Cast Out, Crowned

Chapter Thirteen: The Thing He Didn't Say

Fenric shut the door. His hand stayed flat against the old wood a long moment, and the gold that ran under his skin when he sealed it seemed to cost him more than it had before.

"She's lying," I said. "About the breeding thing. Trying to scare me. Right?"

"No." He didn't turn around. "That part's true."

The fire cracked behind me. Outside, far off, I thought I heard the horn again, turning, patient, coming around by the ford.

"Then say it plain," I said. "You keep going still every time she gets close to something. So say it. What did she mean, only one way to be sure."

He turned then, and looked at me across the little room, and I watched him decide to stop protecting me from a thing I'd already half worked out on my own.

"There's a reason the hunters didn't just kill your line and mine outright, back at the start," he said. "Killing a bloodline is hard. Blood scatters. A pup gets hidden, a cousin survives, someone rides off in the night with a sealed baby and a purse of silver." His jaw tightened. "So they learned. It's not enough to kill the last of a line. Because as long as one of yours and one of mine are both breathing, the thing our blood makes together could still happen. The unsealed one. The one they can't cage." He held my eyes. "So the surest way to end it isn't to kill us both. It's to make sure the two lines can never join. Cut one of us. Break the part that carries the line forward. And then it doesn't matter if we live to be a hundred, because the danger dies with us anyway."

I understood then, cold all the way through. What Renna had meant. What the hunters wanted from me now that they knew I was awake and that Fenric had found me.

Not just a cage. Not just a leash.

They wanted to make certain that whatever I was, it ended with me.

"That's what's coming," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "That's what they're crossing the ford for."

"That's what they've always come for, when they find one of us." He said it quietly. "It's why I've spent a hundred years alone and hidden. As long as there was only me, there was nothing to prevent. I was the last of my line with no one to join it to, so they left me in peace. A dead end. Harmless." Something moved in his face. "And then this morning I felt the sealed line wake up, and I stopped being harmless. The second I walked toward you, I made you the most hunted thing alive. Because now there are two of us. Now the thing they've spent a hundred years preventing is possible again. And it's my fault it's possible."

The fire popped. He'd said it flat, no self-pity in it, just the fact laid down between us, and I saw for the first time what it had cost him to walk out of those trees this morning. He'd known. He'd known that finding me would put a target on me that being wolfless never had.

"You knew," I said. "When you came for me. You knew it would do this."

"I knew." He didn't look away. "And I told myself I'd stay far off. Watch from the trees, make sure you learned what you were, and never get close enough that the two lines mattered. That was the plan." A short, humorless breath. "It lasted right up until I saw them branding you. And then I crossed a whole gathering ground toward you, and I ruined the only protection you had left, which was being nothing, and I have been trying to make up for that ever since."

I should have been angry. Some part of me reached for it, the way I'd reached for the gold, the anger of a girl who'd finally had one safe thing and just learned the man beside her had taken it. But it wouldn't come. Because he'd told me. Aron would have hidden this until the day he needed it. Renna had used it as a blade. Fenric was standing in a stone box in a hillside telling me the ugly truth about what he'd cost me, when the easy thing, the thing every other person in my life would have done, was to keep his mouth shut and let me believe he was only ever a rescue.

"Why tell me at all," I said. "You could have just kept running me toward safety. Let me think you were the good thing in all this."

"Because I'm not going to be another person who decides what you're allowed to know for your own good." His eyes held mine, gold to gold. "You've had a whole life of people making you small by keeping you in the dark. Aron. Selene. The seal itself. I told you I'd never do that. So here it is, all of it, even the part that makes me the reason they're coming. You get to decide what you do with the truth. Even when the truth is that I'm the danger."

The room had gone very quiet. The fire moved gold across both our faces, and he was closer than he'd been, and I was aware of it the way I was aware of everything tonight, low in the body, before my mind caught up.

"So decide," he said, softer now. "Because there's a choice in front of you, and it's yours, not mine. They want to make sure our lines never join. The safe thing, the smart thing, is to make sure they're right. You go your way. I go mine. Two dead ends, two survivors who never meet again, and the thing they're afraid of never happens, and maybe, maybe, they lose interest and let us both live out our lives alone in the dark." His voice dropped. "That's the safe answer. I'll take you to the ford myself and put you on the far road and never come near you again, if that's what you choose."

"And the other answer," I said. My heart was slamming.

"The other answer is we stop running from the one thing that scares them." He didn't move to touch me. He just looked at me, steady, gold to gold, laying it down. "We learn what our blood does together instead of letting them decide it's a thing to be prevented. We become the exact thing they spent a hundred years trying to make sure could never exist." A pause. "That answer is more dangerous than anything you've faced tonight. It puts every hunter in the north on us for the rest of our lives. And it starts with you deciding you want me close for reasons that have nothing to do with running."

The fire cracked. Outside, closer now, the horn sounded, turning off the north road, onto the ford road, coming.

I looked at him. At the man who'd cost me my safety and told me so to my face. At the gold under his skin that answered mine like a struck note finding its match. At the choice he'd put in my hands and left there, the way no one in my whole life had ever left a choice in my hands.

"Ask me again in the morning," I said. "When it's my answer and not the fear talking. You said you had patience."

Something in his face eased, and warmed, and it was worse than anything, because it made me want to give him the answer right then.

"I have patience," he said.

Then his head came up sharp, gold flaring along his arms, and I heard it too.

Not the horn this time.

Footsteps. Outside. Many of them. Close.

And they'd crossed the ford hours before they should have been able to.