Wolfless

My Heir Will Fit It

The rite ground sits at the top of the hill, open to the sky, seven standing stones with the grass worn down to dirt inside them.

They light nothing. That's the whole point of verifying on a new moon: no moon, no fire, nothing to help you. What comes up out of you that night comes up because it's in there.

The seven houses stood at the stones. The students of the year filled the slope in their colours, and above them on the cut bench where the Alphas sit, Torvald Draven had come out in a plain grey coat with no chain of office, which is a way of dressing that says I don't need identifying.

His son stood two paces behind his shoulder and didn't look at the ring.

Sabine Draven was at the head of the year. I'd learned her in four days: second of her cohort, first in three of the four Trial disciplines, twenty-one, a face like a well-made blade, and that particular stillness of somebody who has been keeping count of an injustice for a long time. She watched the verifications the way an examiner watches. When her cousin shifted his weight behind the Alpha's bench her eyes went to him for half a second and then came back.

Not to me. To him. I filed that.

They called us in the order of the roll.

It isn't a long ceremony. The rite-keeper stands at the north stone and says the old words and puts his hand flat on your sternum, and then you go out into the middle and you're alone, and it comes or it doesn't. Twenty-two of the year went through in an hour. Two Mereth boys, a Corran, four Dravens. The wolves came up out of them one after another in the dark with that sound a body makes going from one shape to the other, and each time the slope made a noise of approval, and each time the rite-keeper called a rank and the clerk wrote it down.

Then the wards. Nineteen of us. Fourteen verified.

The cook's daughter went in third and came out a wolf, thin and grey and shaking all over, and I felt something in my chest I don't have a word for and put it away.

"Wren of Vale."

The wire pulled, low and hard, and by then I couldn't tell which of the two of them was doing it to me, the man on the bench who put my family in a pit or the one standing behind his shoulder.

I went into the ring.

The rite-keeper's hand was warm through my shirt. He said the words. I've heard them four times in my life and I could say them backwards, and I stood in the middle of a ring of stones on the darkest night of the month and did the thing I'd come up that hill to do, which was nothing whatsoever.

I didn't call.

Understand me. I have called before. I've stood in a wheat store and a garrison yard and a cold rented room at Corran and torn my own chest open asking, and nothing has ever answered. But there's a difference between a woman who asks and gets no answer and a woman who folds her hands and refuses to ask, and only one of those two is in charge of what happens next.

If it was ever going to come, I did not want it coming up there, in front of him, in front of his father, on Draven ground with a clerk writing it down.

So I stood in the dirt with my hands at my sides and my mouth shut and let the whole hill watch me be a stone.

It took a long time. Longer than a wolf takes.

Somebody on the slope laughed, and then more of them did, and then it turned into that low rolling noise a crowd makes when it's decided something about you. I stood in the middle of it and thought: four steps from the north stone to the path, and the path to the corridor, and the corridor to a door with my mother's sentence over it.

"Wolfless," the rite-keeper said.

The clerk wrote it down.

"Collar and service," the steward called from the edge, in his weather-report voice, and that was that. Nine years, two forged witnesses and a rite-keeper at Corran, finished off in two words on a hillside by a man who wanted his supper.

Corwin came off the slope so fast he nearly ran.

He had the collar in his hand. He'd been holding it, I realised, right through the ceremony, through all fourteen wards who verified, waiting.

"Alpha, with your permission..."

"No," said Torvald Draven.

The hill went quiet. He hadn't raised his voice; he never has to, and that's the thing about him the stories get wrong. He got up off the bench and came down the three steps to the edge of the ring like a man crossing his own dining room.

"The girl is Vale," he said, pleasantly, to nobody in particular. "Vale is a settled matter. Settled matters should be handled by the house that settled them, and handled where the houses can see it done."

He turned his head, unhurried, towards the man standing where his shoulder had been.

"My heir will fit it."

I've gone over the next few seconds more often than is good for me, and here's what I know.

Rhys Draven did not hesitate long enough for anybody on that slope to call it hesitation, and he hesitated. Sabine saw it; her chin came round half an inch. And Torvald didn't turn to watch his son's face, which wasn't indifference. A man who has decided to test his son doesn't need to watch the test. He needs the son to know he's being tested, and to know he isn't being watched, and to have to be certain in the dark.

I understood, kneeling in the dirt with my hands turned up on my thighs the way the wolfless kneel, that the Alpha of Hollowmere had not arranged any of this to humiliate me.

He'd arranged it to see what his son's hands would do.

Rhys came into the ring.

The collar is iron, thin, hinged at the back, with a screw at the throat that takes a quarter turn. It isn't heavy. Everyone expects it to be heavy; it weighs about what a full cup weighs, and it sits high, up under the jaw, so that you can't forget it's there and can't lower your chin. That's the whole of the design.

He went down on one knee to reach me, which he didn't have to do. It put our faces level.

Up close, in the dark, I could hear him breathing.

His hands came round my throat with the iron between them.

And it detonated.

There's no better word and I've looked. It came up through the floor of me and the floor of him in the same instant and went everywhere at once: heat, and a pull closer to gravity than to wanting, and underneath it a sound that wasn't a sound, in a register I have no organ for, saying one syllable over and over in a voice I'd never heard and recognised anyway.

His thumbs were at the hinge of my jaw. Neither of us moved.

Seven houses were watching. His father was standing eleven feet away with his hands behind his back, and there was a clerk with a pen, and a hill full of people who had just spent an hour watching bodies do exactly what bodies are supposed to do. If one thing showed on either of our faces, he was a traitor and I was a corpse before the moon came back.

So we did the only thing there was to do. We lied. Both of us, in the same second, without agreeing to it first.

My face did nothing. His did nothing. He turned the screw a quarter turn, and I felt the iron settle up under my jaw, and his hands came away, and he stood up, and I looked at the dirt in front of my knees like a wolfless girl who has just found out what she is.

"Household wing," the steward said, consulting his list. "The heir's service."

Rank to rank. Torvald hadn't even had to arrange that part; the machine did it for him, the way it's done it for four hundred years.

I stood up with a collar on my neck and everything I came here for on the other side of that corridor.

Going down the hill in the line of the collared, the last thing I saw was Sabine Draven watching her cousin walk back to his place behind his father's bench. Not looking at me. Not once. Her whole attention on the way he was holding his hands.