to shoulder, and they put you in the middle of it so that wherever you turn there is a wall of faces and not one of them is a way out.

Sera stood at Theron's right hand, already wearing the silver circlet of a Luna-to-be. Morag stood behind her, hands folded, serene as a saint. And Theron stood on the speaking-stone above me with the grey dawn behind him, and he would not meet my eyes.

Coward. I understood it fully now. He was not cruel — cruelty would have taken courage. He was simply a coward, and cowards do the cruelest things of all, because they do them while looking away.

"Lena Veyra." His voice was the formal voice, the Alpha voice, flat as a blade. "Stand and be released."

"From what?" My own voice came out steadier than I felt. The Elder's question had lodged in me like a splinter and given me something to hold onto that wasn't grief. "You can't reject a bond that was never claimed. The whole pack saw you choose Sera. There is nothing between us to sever."

A murmur went through the ring. Theron's jaw tightened.

It was Morag who answered, stepping smoothly forward, her cold voice pitched to carry. "The girl is confused. Grief, perhaps." A few sympathetic nods. "There is a taint of feeling that lingers, Alpha — an unsanctioned longing she has nursed for years, improper for an unmated, unranked female to direct at her Alpha. For Sera's peace, and the purity of the new Luna's bond, it must be formally cut. The Moon witnesses. Speak the words."

And I understood. This wasn't about me at all. It never had been. Morag wanted me severed, named, marked — unwolfed in front of witnesses — so that whatever I was, whatever the moon had bent toward, could be branded as nothing and sent away where no one would ever look at me twice again.

She was afraid of me.

That was the strangest thought I had ever had, and I had no time to hold it, because Theron lifted his hand toward the lightening sky and began to speak.

The Rejection is old words. Older than the pack, older than the kingdoms, words in the tongue the first wolves spoke when the moon was young. I will not write them. But I will tell you what they do.

They reach into the place where your wolf lives and they pull.

For most of the rejected, this is agony beyond description — the tearing of a bond is the tearing of a piece of the soul. I had braced for it knowing I had no wolf to tear. I had thought, with the small bitter pride of the truly emptied, at least it cannot hurt me. There is nothing there to hurt.

I was wrong.

Theron spoke the final word and the moon's grey light came down like a blade and went into me — and found something.

It found something vast.

I screamed. The pack flinched back as one. Because the thing the rejection reached for was not the little flickering candle of an ordinary wolf — it was a furnace, banked and buried and walled in stone, and the words of severance struck that wall like a hammer and the wall cracked.

Light poured out of the crack. Out of me. Silver, blinding, pouring from my eyes and the seams of my fingers and the open scream of my mouth, and through the roar in my ears I heard Morag shriek a word I did not know in a voice raw with terror, and I heard Sera cry out, and I heard, beneath it all, ancient and patient and glad, the voice behind the moon.

"There you are."

And then the wall in me slammed shut again — Morag's doing, I would learn later, the last desperate clench of a ward she had spent fifteen years maintaining — and the light snuffed out, and the furnace banked, and I dropped to my knees in the center of the ring, gasping, whole, ordinary.

Silence.

Three hundred wolves stared at me. Theron had gone white as the dawn. Morag's serenity had cracked clean off her face, and underneath it was not a saint and not a stepmother. Underneath it was naked, animal fear.

For one heartbeat, no one moved.

Then Morag recovered, and smoothed her face, and said in a voice that only shook a little: "Moonsickness. A fit. The taint, expelled. It is done." She turned to Theron. "Send her out. Now. Before nightfall. The bond is severed; the law is satisfied; she is no one."

And Theron, my coward, my unfinished sentence, looked at me kneeling in the dirt with light still ghosting under my skin — and he gave the order to cast me out.

They walked me to the border at midday. Sera came to watch. So did Morag. Theron did not.

At the edge of the wards, where the pack lands gave way to the grey dead trees of the Ashlands beyond, the guards stopped and would go no further, because no one goes into the Ashlands. I stepped across the line alone, into the salted silence of a kingdom three hundred years dead, with a borrowed cloak and a body that had stopped being only mine.

I did not look back.

But I heard Sera's voice float after me, light and clear and pleased: "Goodbye, little nothing."

And under my skin, low and certain, something far older than her, and far older than the pack, and far older than the moon's lie about who I was, opened one eye in the dark and began, slowly, to wake.