Cast Out, Crowned

Chapter Ten: What You Are Now

Now

The shelter was a stone hut dug into a hillside, half hidden under a fall of ivy, older than any building I'd ever stood in.

Fenric put his hand flat on the door and it opened for his gold. Inside it was dry and close and smelled of cold ash and old wood. He got a fire going fast, and I stood dripping in the middle of the little room while the light climbed the walls, and only then, in the warmth, did I understand how hard I was still shaking.

"Sit," he said. "By the fire. You've been cold for hours."

I sat. He crouched to feed the flames, and for a while neither of us spoke. The heat soaked into me. My clothes steamed. Somewhere far off, if I strained, I thought I could still hear the horn, turning north toward the ford, but in here it felt like something from another life.

"They'll reach the ford by morning," Fenric said, not looking up from the fire. "Cross by midday. We'll be gone before then. But you should know what you're walking into, because there's no putting this back."

"Putting what back."

He sat down across the fire from me, close in the small room, the light moving on his face.

"This morning you were a wolfless girl nobody looked at twice," he said. "That was the safest you'll ever be, and you didn't even know it. As long as everyone believed you were empty, you were beneath notice. Nobody hunts what they think is nothing." His gold eyes held mine. "That's over now. You lit up on a marking stone in front of a hundred witnesses. You burned an Alpha. The hunters felt you a hundred miles off. Renna's people know you're alive. By the time the story finishes spreading, everyone who trades in power is going to know there's a living heir of the sealed line walking around, and they're all going to want the same thing."

"Which is."

"You. In a cage, or on a leash, or opened up to see how you work." He said it plainly, the way he'd said everything, no cruelty in it, just the shape of the thing. "A bloodline that breaks seals and burns Alphas and answers living water. Do you understand what people would do to own that? What they'd do to breed it, or bleed it, or point it at their enemies? You're not a girl anymore, Zaveria. You're a weapon that hasn't been claimed yet. And every hand in three territories is going to reach for you."

I looked into the fire. It should have frightened me more than it did. Maybe I'd used up all my fear on the river. Or maybe I'd spent so long being nothing that being wanted, even like this, even as a thing to own, landed strange and complicated in my chest.

"So what," I said. "You're telling me to hide. Be small again. Let them think I'm nothing so they leave me alone."

"No." He said it fast, and something in his voice made me look up. "That's the last thing I'm telling you. I spent a hundred years making myself small so no one would come looking. Hiding what I was. Sleeping light. It's not living, it's just dying slowly with your eyes open." His jaw set. "I'm telling you the opposite. Learn what you are fast enough that when they reach for you, you take the hand off at the wrist."

The fire popped. He'd leaned forward without either of us noticing, and the space between us had gone small and warm.

"You keep doing that," I said quietly.

"Doing what."

"Telling me the thing that's hard to hear instead of the thing that's easy." I searched his face. "Aron never did that. Not once in three years. Everything out of his mouth was soft and kind and a lie. You've told me nothing but hard things all night and none of them have been lies."

Something shifted in his eyes. The fire moved gold across both our faces, and I was very aware of how close he'd gotten, and of the heat of him that had nothing to do with the flames.

"I told you I'd never keep you small," he said, low. "I meant it more than you know. I've watched what they do to our blood. I'm not going to be another set of hands that shrinks you to a manageable size." His gaze dropped, just for a breath, to my mouth, then came back up. "Even when it would be easier. Even when part of me wants to keep you close enough that nothing can reach you. That's the same instinct that put you on that stone, and I know it, so I keep my hands to myself."

My heart was going hard again. Not from the hunters. Not from what he'd told me about cages and leashes.

From how badly I wanted him to stop keeping his hands to himself.

And that was the whole trap of it, wasn't it. One night free of everyone who'd ever owned me, and here I was leaning toward the first man who'd sworn he never would, wanting the very closeness I'd spent the whole night refusing. I didn't know if the wanting was mine or just the old need to belong to someone, dressed up warmer.

He saw it. Of course he saw it, he'd seen everything else. And instead of closing the distance, he sat back, gave me the space, let the fire come between us again.

"Not tonight," he said gently. "Not while you're still shaking and don't know your own mind. When you want something from me, Zaveria, I need to know it's you choosing it, and not just the night, and not just being alone, and not just gratitude to the one who ran with you." A small, crooked smile. "I've got more patience than a hundred years should leave a man. I can wait for you to be sure."

I hated how much that made me want him more.

I opened my mouth, though I didn't know what I meant to say, whether I was going to argue or agree or just close the distance myself and stop thinking about it.

I never found out.

The gold on the door flared without warning, bright and sudden, and Fenric was on his feet before I'd even registered why, his whole body gone taut, the softness wiped clean off his face.

"Someone's touching the wards," he said, low and fast. "Out there. Right now."

"The hunters? You said they couldn't cross the water, that we had until, "

"It's not the hunters." He was staring at the door, and for the second time all night I saw fear move across the face of the thing the whole pack had been afraid of. "The hunters don't knock. And they can't open a door sealed with my blood." His gold rose along his arms. "Whoever's out there just did."

Something knocked on the door. Slow. Deliberate. Three times.

And a voice came through the old wood, warm and easy and horribly familiar, a voice I'd last heard offering me safety in a gap in the trees.

"Little cousin," Renna said. "You didn't really think a river would be enough, did you? Open the door. We have so much to talk about."