Rejected Luna

"What's the Orphan Go For?"

Perrin Rooke tipped his bucket across the floor I had just dried and stood there waiting to see what I would do.

I picked up the rag, wrung it out, and started again at the far corner.

"Nothing," he said. "Really nothing."

"Nothing."

He was nineteen and had been made a runner in the spring, and for two months he had been looking for the place where I would break, and most of the pack had been looking with him, leaving a space beside every door and waiting to see whether I would crawl into it and stay.

I did not crawl, and I did not give them the story they wanted; I scrubbed.

By the end of the first week the lye had gone into the cracks along my knuckles, and I woke each morning to a small, precise burning I had learned to read as other girls read weather. By the eighth week I knew where everything in this pack was kept — salt under the north eaves, coal in the long shed, the good knives in Nessa's cupboard, the bad knives everywhere else.

And the wolf had gone quiet in me the night the wire snapped — no stir, no call, no waking at the moon's rise, only a shape in my chest like a room somebody has left. Nobody in the yard could see it. They looked at me and decided I was already beaten, and they were counting the wrong thing.

Packless is a word with a law inside it. I had heard Elder Rowan say it to the children: the lowest thing on this land, and any hand is allowed to be raised against it. The law names a price for everything — a broken fence, a taken deer, a life — and it had never got around to naming mine.

What the law never says is the rest of it — that a hand raised against you has to be answered, or the raising of it becomes a habit in the man who did it. So on the second morning, when Perrin knocked the bread out of my hands, I had picked it up off the floor and eaten it in front of him, slowly, with my back to the wall and my eyes on his face the whole time.

He had not touched me since, but he had not stopped talking either.

"You missed a bit."

"I'll get it."

"You missed it yesterday, too." He leaned on the mop handle, the way a boy leans on a thing when he wants you to look up at him. "They're saying at the yards that he gave you till the snow."

"I've heard."

"And?"

"And I'm still here." I wrung the rag into the bucket and the water went the color of the floor. "Say it again tomorrow, Perrin. I'll still be here."

He went red to the collar, which was the only victory available to me and I took it, and then he shouldered out into the yard and told somebody I had gone strange, that I didn't even mind any more.

That was not true. I minded at four in the morning, when the burning in my hands woke me and the cold from the broken bond came back into the room like water finding a low place. I minded every time the drum went up on the ridge, because a gathering meant two hundred people arranged in rows with me outside them. I minded; I had simply learned the difference between minding and showing it, which nobody teaches an orphan until she has no choice left but to learn it.

What I wanted was small, and I wanted it badly: a reason to be kept. Not pride — pride is what you spend when you have nothing else. I wanted something in my hands that belonged to the running of this place, so that when the pack counted its mouths, mine would be a mouth with a use attached.

Maeve found me at the ash pit on a Thursday with a lump of hard soap wrapped in her scarf.

"Don't tell me that's off your mother's shelf."

"It's off my mother's shelf."

"I'll pay you back."

"You'll pay me in salt, same as you already do." She sat on the overturned crate and watched me riddle ash. "Lira cried in the wash house on Tuesday."

"Lira is Luna, and the Luna is allowed to cry in the wash house if she wants to."

"Lira is a girl who got handed two hundred people and no mother worth the name, and the elders eat her at every meal." Maeve picked a cinder out of the ash and threw it at the wall. "He isn't there — on the ridge half the day and gone the other half, and when he is there he does not look at anybody. Nessa says the Luna's seal hasn't been cut. Two months, Wren — two months, and he has not had her seal cut."

"What does that mean?"

"It means Elder Rowan is asking questions in a voice the whole pack can hear."

I did not want to care; I cared, which was worse — there was a part of me that had spent two months waiting for Lira Vale to fail, and I hated the heat it gave off.

"Say what you came to say."

Maeve's grin came out quick and guilty, and then she said it: "Forty crates. Salt, up from Saltmarrow, counted by Nessa and signed by Bram, under the north eaves."

"Twelve came out for the kitchen. I asked."

"You asked everybody."

"I asked everybody."

"Yesterday Bram drew six more, for the smokehouse, or so he told Nessa." She leaned in, though the yard was empty and the wind was ours. "The smokehouse is shut till the first frost, and I asked, and they laughed at me."

Six crates for a smokehouse that was shut.

"I'm going to look tonight."

"Wren—"

"You don't come," I said. "And you don't stand near me tomorrow, and if anybody asks, you never heard me count anything in your life."

Her mouth went tight; then she said, "Tobin Hale asked after me at the well."

"When?"

"Sunday." She said it like it was nothing, and then she said it again like it was everything. "Twice."

"Good," I said, and meant it, and it cost me something to mean it. "Then stay where you are. I need you on the inside."

"I am on the inside. That's the trouble with it."

The coast wagon came up at dusk with six crates roped on the back and a man walking beside it who was not Silvermane.

He had the look of the low country — salt gone white in the seams of his coat — and he stood at the gate with his hands loose, as a man stands when he has decided to find the Alpha amusing.

Caden came down from the hall with his sleeves pushed back, and the yard did the thing it always did when he crossed it: not silent, not frightened, only rearranged.

"Alpha," the trader said. "Six crates, as we said."

"Saltyard's price or mine?"

"Yours."

"Then count them."

The man's smile did something complicated and settled again. "Counted twice on the road."

"Count them a third time, Corin. Here, where I can watch your hands."

That was when he saw me. I was ten yards off, kneeling at the drainage run, mud to the elbow. His eyes went over me the way they went over the gatepost and the crates and the dog, and did not stop, and that was the thing I had trained myself not to watch for and had watched for every day since August.

Corin followed the look, and something in his mouth changed.

"And the girl?" he said. "What's the orphan go for, if she's —" He made a small shape with one hand: no pack, no bond, no price, nothing in this valley anybody would pay for.

The yard went still.