Rejected by Moonlight

Chapter Three: The Wither

They put me out that night.

Not Kael. Kael had gone — walked out of the hall the second I crossed the salt, and I heard later that he made it as far as the armory before he went down on one knee and stayed there for a quarter of an hour with his hand over his shoulder, and that when Torin tried to help him up he snarled at him with a voice that wasn't entirely a man's.

It was Marrick who put me out. Marrick and six warriors, at the north gate, in a wind coming off the icefields at forty miles an hour.

"You will want to be reasonable," he said. He had brought a lantern and a small clean writing case, which told me everything about how he'd expected the night to go. "Say the words. Here, quietly, no audience, no shame in it. Say them and I will personally see you settled in a border holding with an allowance. A cottage, Ivy. A stove." He almost smiled. "You have never in your life had a stove of your own."

Snow was going sideways past the lantern.

"No," I said.

The almost-smile went off his face like a light switched at the wall.

"Then understand what you've done, you stupid child." He came very close, and for the first time in nineteen years Elder Marrick Vale stopped being mild. "A rejection unanswered doesn't die. It sours. All that severance, all that pain, and only one throat open to take it — his. Every hurt you take from tonight forward, he wears. Every hour you're cold, he's cold. You freeze out there and he will feel himself freeze from the inside of a warm hall and no healer alive will be able to tell him why." He straightened his cuffs. "You have made yourself a wound on the Alpha of Ironmoon. Do you imagine that ends with you living?"

I thought about that for a moment, with my hair whipping across my face.

"Good," I said.

They threw me out into the Wither with no cloak.

Here is what I remember of the next six hours, in the order I remember it.

Walking. Not toward anything — there was nothing north of Ironmoon for ninety miles but ice and the burned-out shell of Greywall — just walking, because stopping had a very obvious ending.

My left shoulder, screaming, then not. That was worse. Numb was worse.

The wind dropping, near the third hour, the way it does when the cold is about to get serious.

My mother's voice.

I want to be honest: I assumed I was dying and that dying comes with your mother's voice. I was face down in a drift under a black pine with my hands gone the color of skim milk, and I heard Elowen Hale say, as clearly as she'd said it across a kitchen table thirteen years earlier, you are not less, Ivy.

"I'm so tired," I said, out loud, to the snow.

You are LATE.

And something in my chest — the thing that had woken up under the Blood Moon and said mine — rolled over, and stood, and shook itself out, and it was enormous.

I had been told my whole life that the first shift is the worst pain a wolf ever survives. It isn't a shift, is the thing. It's a correction. Nineteen years of being folded into the wrong shape, and then the fold coming out.

My spine went first. I heard it, from the inside, a long crackling run of it like ice giving on a lake, and then my hands, every finger breaking and re-setting longer, and I screamed and the scream went down an octave, and then two, and then it stopped being a scream and became something that rolled off the icefield and came back off Greywall's ruined wall a mile away.

I came up out of the snow on four legs.

White. Not grey, not silver. White, and I could see the size of my own shoulder without turning my head, and when I put a paw down the crust didn't break, and the cold — the cold was gone. Not endured. Gone. Irrelevant. Something I lived in.

And around me, over the whole icefield, the moonlight was on the snow, and where I stepped it came with me, gathering along my flanks like frost forming on glass.

There, said the thing in my chest, and it was mine, and its name was Vesper. There you are.

I lifted my head to howl and that is when I smelled them.

Rogues. Nine of them, upwind, close, and already fanned into the arc that predators use on something that can't run — and my first coherent thought as a wolf, my very first, was not run and was not hide.

It was, with a calm that frightened me for years afterward: good. I need to hit something.

I killed three of them.

I am not going to pretend I remember it as strategy. I remember snow going up, and a throat, and a weight coming off my back, and Vesper's total serene joy, and then the six survivors breaking and running not from a fight they were losing but from something they had recognized, because the last one to go looked back at me across forty feet of red snow and its ears went flat and it whined.

And when the field was quiet, I turned around, and there was a black wolf standing on the ridge.

Enormous. Alpha — you can feel it, I learned that in the same three seconds I learned everything else. It had watched the whole thing. It had not helped.

It came down the slope and shifted as it walked, which is a thing I had never seen done and which takes forty years to learn, and by the time it reached me it was a man in a grey wolfskin coat, maybe thirty, with a scar through one eyebrow and a face that looked like it had been carved out to be honest with.

He looked at the dead rogues. He looked at me, white and steaming and standing over them.

Then Rune Vaelen, Alpha of Vaelhollow, went down on one knee in the snow in front of me and put his fist over his heart.

"Moonborn," he said. "Your line has been extinct for two hundred years."