The Rogue Luna’s Vengeance

The Kessler boy took four hours to die, and he thanked me twice. That's not the part I remember. What I remember is that his mother stood outside the shed the whole time with her fist pressed against her mouth, and when I finally came out at first light she didn't ask me anything. She looked at my hands. Everyone looks at my hands. "It was quiet," I told her. "He knew me at the end. He said your name." He hadn't. By the end he hadn't had a name of his own left to say. But you learn, in my work, that the truth is a thing you ration out like medicine, and you don't give a woman a dose that'll kill her. She nodded. She didn't touch me. Nobody touches me after. I walked down through the birches with the sun coming up green through the leaves and my sleeves rolled to the elbow because the cold helped, and behind me I heard her start to make a sound I'd heard maybe forty times in my life and would never once get used to. That was the morning of the Choosing. I'd forgotten it was happening at all. My name is Nell Brannock, and in Harrow Bend they call me the mercy. Not a mercy. The. Like weather. Like a season that comes around. When a wolf turns — when whatever holds the man and the animal in the same skin comes undone, and it goes feral, and it stops knowing its own kitchen or its own children — somebody has to sit with it. The pack won't do it. Family can't. So they send for me, and I go in with the door shut behind me, and I talk to it in the old words until it settles, and in the morning I come out alone. Maren trained me. She was the mercy before me and her aunt before her, and she used to say we were the only honest job in the pack, because everyone else's work was about making the pack bigger and ours was about making it kind. Maren died when I was nineteen and I went in alone after that. I was twenty-two the day of the Choosing. I had three shirts, one pair of good boots, a room over the tannery that smelled the way you'd expect, and a reputation that walked into a room a full minute before I did. I had never once thought about being anybody's mate. You don't. Not when you've spent six years being the last face people see. The Choosing happens in the stone bowl below the Bend, where the old amphitheatre sits in the hill like a thumbprint. It's not a ceremony so much as a weather report. The whole pack comes, the unbonded stand in the bowl, the Alpha walks the ring, and if his wolf finds anything, everyone knows about it. There's no ritual to it. There's no choice in it, whatever the name says. I nearly didn't go. I'd been awake all night. I stank of the shed. But attendance isn't optional and I'd had enough trouble that year without adding to it, so I washed to the elbow, put on the shirt that had the fewest opinions about me, and went and stood at the back of the bowl where the shadow of the hill still lay, because I wanted to be where nobody would be looking. Six hundred people, maybe more. Everyone in their best. Girls with their hair done up and oil on their collarbones, and you could feel the hope coming off them like heat off a stove. Somebody's grandmother handing out bread. Somebody's baby screaming. And then the drums stopped, and Emory Sallis came down into the ring. I'd seen him a hundred times and never close. He was three years older than me and had been Alpha since he was twenty-one, and he had the reputation of being a cold, careful, good ruler, which in my experience means a man who's tired. He walked like he was counting his steps. There was a stillness in him that people took for strength and that I, having spent my life in rooms with things that were about to break, recognized as something else entirely. Behind him came Old Wace, the seer, with his milk-white eyes and his hand on the shoulder of a boy who led him. The Sallis line are seers. Everyone knows it. Their wolves don't dream — they branch. They see the roads out of every choice, spread like a hand of cards, and the Sallises have ruled Harrow Bend for two hundred years by always knowing which road is which. It's the reason the Bend has never lost a war. It's the reason nobody's ever managed to get a knife close to them. Emory started his circuit of the ring. It takes about ten minutes. He walks, and the wolf underneath him looks, and mostly nothing happens; a Choosing that turns up nothing at all is as common as one that doesn't. He was halfway around when I felt it. I want to be honest about this, because of everything that came after, and because I've had three years to make myself into someone who lies about it and I've decided not to. It was the best thing that has ever happened to me. It came up through the soles of my feet. It went through my chest like a hand closing. Every hair on my arms stood up and the whole bowl — six hundred people, the bread, the baby — went very far away and very quiet, and there was a road inside me where there had never been a road before, and at the end of it was a man I had never spoken a word to in my life, and I knew him. Not his face. Him. The way you know your own house in the dark. He stopped walking. Every head in that bowl turned. I heard it happen — the sound of six hundred people moving at once, a sound like wind going through a field — and they all turned to look at the shadow at the back where the mercy was standing with her mouth open. For one second — and I will pay for this second for the rest of my life — I thought: oh. Oh, so this is what happens to me. I thought: they'll have to touch me now. Emory Sallis turned around. He found me in the dark at the back of the bowl without looking for me, the way you find your own hand. And I watched his face, and I was close enough by then — I'd come three steps forward without deciding to — I was close enough to see exactly what was on it. It wasn't disgust. I've been braced for disgust since I was sixteen; I'd have known it. He looked at me the way a man looks at a house on fire with his children inside. Then something went across his face like a door closing, and he said, loudly enough that the far rows heard it: "No." The bond was still open. That's the thing nobody tells you about a rejection. It doesn't spare you. You're still wide open to him when he does it, so you get the whole of it, live, with no skin on. "I, Emory Sallis, Alpha of Harrow Bend—" Somebody was saying my name. Teague, his second, had a hand on his arm and was saying something fast and low, and Emory shook him off without looking. "—reject Nell Brannock as my mate and my Luna." I don't remember the ground coming up. I remember being on it. I remember Old Wace's boy shouting something, and Wace himself turning his blind face toward me and going the colour of ash, and saying, over the noise, in the tone of a man reporting a fault in a machine: "I can't see her. Emory — I can't see her at all." I remember that it hurt, and that the hurt was not the worst of it. The worst of it was the silence afterward, where the road had been. You don't know how loud a thing is until it stops. And I remember Emory Sallis standing over me while I couldn't get up, and every single person in that bowl watching, and I looked up at him and I got out one word. "Why?" He was shaking. His hands were shaking. I've thought about that more than I've thought about anything else in my life. He said, quietly, so quietly that I'm the only one who heard it: "Because I've already watched you do it." Then he turned around and walked out of the bowl, and Teague's men picked me up under the arms. They didn't let me go back for my things. They walked me out along the north road in the dark with a lamp, four of them, nobody speaking, and at the boundary stones they stopped and one of them — Aldous, whose brother I sat with two winters ago, who had wept on my shoulder in the road afterward and called me a blessing — Aldous couldn't look at me. "That's the line, Nell." "I know where the line is." "There's a price set." He said it to the ground. "On your return. Living or otherwise. It went up before we left the bowl. Anyone brings you back inside the stones, they get paid." I stood there in the dark with my sleeves still rolled up. Because here's what I knew, even then, even with my chest hollowed out and my legs not working properly and the whole of my life ending behind me on a hill: You don't put a price on a woman you don't want. You put a price on a woman you're afraid of. That was three years ago. I've spent every day since finding out what he saw. And I'm going to tell you now, so you understand what kind of story this is and what kind of woman is telling it: he was right to be afraid. He just doesn't know what of.