Rejected by Moonlight

Chapter Four: What the Alpha Felt

Kael

The first hour after she walked out of the salt, Kael Draven believed he had done the right thing badly.

By the second hour he had stopped believing anything, because he was on the floor of his own study with his shirt open and his shoulder had begun to bruise — not the mate-mark, which had gone the dead grey of a scar, but the flesh all around it, spreading out under the skin in the exact pattern of a hand pressing down.

By the third hour he was cold.

He had a fire six feet away, and forty pounds of wolf pelt over his knees, and his teeth were chattering so hard he'd bitten his tongue twice. Harlow, Ironmoon's healer, had gone through every draught in her case and then gone through them again, and finally she sat back on her heels and said the thing Kael would remember for three years.

"Alpha. What is she doing right now?"

"Who?"

"Her. The Hale girl. Where is she?"

And Kael Draven, who had held Ironmoon through two rogue winters, sat up so fast he tore the bruise open and said, "Where is she."

Nobody would tell him.

That is the sentence he would come back to, later, when he was picking through the wreckage for the moment it had actually gone wrong. Not the rejection. Not even the salt. The moment a room full of people he had known his whole life all decided, at once, to look at the floor.

He found Torin at the north gate. Torin, who had been eight years old with him and stolen bread with him, who was standing in the gate arch in the dark not doing anything at all.

"Torin."

"Alpha."

"Where is Ivy Hale."

And Torin said, "Elder Marrick had her put out. Three hours ago. Through this gate." He swallowed. "No cloak, Alpha."

They say that when Kael Draven shifted in that gate arch he broke the keystone. I've stood under it since; there's an iron band around it now. He went out into the Wither as a wolf the size of a plough horse and he ran her trail north for eleven miles with his own body freezing from the inside out, and Torin and nine warriors ran behind him, and at the eleventh mile they came over a ridge onto an icefield with three dead rogues on it.

Three rogues, opened up in a way that no shiftless girl and no wolf under two hundred pounds does.

A great deal of blood, none of it hers.

A circle of snow forty feet across where the crust had been scoured down to bare black rock, in a spiral, which is a thing his father had described to him once from a book and which he had thought was a story.

And two sets of tracks leaving north together. One vast and pawed. One a man's boots, unhurried, walking beside her.

Kael Draven stood on that ridge in a wind that should have killed a naked man, and his shoulder stopped hurting for the first time in four hours — stopped completely, went warm, because eleven miles away someone had put a coat over Ivy Hale's shoulders and given her hot broth in a bowl — and he understood, with the clarity of a man reading his own sentence off a wall, that she was alive and had shifted and had been picked up by another Alpha and that every single one of those three facts was worse than the last.

He was still standing there when the sun came up.

"Alpha," Torin said carefully. "Orders."

"Find her."

"North is Vaelhollow. Their border is nine miles on. We don't have a treaty, we have a ceasefire. If we cross it armed —"

"Find her," said Kael Draven.

They searched for two years and four months. They did not find her, because you cannot track something the moon is hiding, and because Rune Vaelen was the best liar in the North, and because Ivy Hale had spent nineteen years learning how to be furniture and it turns out that is an extraordinary foundation for disappearing.

What Kael got instead was the wither.

Every bruise she took, he wore. She learned to fight that winter — properly, eight hours a day, with Vaelhollow's brutal old weapons master — and Ironmoon's Alpha walked into his own war council with a split lip he could not explain and a cracked rib nobody had given him. When she trained in the ice water, he shivered through midsummer. When she broke two fingers on a shield rim, his hand seized up on the map table in front of nine elders and Marrick Vale said, gently, for everyone, "Perhaps the Alpha should rest."

And twice — twice in three years — something went through him so enormous that he blacked out where he stood.

The first was in the spring of the second year, and it lasted nineteen hours.

The second was fourteen months later, and it was short, and it was pure white joy, and it woke him out of a dead sleep laughing with tears running into his ears, and he lay in the dark of the Alpha's chamber in a fortress of four hundred wolves and had absolutely no idea that he had just felt his son learn to walk.