Rejected by Moonlight

Chapter Six: Two Reasons

They came in October, nineteen hours apart, in a turf-roofed room with Marta on one side and Rune outside the door refusing to sit down.

A girl first. Then a boy.

I named the girl Elowen, for my mother. The boy I named Wren, because it was small and it was ordinary and I wanted one thing in my life that nobody had prophesied.

The girl had my face and my mother's chin and hair the color of wet sand.

The boy had black hair and, when he finally opened his eyes on the third day, the pale grey of a winter sky, ringed dark, and Marta made a small sound and went out of the room, and Rune came in and looked into my son's face for a long moment and said, tiredly, "Well. There's no arguing with that."

Because every wolf in the North knew the Draven eyes.

"He can't ever come here," I said.

"He can't ever come here," Rune agreed. "So we make sure he has no reason to." He sat down on the edge of the bed, and he was gentle, and it was the first time I ever saw him look afraid. "Ivy. Listen to me now, because in about a year you're going to start thinking about what you're owed, and I want to have said this while you still have milk on your shirt."

"Say it."

"He wears everything you take. That's the wither. You've had nineteen hours of the worst pain a woman survives, twice, and he had it too, and he does not know what it was." Rune held my eyes. "That's a weapon. It is the only one in the world pointed at the strongest Alpha in the North and it lives in your body, and I need you to understand that the day you use it on purpose, you become something. And I don't know what."

He was right on every count except one, and it took me eleven months to find it.

What Rune Vaelen wanted — and he never lied about it once, which I have always given him credit for — was a Moonborn Luna in Vaelhollow. He asked me to be his in the third year, plainly, in daylight, on the terrace where he'd told me my name was a war crime.

"I'm fond of you," he said. "That's not the pitch. The pitch is twelve hundred wolves, a Moonborn on the high seat, and Ironmoon finally having a neighbor it can't push. Also I like your children and your son has started calling me Ru, which I have decided is unfair."

I looked at him for a while.

"You know what he'd feel," I said. "If I did."

"Yes."

"Say it out loud."

Rune Vaelen had the grace to look away. "The bond isn't broken. He'd feel it happen. It would very likely put him on his knees in front of his own war council." A pause. "I would not pretend that isn't part of the appeal."

"Then no." I heard myself say it and only understood it as I did. "Not because of him. Because I've been somebody's political solution since I was nineteen, and I'd rather run a pack than be the reason one gets stronger."

Rune raised his eyebrows.

"Run a pack," he said.

"You said there were nine Moonborn houses." I put my daughter on my hip and walked to the rail, and I looked north, past Vaelhollow's ridges, at a smudge on the horizon nine miles the wrong side of the border. "You said Ironmoon burned them out. You never said they burned the land."

There is a ruin at Greywall. Ninety miles of icefield with a dead fortress in the middle of it, the place Kael Draven's father died defending, the gap every rogue pack in the North comes down through because there has been nobody holding it for two hundred years.

It had been a Moonborn seat. Mine. Legally, under a six-hundred-year-old pack law that no one had bothered to repeal because no Hale had existed to invoke it.

"That's a suicide," Rune said.

"It's a wall," I said.

I took forty wolves who volunteered, and Old Bryn, who did not volunteer so much as pack a bag and stand by the gate, and I walked out of Vaelhollow in the spring of the third year with two toddlers in a cart.

And eleven months later Ironmoon's northern scouts came back to Kael Draven with a report that took him twenty minutes to get through, because Greywall was standing.

Rebuilt. Garrisoned. Three hundred wolves and growing, rogues coming in off the ice and submitting instead of raiding, the gap sealed for the first time in two centuries — and flying, over the rebuilt gate, a banner nobody in Ironmoon had seen outside a burned book.

A white wolf on black.

House Hale.