Mated at Midnight

Chapter 6: What the Circle Takes

He didn't argue with me in the hall. He never argued in front of the pack.

He waited until the doors were shut and the crowd was gone and the council had scattered to their beds with their self-satisfied faces, and then he found me in the armory, where I had gone because I did not know anywhere else a person could stand and still be angry.

"Four days," he said from the doorway.

"Four days."

"You don't have a wolf."

"I have a debt."

"A debt won't stop a blade."

"Then teach me something that will."

He looked at me a long moment, and then he did something I had never seen him do: he took off his coat and hung it on a peg, and rolled his sleeves, and stepped onto the sand himself.

The armory had an exercise floor, old sand over stone, where the guard drilled in winter. He picked up a practice sword. He tossed me the other.

"Hold it like you mean to cut something, not like it's a dead rat."

"Show me."

He did. And I copied him, badly, and he corrected me without touching me, using the flat of his blade to nudge mine, and we went on that way until the candles guttered and my arms shook.

"Again," he said.

"I'm done."

"Again."

The bond woke when he said it. Not the pull. The other thing. Strength coming down the line the way water comes down a hill, his stamina pouring into me because he wanted it to, because for the first time since the Rite he was feeding me on purpose.

I felt it and I hated how good it felt.

"Stop," I said.

"Don't stop. Pull."

"It costs me a memory every time."

"I know." His voice was even. "That's why you're going to pull now, while you can still choose what it takes. In the circle you won't get to choose. Learn what it feels like when it's free, so you know the difference when it isn't."

So I pulled.

I felt a coin drop down the well of me, somewhere I couldn't point to, and this time I felt what left with it: the smell of the tallow candles in my mother's kitchen, and the way she sang when she thought no one was awake. Just that. Small and mine.

I looked at Rhys with tears standing in my eyes that I refused to shed, and I raised the sword, and I hit him so hard he had to take two steps back to keep his feet.

He laughed. It startled me more than the strength did. I had not heard him laugh in three years.

"Again," he said, and this time he was smiling, and it was terrible, because we both knew what day it was.

We drilled until the fourth bell. He talked, between exchanges, about the circle and its price, because I'd never seen one. He said the ground bites, and the bonds feel it. He said that when you fight in the circle, the law cuts every tie that leaves it, so a champion can't lean on the pack, the pack can't lend him strength, the ancestors can't be called. He said that is the point of it. That the circle makes you fight as if you were born alone.

"Then how do I win," I said.

"You don't win by being stronger. She'll be stronger. She was born to the blade and the moon." He lowered his sword. "You win by being the one the pack wants to see win."

"The pack hates me."

"The pack remembers the stones." He wiped his face with his sleeve. "I have spent three years letting them remember the stones. On the fourth day, when you walk into that circle, they will remember something else, if you give them something else to hold. That is the whole of it. That is what a Trial is. It is not a fight. It's a story, and the crowd decides when it's true."

"And you?"

"What about me."

"What will you remember, the fourth day, when I've spent myself on memories in front of them?"

He was quiet. Then he said the truest thing he had said to me since the Rite.

"That I didn't stay," he said.

Mira was waiting at the foot of the east tower stairs.

She had no lantern. She was in her nightdress with a cloak thrown over, and she was shaking, and for one second she was eleven years old again and I was carrying her through the snow, and I nearly dropped my sword.

"Don't," she said, before I could speak. "Don't be kind to me. I came to tell you something and if you're kind I won't get it out."

"Say it."

"Ysolde sent for me tonight. Before the healers came, while she was still bleeding on the litter. She offered me a bargain in front of two of her women." Mira's voice shook, but her eyes were steady, and I saw our mother's steadiness in them, and my own.

"What bargain."

"She wins the circle. I'm named her ward, and the debt comes to me. She'll let me live if I hand her the mountain after you're dead." She caught my wrist, hard. "The knife was hers. She cut herself, Wren. I saw the wound. It's on the wrong side, and the cut is shallow and clean, and it's where a right hand reaches when it's aiming for a story, not a heart. She built all of it to bring the law down on you and then own what's left of our house."

The blood went out of the night. I stood on the stair with my sister's hand on my wrist and understood, all at once, what kind of thing I was walking into.

"Then we let her," I said.

Mira stared at me.

"Four days," I said. "In the circle, the law cuts every bond that leaves it. So when she steps in, her own bargain dies with her. And when I step in, mine does too." I looked at the tower, and the king's light burning in his window across the yard, the way it burned every night while he told himself he wasn't watching. "And there's exactly one person in Ironhollow who still knows what my bond can do."

I opened my hand. The coin of memory sat in it, small and bright and burning.

"Go home," I told my sister. "And on the fourth day, whatever happens, don't step into the circle."