Cast Out, Crowned

Chapter Three: What They Buried

For a moment nobody in that gathering ground moved at all. Then everybody moved at once.

Aron clutched his burned hand to his chest, and the sound that came out of him wasn't the sound an Alpha makes. It was the sound of a man in pain and afraid of it, and the whole pack heard it, and something in the air went sour. You could feel them not knowing where to stand or where to look. Their golden Alpha, marked in his own hand. The wolfless girl, glowing from wrist to shoulder. The Lycan out of the northern trees, watching every bit of it with those still, pale eyes.

"Restrain her." Aron's voice cracked on the word. He tried again, louder, throwing it out to the crowd. "She attacked your Alpha. Every one of you saw it. Restrain her."

Nobody came.

That was the part that undid something in me. For three years I would have given anything at all for one of them to look at me as though I mattered. Now the whole pack was looking at me as though I mattered a great deal, and it was only because they were terrified of what I might do to them.

Two of Aron's warriors forced themselves forward at last, jaws set hard, hands out in front of them. They never got close. The gold flared up my arm on its own, a warning I hadn't chosen to give, and both of them stopped six feet short like they'd walked straight into a wall.

"Don't," I said. My voice was shaking now. "I don't want to hurt anyone. I don't even know how I did that. Please, just don't make me."

"She doesn't know." Selene's voice sliced clean across the ground. She'd come forward to stand at Aron's side, and the smooth mask was long gone. She was looking at me with pure northern calculation, the expression of a woman running numbers behind her eyes. "She genuinely doesn't know what she is. Aron." She grabbed his good arm and pulled his attention around. "Do you understand what's standing on your marking stone? Do you have any idea what blood like that is worth, if it can do this much with no training at all?"

"It isn't possible," Aron said again, staring down at his ruined hand. "She's been nothing for three years. She's been nothing."

"She's been hidden," the Lycan said.

He still hadn't raised his voice. He didn't need to. He simply stood there in the cleared circle the pack had made around him, and spoke, and everyone listened because the only other choice was worse.

"Someone sealed her," he said. "A long time ago, when she was small. They buried her deep and marked her weak so that no one would ever look twice at her. It's the kind of work that takes an old bloodline and a very good reason to want it gone." His eyes moved to me and held there. "You never had a wolf, Zaveria, because they took it from you and locked it away. You've been carrying it under your own skin every day of your life, and the people who raised you made certain you believed you were empty, so that you would never once think to go looking for the door."

The words went into me and stopped where I couldn't reach them.

Buried. Sealed. Raised to believe I was empty.

Twenty-three years of the seat at the far end of the table and the attic room and that word said soft behind cupped hands. Twenty-three years of pressing two fingers over my heart and feeling nothing at all, and being told, gently and endlessly, that the nothing was simply all there was to me.

"That's a lie," I said. But it came out of me thin and unconvinced.

"Is it." The Lycan tipped his head a fraction. "Then ask the man who took you in. Ask him why a defective pup gets kept for twenty-three years instead of turned out at the gate. Ask him who carried you here, and why, and what they told him he was to do with you." His gaze slid across to Aron and hardened into something with edges. "Or ask him what he already knows, and hasn't found the courage to say."

The whole gathering ground turned to look at Aron.

And Aron's face did a thing I will remember for the rest of my life. For one breath the fear cracked open, and what lay underneath it was not surprise. It was the face of a man hearing a secret he already knew, spoken out loud for the first time.

He knew something. He'd always known.

"Aron," I said. "What is he talking about."

"Nothing." Far too fast. "He's a stranger spinning a story to steal a wolf out of my pack. Zaveria, you know me. Three years under my roof. Have I ever once been anything but good to you?"

Good to me.

He had sheltered me and shamed me in the very same breath for three years and called the whole of it kindness. He had sat me at the far end of his table and worked me like a servant and let an entire pack learn to say wolfless the way you'd say a disease, and every single day he had worn that soft, sorrowful face and called it kindness.

"You knew," I said. I said it slowly, turning it over, testing the weight of it as it came. "You've always known there was something wrong with my story. Haven't you."

"Zaveria."

"Who brought me here." I stepped toward him, and the warriors flinched back, and the gold ran up my arm like water finding its level. "I was a child. Somebody brought a wolfless child to Crownwood twenty-three years ago and put her into your hands. Who was it."

Aron's mouth opened. Then it closed again.

And Selene answered in his place, because Selene had already worked out which way the wind was about to blow, and she had never in her life been caught standing on the wrong side of it.

"The old Alpha's own guard," she said. Cool and precise, cutting Aron loose with every word she spoke. "That's the story, isn't it, Aron. A rider came in the dead of night, the same year you took the pack for yourself. He left behind a marked pup and a purse of northern silver and a single instruction to go with them." Her eyes found mine, and there was something almost like respect in them now, the respect a person gives a blade they've just realized is sharper than they thought. "Keep her small. Keep her weak. Never let her learn what she is. He was paid to hide you, and he took the silver and built himself a pack with it."

The purse of silver. I thought about the grain that fed us through the winters, the alliances, the trade routes east. All of it built in the years right after I arrived. Built, it seemed, on the price somebody had paid to bury a child.

I looked at Aron. At the burned circle seared into his hand. At the beautiful, merciful face I had spent three whole years trying to earn a single kind word from.

"You were paid to keep me nothing," I said.

He didn't deny it. That silence was the whole answer. He didn't even try.

And something in my chest that had been bent double for twenty-three years quietly finished breaking. It didn't hurt the way I'd always imagined it would. It felt more like a door I'd spent my whole life leaning against had finally given way behind me, and I was falling backward through it into a room I'd never once known was there.

The gold flared, and this time I felt it move through my whole body, not a burn, not a warning, but a wave, rolling out from the center of me across the entire gathering ground. The torches guttered low. The warriors staggered where they stood. Somewhere off in the dark a wolf howled and then cut itself short.

Aron had gone white. "Stop that. Stop it, whatever it is you're doing, stop it right now."

"I'm not doing anything," I said. And it was true. For the first time in my whole life the thing under my skin was doing exactly what it wanted, and what it wanted was to be seen.

The Lycan hadn't moved through any of it. He'd stood there in the center of that cleared ring the entire time, watching me the way you watch a fire finally take hold of dry wood, and when I looked over at him he spoke one last time, low and only for me, under the rising noise of a pack coming apart at the seams.

"They're going to try to put you back in the box," he said. "Tonight. Before the story has a chance to spread. Him, and her, and all of them together." His gold-lit eyes stayed on mine. "You have until they stop being afraid of you to decide whether you're going to let them."

Behind me, Aron found the last of his Alpha's voice, raw and shaking, and gave the order that would change everything.

"Take her to the cells," he said. "Now. Before she wakes up all the way."