THE REJECTED BLOODLINE

No Answers

Nobody said the word aloud. By the second round of fires, everyone already knew what it meant that Darius Veyne hadn't come back through the gate.

Maren stood near the smokehouse, close enough to hear pieces, far enough that no one thought to send her off.

Orsa had taken the boy who'd spoken — Corren, one of the younger fighters — into the elders' hall. The doors shut. The crowd broke into smaller knots, murmuring.

"They'll send someone back out," Ren said. He hadn't gone with the others. He rarely did.

"Tonight?"

"Doubt it. Not with half of them barely standing." He nodded at the wolves slumped near the gate, wrapped in whatever blankets had been found. "Whatever did that to them, you don't go looking for it in the dark."

Maren didn't ask what he meant. One of the returning fighters had a gash along his ribs that looked burned at the edges, not torn. Nobody was saying that word either.

Elias found her by the woodpile an hour later.

"Where were you," she asked.

"At the gate. Where else."

"I didn't see you."

"I saw you." He sat down on an overturned log, which he almost never did in front of others, and put his head in his hands. "Corren's saying Darius told them to fall back. That he stayed on purpose."

"Stayed to do what."

"Nobody knows. Corren doesn't know. He just keeps saying it." Elias looked up. "Fight something. Buy them time."

"Or he didn't have a choice, and that's the version that sounds better."

"That's an ugly thing to say."

"It's not an accusation."

"Feels like one." He was quiet a moment. "If he chose to stay, it means something. If he just couldn't get out—"

He didn't finish. He didn't need to.

Somewhere near the elders' hall, a woman was crying, loud, unhushed. Darius's sister, maybe, or his cousin — Maren had never learned which. She looked away. It wasn't hers to watch.

"You should go home," Elias said.

"So should you."

"I will. After."

He didn't say after what. She didn't ask.

She walked back alone. The yard had emptied, most people gone behind closed doors. Near the old stone foundation, she slowed.

The carved shape was still there. Three lines, crossed, worn nearly flat. Someone had left an offering at its base since she'd last seen it — dried herb, tied off with red thread. The kind of thing left at a shrine. Not at a crack in a wall.

She hadn't known it was a shrine.

She crouched to look. The stone around the carving was a different color than the rest of the foundation — older, patched in from somewhere else, long before she was born.

"That's not something you should be looking at."

She startled upright, shoulder catching the wall. Orsa stood a few feet off, arms folded.

"I wasn't doing anything."

"I didn't say you were doing anything." Orsa's eyes moved to the offering, then back. "Go back to your lodge."

"Is this about Darius?"

"Go back to your lodge, Maren."

She went. From the edge of the yard she looked back once. Orsa hadn't moved. She was still staring at the stone the way you'd watch something that might start moving.

The lodge was dark. Ines asleep, or close enough to it. The Reyat brothers sat near the fire talking low, and stopped the moment she came in.

She lay down without undressing. The draft came in steady under the door. At some point her hand found her own ribs, pressed flat over the spot where something had moved three nights before.

Nothing moved now. It hadn't since.

She woke once to raised voices somewhere across the yard, too far to make out words. They stopped before she worked up the will to get up and find out why.

By morning, no word had come from any search party. The pack ran its usual routines with a stiffness that fooled no one — fires lit on schedule, the training yard occupied, water hauled same as always, all of it moving under a quiet that had nothing ordinary in it.

Nobody told Maren anything new. Not that day, not the one after.

But people were watching her differently now. Not the old contempt — something more careful. The way you'd watch a door you weren't sure was locked.

She didn't know why.

She found out that night, when she came back to the lodge and found her sleeping alcove already searched — furs thrown back, her few belongings shifted just enough to prove someone hadn't bothered hiding that they'd looked.

Nothing was missing. That was almost worse.