Rejected by Moonlight

Chapter Eleven: Nine Words

There is a formula for rejection and everyone learns it as a child.

What almost nobody knows — because it is in nine books in the North and eight of them are ash — is that the words are not a spell. They are a shape. Nine beats, blood and moon and forever, and the shape doesn't care which way you point it.

I stood on the ice at the gate of Greywall with Kael Draven's cut hand inside mine, with eleven hundred rogues a mile out and seven hundred wolves at my back and four hundred years of my family's ashes under my boots, and I said the nine words.

Not his nine.

Mine.

"I accept you as my mate. Blood and moon. Forever."

I have been asked many times what it felt like, and the honest answer is: like a door I had been leaning on for three years being opened from the other side.

The grey scar on my shoulder went gold.

Not gold like paint. Gold like something under the skin lighting up, and it ran — down my arm, across the join of our hands, up into him, and Kael Draven's head went back and he made a sound I will hear on my deathbed, and then it kept going. Out past him. Into the ranks. I felt it go, and this is the part I still cannot explain properly: I felt seven hundred wolves at once. Every one of them. Torin's stubborn grief. Harlow counting bandages. Old Bryn, delighted. A boy on the west wall, sixteen, who had been a rogue eleven months ago, who was frightened and pretending not to be.

Seven hundred, and every one of them turned to look at me.

That is what a Luna is. Nobody had ever told me. They talk about Lunas like they are ornamental, like the word means the Alpha's wife, and it does not. A Luna is the place a pack's bonds are tied. Kael held them. I could hear them.

"Oh," I said, "you idiots, all of you, for six hundred years —"

"Ivy," said Kael, hoarse. "They're at half a mile."

I turned around and looked at eleven hundred rogues.

And I called them.

I cannot describe the call itself, because I have never had a word for the sense it used, in the way that I assume a fish has no word for wet. I can tell you what it looked like from the wall, because three hundred people have told me.

The white wolf went out of the gate alone, and stopped forty feet clear of it, and howled.

The sound went out across the icefield and it did not come back.

That's what everyone says first. There was no echo. Greywall's wall throws every sound in the world back at you and that one it swallowed, and the snow-crust for forty feet around me scoured down to black rock in a spiral, the same as it had when I was nineteen, only now it went out and out, two hundred feet, four hundred, a widening pale wheel across the ice with me at the middle of it.

And the rogue host broke.

Not ran. Broke, the way ice breaks, along seams you couldn't see until it happened. The front three ranks simply stopped, and stood, and one of them sat down. Then whole sections of the host peeled sideways and came toward me at a dead run with their ears flat and their heads low — six, seven hundred wolves running at Greywall's gate to submit, which meant that the seven hundred armed wolves behind me had to stand absolutely still and let them come, and to the eternal credit of Ironmoon and Greywall both, not one of them broke ranks.

And it hurt.

I don't want to dress this up. Somewhere around the third second it stopped being effort and became damage, a long tearing-out feeling behind the sternum, like something being pulled up by the roots — and then it went sideways.

I felt it leave me. I felt it pour along a gold thread and land on Kael Draven, forty feet behind me at the gate, and I heard him go down on the ice, and I could not stop, and I kept calling.

And then — and this is the thing that no book in the North records, because for two hundred years no Moonborn had ever been bonded when they did it — it kept going past him.

Out through him, into seven hundred pack-bonds, into every wolf on that wall.

Spread across seven hundred backs, it was nothing. It was a bad morning. Old Bryn said afterward it felt like a hangover and an argument.

That is what a pack is for. Nobody had told them either.

When I came back to myself I was human, on my knees on bare black rock, with my hair frozen in a sheet down my back and six hundred and eleven new wolves lying flat in the snow in a wheel around me.

And walking up through them, alone, unhurried, the bone-colored Alpha, shifting as he came.

He was old. Seventy, maybe more, and built like a door, with a face I had seen every day of my life in a bad silver mirror in a kitchen — my mother's cheekbones, my mother's mouth.

"Well," he said. "You're Elowen's."

"Who are you?"

"Corwin Hale." He stopped ten feet off and looked around at his army lying in the snow with something like professional appreciation. "Your mother's brother. Ironmoon burned our seat when I was nine and put me out on this ice, and I have spent sixty-one years pulling every masterless wolf in the North together to bring that mountain down, and it took me sixty-one years, girl." He tipped his head. "You did it in four seconds."

"You sent them," I said. My voice was a ruin. "The night I shifted. Nine rogues."

"I sent them to see whether Elowen's daughter was worth collecting." He shrugged. "You killed three. I was delighted."

"They'd have killed me."

"Then you'd have been no use." He said it without any cruelty at all, which was worse. "Come with me. Not as a follower — there's nothing left to follow, you've just taken my whole host off me and I find I'm not even angry. Come as Hale. You and I can end Ironmoon inside a year and put our house back where it was, and every wolf on this ice will thank us."

And behind me, Kael Draven — who could not stand up, who would not be able to shift for a year and a half, who had just taken a bond-burn meant for someone else in front of his entire pack — said, from the ice: "Ivy."

Just my name. Nothing else. He did not tell me what to choose. I have loved him for that ever since.

I looked at my uncle.

"They put me out that gate with no cloak," I said. "Eleven weeks before a rogue winter. So I understand you, Corwin, better than anyone alive." I got one foot under me, and then the other, and it took a very long time, and every wolf in the wheel lifted its head as I did it. "But I built a wall in the hole where our house used to be, and it's full of your army, and they're mine now, and I'm not spending them on sixty-one years of your grief."

His face didn't change.

"You're your mother's," he said again, and this time it wasn't a compliment.

"Yes."

Corwin Hale looked at Greywall's rebuilt gate for a while, with an expression I have never been able to name.

Then he turned around and walked north, alone, out onto the icefield, and nobody stopped him, and the last anyone saw of him he was a pale shape going toward Greywall's dead ground with the sun coming up on his left.

I have never found his body.

I want you to remember that.