He Crowned Another Luna, So I Let His Pack Burn

Chapter 5 First Blood

They brought Tovan back at grey dawn, and the sound the pack made when the gates opened was one Maeryn had not heard in twelve years: the low, rising moan of wolves smelling their own blood on the wind.

The boy was alive. That was the first mercy and nearly the last. They carried him in on a shield-board, and where his right arm should have been below the elbow there was a soaked wrapping, and his face above it was the grey of ward-stone. Four warriors had gone north at moonset to relieve the doubled patrol. One had come back tied to a plank, and the other three had come back changed, silent, flinching from the tree line.

The lodge became a surgery, then a fortress, then a court, in the space of an hour. Maeryn worked she had always worked; hands busy at the boiling linens and the moss packing while half the pack stood useless with shock and so she was three feet from the boy when the healer's draught loosened his tongue, and he began, in a high, drifting singsong, to talk.

"Polite," Tovan said, to the rafters. "It was so polite. It stood on its side. Never crossed. Big as a horse and it stood so still and it asked. It asked nicely."

Corvan was there in an instant, crouched, gripping the boy's remaining hand. "Asked what, son? What did it want?"

"Said the light is going out." Tovan's eyes wandered, found nothing, wandered on. "Said they can smell it going out. Said they've waited so long, and they only want one thing, and if we give it they'll wait longer. It asked so nicely, Alpha, and I said I didn't understand, and it" His breath hitched, and his gaze dropped to the wrapped ruin of his arm with a child's simple puzzlement. "It said that was for the delay."

The hall had gone absolutely silent. Fires and breathing.

"What one thing?" Corvan's voice, very quiet. "What did it ask for, Tovan?"

And the boy turned his head, drifting on the draught, and his unfocused eyes slid across the crowd across Corvan, across Ilsabet luminous and stricken at the front and stopped, by pure animal accident, in the direction of the shadowed corner where Maeryn stood with bloodied linens in her hands.

"The bleeding one," Tovan said, clear as a bell into the silence. "They asked us to send out the bleeding one."

For three full heartbeats, nobody moved.

Then the hall erupted voices, fear, fury, elders shouting over warriors and under the cover of that noise, two things happened that only Maeryn was placed to see. Priestess Verah, at the far wall, closed her eyes like a woman hearing a sentence pronounced. And Ilsabet Renn golden, grieving, magnificent Ilsabet went utterly still, and her gaze cut sideways, fast and flat as a blade, to Maeryn's bandaged palm.

Counting. The girl was always counting.

"Enough!" Corvan's roar cracked the panic in half. He rose from the boy's side and Maeryn watched twelve years of easy certainty burn off him in one breath, leaving something older underneath, leaner, the wolf she'd once rebuilt a broken pack beside. "It talks in riddles to frighten us. That is what a besieger does when it cannot breach the wall it begs the wall to open itself. Hear me. No wolf of Hollowmere will be sent anywhere. Not one." His eyes swept the hall and found hers, and held. "Whatever it thinks it's asking for, it will not get it. On my blood, I swear that."

On his blood. Maeryn held his gaze and thought, with a calm that was becoming its own kind of madness: wrong blood, my love. Twelve years, and you still don't know whose blood your oaths are drawn against.

It was Ilsabet who broke the silence, and Maeryn had to admire the stroke even as she watched it land. The girl stepped forward into the torchlight, tears standing bright and unshed grief-stricken, brave, a war hero's daughter rising to the moment and turned to face the pack.

"They strike at us now because they think we are divided," she rang out. "One Luna set down, another not yet raised they smell the seam and they claw at it. Then let's close the seam." She turned to Corvan, and knelt, white fur pooling on bloody floorboards, and the sight of it went through the frightened pack like strong drink. "Alpha. Don't make Hollowmere wait nine days to be whole. Seal the bond now. Tomorrow night, under the waxing moon. Let them watch our light get brighter."

The hall roared. Of course it roared she'd built the roar with her own two hands, fear and love and theater all braided together, and it was masterful, and Maeryn stood in the shadows doing sums no one else in the room knew existed.

The rites, moved to tomorrow night. The sealing and the release of the tithe three days before the full moon instead of on it. The wards, already drinking uphill from her open palm, cut off with three days of dark moon still to run.

Corvan looked down at the kneeling girl, and out at his terrified, roaring pack, and Maeryn watched him mistake momentum for strength one last time.

"Tomorrow night," the Alpha said.