Cast Out, Crowned

Chapter Five — The Stripping

They lit every torch in the gathering ground for it. If they were going to break me, they wanted the whole pack to watch it happen.

The warriors walked me back to the stone at the center of the ground, the same stone they'd knelt me on that morning, and the whole of Crownwood gathered around it again in a ring three and four bodies deep, quiet in that hungry, waiting way. Only now the hunger had fear stitched all the way through it. They had watched the wolfless girl burn their Alpha's hand. They didn't know what I was. And a frightened pack does exactly what its Alpha tells it to do, because the only other option is thinking for itself, and they had never been asked to do that.

Aron stood up on the raised stone with his burned hand wrapped in linen, and Selene stood beside him in the north's grey, and as I looked up at the two of them I understood that this was hers as much as it was his. His fear needed a shape to move through, and she had handed him one.

Fenric's voice was still sitting in my ears. Don't fight it. Let them say every last word.

So I let them walk me to the stone. I let them stand me in the center of the ring. I kept my hands quiet at my sides and I looked up at the two of them on the stone, and I did the thing I had done my whole life. I stayed still.

Aron raised his good hand, and the ring fell silent.

"Tonight this pack does a thing it has not done in a generation," he said, and his voice had found its old warmth again, that beautiful, sorrowful gravity that made people love him. "Tonight, with a heavy heart, we cast out one of our own."

A murmur moved through the ring, and he let it run its course.

"Zaveria came to us a foundling," he went on. "Wolfless. We sheltered her. We fed her. We gave her a place at our fire when no other pack in three territories would have opened its gates to her." He pressed the wrapped hand to his chest, the very picture of a wounded and merciful man. "And today she raised her power against her own Alpha. You all saw her do it. Whatever she is, she is not pack. She was never truly pack. And a body cannot go on carrying a thing that turns and bites the hand that fed it."

Never truly pack. After twenty-three years of trying to earn exactly that, and nothing else.

The girl I used to be would have wept at those words. She would have begged. She would have gone down on her knees on that stone and pleaded for the place she'd spent her whole life reaching toward. I felt for that urge inside me, and it wasn't there anymore. Somewhere back in that cell, with my fingers over my heart and the sealed thing pressing quietly back, she had gone still, and she hadn't gotten up again.

"Bring the rite," Aron said.

An elder came forward carrying a bowl of ash and ember, the old grey mixture they used for a severing, and Aron dipped his good hand down into it and turned to face me across the ring.

"By ash and by ember," he intoned, and the whole pack drew breath together, because these were words most of them had never once heard spoken aloud. "I sever you from the bond of this pack."

I felt it go.

It was real. That was the thing I hadn't braced for. Whatever thin thread had tied me to Crownwood, that faint background hum of belonging that every wolf carries and never notices, I had never even known I had it until the moment it tore loose. It came away in my chest with a small and terrible snap, and for one breath the loneliness of it was so complete that I nearly went down onto my knees after all.

Aron saw it happen, and his eyes gleamed. Beside him Selene leaned forward, and I saw that she was holding the collar now, black iron, waiting in her hands, and I understood the whole shape of the plan in a single look. Sever her from the bond. Let the loss of it buckle her. Then get the iron around her throat while she's still reeling.

"I sever you from the name of this pack," Aron said, and dipped his hand again.

Another snap, deeper than the first. My name, the pack-name I had worn every day of my life, coming away from me like skin peeled back.

"Zaveria," he said, softer now, almost tender, moving in for the last of it, "you are cast out. You belong to no one. No pack, no fire, no name. You are alone."

You are alone.

That was the word the whole rite had been built to land on me. Alone. The one thing they were certain would finally break the small, grateful wolf who had spent her entire life terrified of exactly this.

They had it exactly the wrong way around.

Because I wasn't reaching for them anymore. And with the pack-bond severed and the name stripped clean away and every last thread that had ever tied me small and grateful to Crownwood cut through, there was suddenly nothing left holding that door shut.

The sealed thing under my heart felt the final thread give way.

And it opened.

It didn't hurt. I had braced my whole life for it to hurt, and it didn't. It felt like the first full breath you take after twenty-three years of shallow ones, except that this time the breath didn't stop. It kept coming, filling me up and then filling me past where I ended, gold rising through my skin in bright branching lines from my wrist to my throat to the very crown of my head, and every torch in that whole gathering ground bent toward me at once like grass laid flat in a wind.

The ring screamed and broke apart. Wolves scrambling backward, falling, clawing away from the stone. Somewhere a warrior shouted my name in pure terror, my old name, the one Aron had just severed from me, because it was the only word he had left to reach for.

Aron's face came apart. The warmth, the mercy, the beautiful sorrowful mask, all of it fell off him at once, and what was underneath was only a man who had wagered everything he had on the wrong wolf.

"The collar," he said. His voice climbed toward panic. "Selene, the collar, get it on her, get it on her now before she, "

Selene moved fast. I'll give her that much. She came off the stone with the black iron open in both hands and crossed the space toward me while every other wolf on that ground was running the other way. She wasn't afraid. Out of all of them, she and one other were the only ones on that ground who weren't, and she reached for my throat with the collar open in her hands.

The gold met her.

I didn't will it to. I didn't so much see it happen as feel it, a wave rolling off me the way it had rolled off me at the marking, except vast now, unsealed, and it caught Selene mid-stride and stopped her dead, like she'd waded straight into a wall of standing water. The collar dropped out of her hands and rang against the stone. She staggered back from me, and for the first time since she'd walked into Crownwood in her northern grey and called me it, Selene Verlain looked at me with something raw and entirely human in her face.

It was fear. Real fear, all the way down.

And into that, across a whole gathering ground of wolves tripping over each other to get away from the girl they had come to break, came the one set of footsteps that walked toward me instead.

Fenric stepped into the ring. Calm, unhurried, the gold answering in his open palm as he came on, the only thing on that whole ground moving toward the light instead of fleeing from it.

He stopped in front of me, in the center of the torn-apart ring, with the whole broken pack watching, and he looked at the wolf they had just cast out, glowing gold from wrist to crown, and he smiled the first real smile I'd seen cross his face.

"There she is," Fenric said. "The old blood, awake at last." He glanced once at Aron, frozen white on the stone, and then back to me, and he pitched his voice to carry into every corner of that silent ground. "You cast out a foundling, Alpha. You should have looked a great deal closer at what it was you were throwing away."

He held his hand out to me. Not grabbing. Open. Gold to gold.

"They've named you no one," he said, only for me now, under the ringing silence. "So let me be the first to tell you what you actually are."

And behind me, up on the stone, Aron found his voice and gave the last order he would ever give as an Alpha, as though it could somehow still save him.

"Kill her," he said. "Kill them both."