Cast Out, Crowned

Chapter Seven: Run or Stand

The horn sounded a third time, and this time the whole gathering ground felt it.

The pack that had been pressed against the far fence, terrified of me, forgot me all at once. Heads turned north. Warriors who'd been frozen in place a breath ago reached for their blades, because whatever was coming out of those trees frightened them more than the wolfless girl who'd burned their Alpha.

Fenric grabbed my wrist. His hand was hot where our gold met.

"Zaveria. Listen to me, because I'm only going to say this once, and we don't have long." His voice had dropped fast and low, all the stillness gone out of it. "The people coming through those trees hunted your bloodline to almost nothing before you were born. They sealed you as a child because they couldn't find you to kill you. Now you've lit up like a fire on a hilltop, and they've come to put you out."

Across the ground, at the tree line, shapes were moving between the trunks. Not wolves. Bigger. Wrong somehow, the way the horn had been wrong.

"How many," I said.

"Enough." He didn't lie to me, and I noted that. "More than this pack could stop even if this pack wanted to. And it doesn't. Look at them."

I looked. Aron's warriors had formed up, but not around me. They'd formed up between the trees and the packhouse, protecting their own, and I saw the truth of it in one glance. They wouldn't die for me. Selene was already backing toward the packhouse doors. Aron stood frozen on the stone, useless, his burned hand cradled to his chest, watching the thing he'd woken come for all of them.

"So here it is," Fenric said. "You can stay and fight them here, on this ground, with a pack at your back that won't lift a blade for you. You'll burn bright and you'll take some of them with you and then they'll put you down, because you don't know what you are yet and they've been killing your kind for a hundred years." His eyes held mine, gold to gold. "Or you come with me right now. I know where they can't follow. I can teach you what your blood actually does before they get another chance at you. But you have to decide in the next ten seconds, and you have to trust a man you met an hour ago."

The first of the shapes broke from the trees.

I saw it clearly then, and my whole body went cold. Tall, and pale, and moving too smoothly to be a wolf, with eyes that caught the torchlight and threw it back flat and silver. It lifted its head, and it looked across the whole panicking gathering ground, past the warriors, past Aron, and it found me. It knew me on sight, the way Fenric had known me. The way something knows the thing it was made to hunt.

More came out of the trees behind it.

Every part of me that had spent twenty-three years staying small and quiet screamed at me to run, to hide, to make myself nothing again. That was the old reflex, the one they'd trained into me. Disappear. Be less. Survive by being overlooked.

I was done being overlooked.

But I wasn't going to be used either. Not by Aron, not by Selene, not by this beautiful frightening stranger who'd walked out of the trees knowing my blood better than I did.

"Why," I said. The shapes were crossing the ground now, unhurried, certain. "You've got ten seconds too, Fenric. Why do you care if I live. The truth, or I stay right here."

Something flickered across his face. Not calculation. He was deciding whether to give me a real answer, and the fact that he had to decide told me it was real.

"Because I'm the last of my line the way you're the last of yours," he said. "Two royal bloodlines. Both hunted. Both burned down to one." His grip tightened on my wrist. "For a hundred years I thought I was the only one left. And an hour ago I walked out of those trees and felt yours wake up on a marking stone at the bottom of a pack of fools, and I am not going to stand here and watch them finish what they started." His jaw set. "That's the truth. I found the only other survivor in the world tonight. I'm not losing her in the first hour."

The nearest shape was thirty feet away. Twenty.

I looked at the thing coming for me with its flat silver eyes. I looked at the pack that had cast me out, backing away, saving themselves. I looked at Aron on his stone, and Selene at the doors, and every face that had watched me kneel this morning and been glad.

Then I looked at Fenric's hand around my wrist, gold to gold, and I made the first real choice of my whole life.

"I'll come with you," I said. "Not because you saved me. Because I choose it." The gold surged up my arm, bright and hot and mine. "But when you teach me what I am, you teach me everything. No sealing me. No keeping me small for my own good. I've had enough of that to last a lifetime."

For one second, even with the hunters closing, Fenric smiled.

"Everything," he said. "I swear it."

The shape lunged.

Fenric moved, and I moved with him, our gold flaring together in a wall that caught the thing mid-air and threw it back across the ground into two more behind it. The gathering ground erupted, warriors shouting, wolves scattering, the pale hunters pouring out of the trees now in a silver-eyed flood.

"Can you run?" Fenric shouted over it.

"Watch me."

He pulled me toward the eastern dark, away from the packhouse, away from the trees, and we ran, gold trailing off both of us like sparks off a struck flint, and behind us I heard the hunters break past the pack that would not fight and come after the two of us instead.

I didn't look back at Crownwood. Not at the stone they'd knelt me on, not at Aron, not at the pack that had thrown me away this morning and watched me crowned in gold tonight. There was nothing back there for me anymore, and there never really had been.

We hit the tree line at the eastern edge and the dark swallowed us, and Fenric ran like he knew every root and I ran like something was chasing me, because something was.

"How far," I gasped.

"Far." He didn't slow. "There's a place they can't cross into. A day's run, maybe less if you can keep this pace."

"And if I can't?"

He glanced at me, and even running for both our lives, there was something almost like a challenge in it.

"You're the old blood," he said. "You can."

The horn sounded again behind us, close, and then another answered it from the north, and then a third from the east, ahead of us, cutting off the way we were running.

Fenric skidded to a stop so fast I nearly went past him.

"No," he breathed, staring into the dark ahead where the third horn had come from. "No, they've circled. They've already circled."

And out of the trees in front of us, blocking the only path away, a single figure stepped into the moonlight. Not a hunter. Not one of the pale silver-eyed things.

A woman. Tall, and still, and watching us with eyes that glowed the same gold as mine.

"Hello, little cousin," she said. "We've been looking for you for a very long time."