Rejected by Moonlight

Chapter Five: Vael hollow

Rune Vaelen never once asked me to say the words.

That is the whole reason I trusted him, and it took me a year to notice that it was also strategy.

Vaelhollow was a valley pack, twelve hundred strong, timber and terraces and long low halls with turf roofs, and everything about it was warmer than Ironmoon in a way that had nothing to do with fires. On my third day there a woman I'd never met handed me a baby to hold while she dealt with a pot, which is a thing that had never in nineteen years happened to me, and I stood in a strange kitchen holding a stranger's child and cried so hard the woman had to take her back.

"You'll want to know what you are," Rune said, that first week.

We were on the high terrace. He'd given me his mother's coat, which I only found out later.

"I'd settle for what I'm not."

"You're not shiftless." He leaned on the rail. "You were late. Moonborn always are. The line runs cold for nineteen, twenty years and then it comes in all at once, usually in extremity, usually in snow. Your ancestors were the pack-callers, Ivy. Every wolf inside a mile of a Moonborn fights better, heals faster, holds a line longer, and the ones outside your pack —" he tipped his head at the northern ridges — "the rogues that broke off you on that icefield. You know why they ran?"

"I hoped it was me."

"It was six hundred years of instinct. A rogue is a wolf with no pack-bond and no Luna and nothing in its head but hunger, and you are the one thing in the world that can pull on it. You didn't frighten them, girl. You nearly made them yours." He straightened. "There were nine Moonborn houses. Ironmoon burned the last of them out two hundred years ago because a wolf who can call other packs' warriors is a wolf who can take a mountain. The house was called Hale."

I stood very still.

"Say that again."

"Your name," said Rune Vaelen, "is a war crime with a family tree, and I would bet this valley that Kael Draven's grandfather knew it, and I would bet you Kael Draven flinched when you told him what you were called."

He had. In the hall. I'd felt it come off him like a draught.

"He knew," I said.

"He knew something." Rune looked at me sidelong. "Whether he knew he was rejecting the last Moonborn or whether he only knew the name was cursed, I can't tell you. But I'll tell you what he did with it. He put you out the north gate with no cloak eleven weeks before a rogue winter."

That's the sentence I trained on for three years. That's the one I hung on the wall.

I shifted every day. I fought Old Bryn until he stopped putting me with the young ones and started putting me with the border scouts, and then stopped putting me with the border scouts and started asking my opinion. I learned to read — properly, not kitchen-lists — and I read every treaty and grain ledger and border settlement in Vaelhollow's archive, and somewhere in the second year I stopped being a rescued girl and started being the reason Vaelhollow's northern line held through the worst rogue push in forty years.

And once a week, sometimes twice, I would be in the middle of something ordinary — hauling water, laughing at Bryn — and the dead grey scar on my shoulder would give one hard pull, like a hand tugging a rope on the other end of the world.

Him. Freezing. Or bleeding. Or on the floor.

I never asked anyone to make it stop. I want to be honest about that, because for a long time I told myself I was just refusing to sign a contract, and it took me until the second spring to admit that I was also keeping something.

The second spring is where this stops being a story about training.

I'd been unwell for three weeks. Bryn thought it was the water. Then Marta — the woman who'd handed me the baby — watched me refuse the smoked fish for the ninth day in a row, put down her knife, and asked me a question so blunt I sat down on the floor.

A mate-bond doesn't need a ceremony. It only needs a night. And there had been exactly one night, three months before I ever left Ironmoon, that I had never told a single living soul about, because I had been nineteen and no one and he had been the Alpha and drunk on grief on the anniversary of his father's death, out at the old watchtower where I'd been sent with the food, and he had not known who I was in the dark and I had known exactly who he was, and we had both agreed without ever saying a word about it that it had not happened.

He had not known who I was.

He had rejected me eleven weeks later in front of five hundred wolves and he had not known.

"Ivy," Marta said, from a long way off. "Ivy, breathe. How far along?"

And Rune Vaelen, in the doorway with a grain ledger in his hand and his face doing something I'd never seen it do, said, "That is Kael Draven's heir."