Cast Out, Crowned

Chapter Six: The Ones Who Ran

Kill them both.

For one breath nobody moved. Then a handful of Aron's warriors did what warriors do, they obeyed, because obeying was easier than thinking, and they came at us with blades out.

They didn't reach us.

Fenric shifted beside me, one step, and the air in front of us went thick and gold. The first warrior hit it and stopped like a man wading into deep water. His blade slowed to nothing an arm's length from my chest. He strained, snarling, and couldn't push through.

I was doing part of it. I could feel that. The gold pouring off me met the gold pouring off him, and the two wove together into a wall of standing light with the whole terrified pack stranded behind it.

"They can't reach you," Fenric said. "Not while you're awake. Look at them."

I looked.

The wolves whose water I'd carried up from the well. The girls who'd learned to say wolf less like a curse. The warriors who'd walked me to a cell not an hour ago. Every one of them pressed back against the far fence, staring at me, and on every face was the same thing.

Fear. Bright, cornered, animal fear.

An hour ago I'd have given my life for one of them to look at me with any warmth at all. Now not one of them could hold my eyes without flinching, and the last soft thing in me went quiet and cold.

"Aron," I said.

He was still on the stone, backed against the elder's table, cradling that burned hand, and when I said his name he went whiter than the linen around it.

"You knew what I was." The gold rose with my voice, and I let it. "Twenty-three years you knew, and you took the silver, and you sat me at the far end of your table and taught a whole pack to treat me like nothing." I stepped toward him. The wall of gold moved with me, and the warriors trapped against it stumbled back. "You called it kindness. Every day."

"Zaveria." He put up his good hand, the way you calm a spooked horse. His voice found its old warmth. "Whatever he's told you, you remember who fed you. Who housed you. I could have turned you out as a pup and I didn't. That has to count for, "

"You were paid to keep me. It doesn't count for anything."

His mouth closed.

And I watched the most beloved Alpha in three territories understand that the story was over. He looked past me to the pack at the fence and reached for them the way that had never once failed him.

"Are you going to let this stand?" His voice split down the middle. "She burned your Alpha. She turned her power on her own pack. I am asking you, as your Alpha, to, "

"They're not going to help you," Selene said.

She'd gotten to her feet. The collar lay where it had fallen, and she didn't reach for it. She looked at Aron now with the same cold arithmetic she'd once turned on me.

"They can smell what she is, even if none of them has a word for it. You're not the strongest thing on this ground anymore." Her eyes cut to me, and something in them had changed all the way through. It wasn't warmth. It was the look you give a power you intend to survive. "A smart wolf doesn't stand next to the loser once the loser's already lost."

She'd cut him loose. In front of the whole pack. The way she cut loose anything that stopped being useful.

Aron stared at her. "You came here to marry me."

"I came for the alliance. The grain, the trade, a strong pack at my back." She looked at the warriors who couldn't force their way through the gold. "The strong pack just changed hands. I'm not marrying a man whose own wolves won't lift a blade for him." She tipped her head toward me, a fraction. "I'll deal with whatever she becomes."

The gold flared with something that wasn't mine, a hot pulse of pure feeling, and I understood it was rage, and it was Fenric's, bleeding through where our power wove together.

"You're all the same," he said, and for once the stillness in him had a crack running through it. "You find the old blood, and you bury it, or sell it, or brand it, and when it wakes you fall over yourselves to own it. Her line was hunted to almost nothing by people who thought exactly like you." His gold burned brighter along mine. "I didn't find her so you could put a collar on her."

He turned to me, and the whole ground fell away, the pack, the stone, Aron, Selene, until there was only the two of us inside a wall of gold we were making together.

"You can hold this pack right now," he said, low, only for me. "You're stronger than every wolf here and they know it. You could take Crownwood back for every year they made you small. Or you could walk out with me and learn who you come from, and what was done to your people, and why a grown man was frightened enough of a newborn to seal her and bury her at the bottom of a pack of fools." A pause. "One of those is revenge. The other is the truth. You don't get both tonight."

The gold hummed between us, woven so close I couldn't feel where his ended and mine began.

I looked at Aron, small on the stone he'd tried to break me on. I looked at Selene, already recalculating. I looked at the pack that had come to watch me marked as nothing, and I felt the pull of it, the chance to put every one of them on their knees.

Then I looked at my own arm, at the gold branching bright from wrist to crown, and I felt the sealed thing that had pressed against my hand my whole life, finally awake.

"Neither," I said.

Fenric went still. Even his gold paused.

"You've been telling me all night what I could do. The old blood. The last of the line." I met his eyes. "I've spent twenty-three years being told what I am by people who wanted to use it. I'm not trading one of them for another."

Something moved in his face I hadn't seen. Surprise. And under it, slowly, the start of a real smile.

"I'll come with you. I'll hear the truth, all of it." The gold flared once, and every wolf on the ground flinched. "But I decide what I do with it after that. Not you. Not him. Not her. Me."

For a long moment he only looked at me, the feared thing out of the northern trees, the last heir of a hunted line, looking at the wolf everyone had thrown away like she was the first surprise he'd had in a hundred years.

"There she is," he said softly. He held his hand out to me, open, gold to gold. "Come on, then. Before your pack of fools finds its courage."

I looked at his open hand.

And behind us, out past the torchlight, from the northern edge of the ground where the trees began, a horn sounded. Deep, and wrong, a note I'd never heard, and Fenric went rigid, the smile falling off his face.

"No," he said. Barely a sound. "Not already. They can't be here already."

"Fenric." I'd never said his name before. It stopped him. "What is that."

He turned to me, and for the first time since he'd walked out of those trees without a trace of fear, there was fear in his eyes. Not of me.

For me.

"They felt you wake up. Every one of them, for a hundred miles." The horn sounded again, closer, and the trees at the edge of the ground began to move. "The same people who hunted your line to ash. And they've come to finish it."