Rejected for My Sister

"Keep your eyes on the floor, Elsie. Tonight is mine." Cora said it without turning her head. She had said things like that to me all our lives, and I had learned to take them the way I took weather. I kept my eyes down and carried the wine, two jugs, one in each hand, along the back of the hall where the boards creaked. Greyfall's hall was full to the rafters. Every wolf had come up the hill for the ceremony, and every one had someone to whisper about. The Moon chooses the Alpha's mate. On the first full moon after a man takes the seat, the light comes through the opening in the roof and stops on the woman he is meant to have. No one argues with it. I had never let myself think it could stop on me. I was nineteen and had never had a wolf. When the other children shifted at fourteen, I lay in my bed with my teeth locked and my body shaking, and nothing came. The healer told my father that some wolves slept longer than others. My father told the pack the same thing. My father died the next winter, and the lie became mine to keep. My wolf is shy, I told them, and she sleeps, and she will wake when she is ready. Five years of that, five years of scrubbing the stone in the mate-house, of hearing Cora tell the other girls that her sister was simple, or sick, or cursed. It was better than the truth. A girl with no wolf was not one of us; she could be put out past the boundary with nothing, and no one would say a word. Pip was eleven and small for it, and he had our mother's hands. Every coin I earned went into a jar under the kitchen floor. I had forty-one coins. When I had a hundred, I would take him west to our aunt's village, and neither of us would ever shift for anyone again. Then the light came through the roof. It came down through the smoke and the dust and stopped on the floor at my feet, as bright as a held flame. People turned, and the talking stopped all at once, the way a fire stops when the wood falls in. The light climbed the front of my dress and settled on my chest. The Moon had chosen me. Someone laughed, then thought better of it. I heard my name go around the hall like a cup passed hand to hand. Elsie, the kitchen girl, Elsie with no wolf. "Look at her," a woman said. "The Moon has made a mistake." "The Moon does not make mistakes," another said. "She must have done something." "The Moon chose a servant," a man said. "What does that say about him?" "It says the Moon has a cruel sense of humor," a third said. I looked up before I could stop myself. Kellan stood at the high table with his hand on the back of his chair. He was twenty-eight and the strongest Alpha in three generations, and he was looking at me the way a man looks at a blade he has just found in his own bed. For one breath, neither of us moved. Something pulled tight between us, a line from my chest to his, and it was warm. It was the first warm thing the Moon had ever given me. I felt it in my throat and behind my eyes. His jaw worked, and he said, "No." The line went taut, and then he said the words. "I, Kellan, Alpha of Greyfall, reject you, Elsie of the kitchens, as my mate." The rope came out of my chest. I heard the jugs break before I felt my knees hit the boards. Wine ran under my hands and into my sleeves. There was blood in my mouth from my own teeth. My chest was open, and something was pouring out of it, and I knew what it was. Every wolf knew what it was: the Moon gives you a mate, and the bond is the road between you, and when one side closes the gate, the other side dies. I lay on the floor and waited to die. Nothing happened. The pain rolled through me and rolled out again. I could hear my own breathing and a chair scrape at the back. "She's not shifting," a woman said. "Her wolf should be dying," another said. "Where is it?" "Where is it?" someone shouted. "Show us your wolf, kitchen girl." Where is it. I had spent five years answering that question, never once with the truth. I pushed myself up. The wine was cold on my palms, and Cora stood ten feet away, smiling. She walked past me to the high table without looking down and put her hand on Kellan's arm. "Ashvale has offered me its warriors," Kellan said, and his voice carried to the rafters. "Cora of Greyfall will stand at my side." The hall made a low, ugly sound, the sound of people agreeing to something they hated. The Coldridge rogues had burned three farms at the river, and six warriors were buried since spring. Ashvale had two hundred spears and the only bridge north. Cora turned her head and looked at me then. She was beautiful in the firelight, with her mother's northern braids and the Moon's own smugness in her face. She had always wanted the high table the way other people wanted air. Merrin, the old steward, cleared his throat. He had known me since I was born, and he did not look at me now. "Get up," he said. "You're bleeding on the floor." "I'm sorry," I said, because I had been taught to say it. I got up, though my knees wanted to fold, and made them hold. "The year of service," Merrin said. "The rejected mate serves the new Luna for a year, so the whole pack watches the old bond die." "A year," Kellan said. "She serves it." One year in this hall, under that roof, serving the woman who had taken my place, and every wolf in Greyfall would watch me not die. Kellan had not looked at me since the words. His hand was flat on the table and his knuckles were white, the only sign he gave that anything had happened. Cora came back down the steps and stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the oil in her hair. "One year," she said softly. "Do you know what I thought when I saw the light on you, sister? I thought, at last I can be rid of her." "Then send me out," I said. My voice came out thin. "Past the boundary. I'll go tonight." "Oh no." She smiled. "You will not get out of it that easily. Tomorrow is my mating feast. You will serve it. On your knees." She smiled at the high table and walked away. My chest still hurt and the wine was cold against my knees, but the pain had already begun to fade, and I was still breathing. I was alive. That was the one thing the Moon had done for me tonight, and it was the one thing I could never let a single wolf in that hall find out. Pip was at the back with the other children, and his face was white. I looked at him and shook my head, once. Not now, not yet. One year, I told myself. I had survived nineteen without a wolf, and I could survive one more. Cora looked back from the high table. "You won't last the month," she said.