Rejected by Moonlight

They held the ceremony at Greywall. That was Kael's doing, and he arranged it without telling me, and when I found out I shouted at him for about ninety seconds and then had to go and stand outside. Because here is what he had done: he had gone to Ironmoon's elder benches, and to the twelve pack-halls of the North, and he had asked for a Mating Ceremony to be held on a Moonborn seat, under a roof that opened onto the same icefield they had once thrown a shiftless girl out into. And every hall had said yes. Not one of them argued. Two hundred years of we do not say that name, and it went down in a single season, because six hundred wolves had watched a white wolf stand on that ice and take an army apart with her voice, and you cannot argue with an entire generation's eyewitness. Old Hesta came. Ninety-four now, carried up in a chair, and when she saw me she cackled the same dry cackle she had let out alone in a silent hall four years earlier. "You didn't say it," she said, gripping my hand with startling force. "You told me to answer him." "I told you to say your half, girl." Her eyes were bright and absolutely wicked. "I never once said which half." They rolled back the shutters at Greywall. The moon came down red, and thick, and moving, and I stood on my own dais in a hall built out of my family's ashes and watched it slide across the floor and find nine pairs of frightened young wolves, and each time the hall roared. And then, because the moon has a sense of humor that I am no longer inclined to argue with, it came up the three steps and found the two of us anyway, four years late, in front of everyone, and my shoulder went gold and Kael Draven's went gold and eleven hundred wolves from twelve halls got to their feet at once. He said the nine words properly that time. In the right order, in front of every pack in the North, with his hand over the scar he'd given me. Then he did the other thing, which nobody had asked for and which they still tell in halls I've never been to. He knelt, and he took my hand, and he put it flat against his own throat — the old submission, the one a wolf gives its Alpha, the one no Alpha in six hundred years had given anybody — and he held it there and said, loud, so the back of the hall would hear: "Four years ago I stood in a hall and said the moon had erred." Silence. My hand on his pulse. "I was the error," said Kael Draven. "Ironmoon, Greywall, Vaelhollow, the twelve halls — hear me. She kept nine words for three years while I bled, and she spent them on my life. Whatever I am after tonight, I am it by her leave." And my son, who was five, and who has never in his life understood the concept of a solemn occasion, shouted from the front bench: "Mama, is he in trouble?" "Yes," I said, over the noise. "Forever."