Rejected by Moonlight

Chapter Ten: What a Moonborn Is For

There was no time to be gracious about it.

"Bryn — open my gate and get every Ironmoon wolf inside my walls."

"Alpha, that's four hundred armed —"

"Inside my walls, Bryn."

Kael was beside me. "They'll hold your wall. Ivy, they'll hold it, they've held mine —"

"They can't hold that." I was watching the host move. It moved well, that was the horror of it, it moved like something led. "Eleven hundred masterless wolves with an Alpha on the front. Walls don't stop that, they just decide the order."

"Then what."

I looked at him.

And he understood, because he had read four nights of his grandfather's archive and he had been raised to be the smartest man in the North and he was not stupid, only late, like me.

"No," he said.

"Rune Vaelen told me what I'm for the first week I had four legs." My voice was very steady, which surprised me. "A rogue is a wolf with no pack-bond and nothing in its head but hunger. And a Moonborn can pull on it. I did it by accident on that icefield when I was nineteen and six of them broke and ran, and I have done it on purpose eleven times in three years, one and two at a time, coming in off the ice — that's what Greywall is, Kael. It's not a fortress. It's three hundred wolves who used to be rogues."

"Eleven at a time." His jaw was tight. "Not eleven hundred."

"No."

"Ivy. What does it cost."

And I could have lied. I want that on the record, because in three years I had become an extremely competent liar and he would not have caught it in time.

"A call that size is my whole bond-strength," I said. "Everything I have. It'll pull them off their Alpha — most of them, the young ones, the ones who've only been out a season, that's six hundred wolves who stop being an army and start being mine. The rest will scatter or come at me." I made myself say the last part. "And it will empty me, Kael. Bond-burn. It doesn't heal. Moonborn who call at that scale walk away from it deaf — no pack-sense, no wolf, nothing on the inside. My great-grandmother did it at half the size and never shifted again."

He looked at me for two seconds.

"Absolutely not."

"It's not your call."

"It is my ice, my father died on it —"

"And my house was burned on it," I said. "And my son is asleep four hundred feet behind that wall."

That stopped him.

Then Kael Draven said, slowly, "Say it again. The part about what it empties."

"Bond-strength. Everything I've got."

"Everything you've got." He turned his left hand over. The cut was still open, mine and his, identical, in front of an entire pack. "Ivy. What do I wear?"

I stared at him.

Three years. Three years of him taking every bruise, every broken finger, every ice bath, nineteen hours of labor and a night of white joy when his son learned to walk. An unanswered rejection, souring, one throat open to take it — his.

"You'd wear the burn," I said. My voice had gone to nothing. "Kael — you'd wear all of it. It doesn't just hurt, it takes the wolf out —"

"Then it takes mine." He said it like a man reading a number off a page. "Not yours. Mine. That's what the wither is, that's what it's been for three years, and I have spent every one of them wishing there was a single thing I could do with it that mattered —" he took my shoulders, and it was the first time he had touched me since a Blood Moon, and the bond went off between us like something struck. "Ivy. If you do this and I carry it, you keep your wolf. You keep your pack-sense. You walk off this ice as the Luna who held the North and your children get a mother who can still hear them."

"And you'll be a wolf who can't shift, in front of four hundred —"

"Yes."

"They'll take Ironmoon off you inside a month."

"Yes," said Kael Draven, and he was almost smiling, and it was the most frightening thing I ever saw him do. "Ivy. Three years ago I stood in a hall and told five hundred wolves I would not spend four hundred lives on a moonbeam. I was so proud of that sentence." He let go of me and stepped back and looked out at eleven hundred wolves coming across the ice. "Let me spend one on you instead."

Behind us, Ironmoon and Greywall were pouring into the same gate for the first time in two hundred years.

"It doesn't work," I said. "Not while it's a rejection. The wither only runs one way — down, from me to you, pain and cold and hurt. It won't carry a cost, Kael, it's not a marriage, it's a wound —"

And I heard my own voice stop.

Because there was a way to make a wound into a bond, and it was nine words long, and I had been carrying it in my mouth for three years like a stone.

"Oh," I said.

Kael Draven went absolutely white.

"No," he said. "Ivy. No. Not for this. Not on an icefield with a horn going — you keep those words, you keep them sixty years, I told you —"

"You told me they were mine," I said.

And I took his bleeding hand in my bleeding hand.

"So let me spend them."