Rejected by Moonlight

Chapter Two: Five Hundred Witnesses

He crossed the hall in nine strides. I counted them, because counting was the only thing my body would still do.

Up close he was worse. Up close the bond had a pull, an actual physical tow toward him, and I had to lock my knees to keep from stepping into his chest like a boat coming into a slip.

He stopped an arm's length away. He was shaking. I remember being amazed by that.

"Say your name," he said, low, only for me.

"You know my name."

"Say it."

"Ivy Hale."

Something went through him at Hale — a flinch, fast and buried, and I would spend three years thinking about that flinch. Then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them the grief was gone. He'd put it somewhere. He was Alpha; he had places to put things.

"Ironmoon," he said, and turned so his voice would carry to the back of the hall. "The moon has erred."

The silence was so complete I could hear the fires.

"The moon does not err." That was Old Hesta, from the elder benches, ninety and furious. "It has never erred in six hundred years, boy, and it did not err tonight —"

"She is shiftless." He didn't raise his voice. That was the awful part. "She has never worn her wolf. She has no rank, no blood claim, no training. In eleven weeks the rogue packs come down through Greywall for the third year running and I will put a Luna in front of my people who cannot shift her own hands." He drew a breath. "Ironmoon does not survive that. I will not spend four hundred lives on a moonbeam."

I heard someone start to cry. It took me a moment to understand it wasn't me.

Seraphine came down the dais steps. She put her hand on Kael's arm and she looked at me with her head tipped, and her eyes were shining, and she said, so gently, so audibly, "Alpha, don't be cruel to her. She can't help what she is."

And Kael Draven said, "Bring the salt."

Everything in me went very still, because I knew what salt was for. Every wolf did. Salt was for rejection. You stood in a circle of it so the bond couldn't crawl back together across the gap.

They poured it around us both. Two of his warriors did it, and one of them — Torin, who used to steal bread for me when we were eight — could not look at me while he did.

There is a formula. It is nine words long and every pup learns it the way human children learn prayers.

Kael Draven turned to face me inside the circle. He was pale under the firelight. His pupils had blown wide, wolf-wide, and I understood that his wolf was screaming at him, and that he was holding it down the way he held everything down.

"I, Kael Draven, Alpha of Ironmoon," he said — and that part is only standing, only a man saying who he is; the words themselves are the nine that come after — "reject you as my mate, blood and moon, forever."

It went through me like a spike of ice driven up under the sternum. The brand on my shoulder tore — not faded, tore, and I heard myself make a sound I have never made since, and my knees hit the flagstones inside the salt, and somewhere far away four hundred wolves flinched as one animal.

And then it stopped.

Because it wasn't finished.

Old Hesta was on her feet. "Answer him, child," she said, and her voice had changed — there was something urgent in it, something that was trying to tell me a thing she wasn't allowed to say out loud. "You must answer him. You must say your half."

I knelt on the stones in a ring of salt with my shoulder on fire and my mouth full of blood from where I'd bitten through my lip.

And I looked up at Kael Draven.

And I thought about nineteen years of trays. I thought about my mother, who died when I was six and who used to hold my face in both hands and say you are not less, Ivy, you are late. I thought about how easy I had been to throw away, how little anyone had even had to lie, and how the single thing left in the world that was mine was the two seconds of silence I was standing in.

"No," I said.

The hall went so quiet the fires sounded like weather.

Kael's eyes snapped to mine. "What?"

"I said no." I got one foot under me. It took a very long time. "You rejected me. Fine. Rejected. In front of your whole pack, and I hope it keeps you warm." I stood, and I was shaking so hard I thought I might come apart at the joints, and I made myself say the rest slowly so every wolf at the back would hear it. "But the words need two of us, don't they. Nine from you and nine from me. That's the contract." I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and looked at the blood on it. "So no. I don't say mine. Not tonight, not in eleven weeks, not when the rogues come, not ever. You want it broken, Alpha?"

I stepped over the salt.

"Break it yourself."

And behind me, on the elder benches, Old Hesta began to laugh — a dry, delighted, disbelieving cackle, alone in five hundred silent wolves — and Elder Marrick Vale went the color of wet ash, and Seraphine's hand tightened on Kael's arm until her knuckles showed white.

Because I didn't know what a half-rejection did.

But they all did.