He Crowned Another Luna, So I Let His Pack Burn

Chapter 8 The First Unwarded Night

For twelve years, night in Hollowmere had a texture: the faint blue rim on the horizon, so constant that pups thought darkness itself was edged in light. That rim was gone now, and the dark that replaced it was the old dark, the true dark, the kind the pack's elders remembered and had prayed never to see again.

They did not attack. That was the first horror.

Maeryn stood on the lodge's high wall beside a white-knuckled Odran and watched the tree line, and the Varkoth did not come howling out of it. They came to the edge of it she could feel them more than see them, a pressure against the border that no longer pushed back and they stopped, and they waited, and every so often a single horn sounded, low and unhurried, from a new direction. North. Then east. Then south. Circling. Measuring. Letting the pack listen to its own walls being paced.

"They're counting our gates," Odran said hoarsely.

"They're letting us count our fear," Maeryn corrected. "An enemy that wanted the kill would already be inside. This one wants us to understand, first, that it can come whenever it likes." She watched a torch gutter along the palisade where terrified warriors clutched spears they hadn't sharpened for war in over a decade. "It's negotiating. It just hasn't named its price out loud yet."

But she knew the price. She'd heard it from a boy with one arm. Send out the bleeding one.

Below, in the yard, Hollowmere came apart in slow motion. Corvan was everywhere at once pulling warriors off the useless outer positions, setting fallback lines by torchlight, roaring the pack's old defensive drills back into muscles that had gone soft on prosperity. He was good at it. That was the terrible, admirable truth of him; stripped of his certainty, the Alpha underneath was still a leader, and the pack steadied wherever his voice reached. But she could see what he could not yet let himself see: it wasn't enough. You could drill a wall of warriors all night and it would not do what nine ward-stones had done silently for twelve years. He was preparing to fight a war the wards had been quietly winning for him since before Ilsabet Renn was old enough to smile.

Ilsabet herself moved through the yard in her white bridal fur, and Maeryn watched her work the crowd the only way she knew how a steadying hand on a shaking shoulder here, a brave word there, the war hero's daughter being magnificent under pressure. And for an hour it held. Fear loves a figurehead.

Then a young warrior named Fenn barely past his first shift broke from the fallback line and ran to her, wild-eyed, and his voice carried up the wall in the brittle night air.

"Luna Ilsabet the wards you're Luna now, you sealed the bond, you have to can you light them again? Please. Selene answers the Luna. Bring them back."

And there it was. The whole yard heard it. The whole yard turned.

Maeryn went very still on the wall, because this was this precise moment that all of Ilsabet's beautiful maneuvering had been racing toward without her ever knowing it. She had spent nine days making herself Luna in every eye. Now four hundred terrified wolves looked to their Luna to do the one thing a Luna of Hollowmere had apparently always been able to do.

And Ilsabet could not do it. Because it had never been the crown. It had always been the blood.

Maeryn watched the golden girl's face in the torchlight watched, for one exquisite heartbeat, genuine panic flash behind the mask before the mask slammed back down. And Ilsabet did the only thing left to a woman with no power and a lifetime of practice at seeming to have it. She raised her chin, and she lifted her hands to the dark horizon, and in a clear, ringing, beautiful voice she called on the Goddess to restore the light.

Nothing happened.

The horizon stayed black. The horns sounded again closer, Maeryn thought, or maybe that was only the way silence carries dread. Four hundred wolves watched their new Luna beg the sky, and the sky ignored her, and Maeryn felt the yard's faith in Ilsabet Renn crack straight down its golden middle like the northern stone.

"She doesn't know how," Odran breathed, half question.

"No," said Maeryn. "She doesn't."

"Do you?"

Maeryn did not answer. Below, Ilsabet lowered her useless hands, and across the whole silent yard, slowly, the way a compass swings north, faces began one by one, then in a rush to turn away from the golden girl on her wedding night and search the dark for someone else. For the woman who had run this pack for twelve years. For the first Luna.

For her.

She let them look. She had earned the look.

Then, from the north wall, a sentry screamed not a war cry, a sound of pure animal horror and every head snapped round. Something had come out of the tree line after all. Not the host. One figure. It walked out of the dark and into the torchlight at the edge of the killing ground, upright, unhurried, twice the height of a man, and it stopped just short of where the ward-line used to burn testing, Maeryn understood whether the line was truly gone.

It set one clawed foot across the dead boundary. Onto Hollowmere's ground. And nothing stopped it.

It lifted its head, and it looked past every warrior, past the Alpha, past the crowned and useless golden girl up, unerringly, to the high wall where Maeryn stood.

And in a voice like grinding stone, into the frozen silence of the whole pack, it said one word.

"Bleeder."