Wolfless

Nine Nights

Hollowmere isn't a school. It's the machine that makes the people who will own you, and it has been running four hundred years without anybody once asking it to stop.

They walked us up from the transport at dusk so we'd get a proper look. Black stone on a black hill. Seven towers for seven houses, the gate arch carved over with the name of every Alpha the place has turned out, which is every Alpha there has been. Six of the towers had lights in them. The seventh was dark and was going to stay dark, and not one person in that column needed it explained.

Then they put us underneath the kennels.

Not beside. Underneath. The dogs have the ground floor and the windows; the wards are in the vaults below, where the runs drain down the inside of the wall in a stripe you learn to sleep facing away from. Forty hounds move around over your head all night. Every so often the whole lot of them wake at once for no reason anybody has ever established, and the ceiling goes like thunder, and eighty people lie in the dark underneath it, awake, remembering things.

The steward gave us the rules from the stair so he wouldn't have to come down into it with us.

"Wards rank below every student of every house. Wards eat after. Wards yield in corridors. Wards do not enter the household wing, the eastern archive, or the rite ground." He read it off like a weather report. "Wards may be assigned to service by rank at any time. Verification of standing is on the new moon, nine nights from tonight, in the rite ground, before witnesses. Those who verify are ranked with their year. Those who fail..."

He left it there, which was elegant of him, because there is no sentence in this language that lands as hard as the gap where that one should go.

Nine nights.

I'd had nine years of forged witnesses, of paying a rite-keeper at Corran in stolen letters to swear he'd watched a wolf come up out of me under a moon he also hadn't watched, of walking around every garrison and physician and lantern-lit door in the country. Now it had a date on it and an hour and a specific ring of stone at the top of a specific hill.

What I felt wasn't panic. Panic is a luxury and I've never been able to afford it. It was closer to what you feel on a long walk when the wall you've been walking at finally comes into view.

Nine nights isn't much. But nine is a number, and I can always do something with a number.

Because here's what the steward had just handed me, without knowing, wrapped.

Those who fail. He'd said it like a threat. But the wolfless aren't killed here, they're used, and the used go where they're needed, and I had spent two years learning exactly one thing about this building that nobody thought was worth hiding.

The collared serve in the household wing.

The eastern archive opens off the household wing.

Everything I came for is behind a door no ward may pass and every servant walks through twice a day with a bucket.

"You," somebody said from the stair. "Vale girl. Eyes."

He'd come down two steps into the lamplight and he was smiling, and half the vault had gone still the moment he moved, which told me who he was before anybody said it. Corwin Ashe. Beta-in-training to the heir. Nineteen, twenty at the outside, with that particular shine that comes off a young man who has recently worked out that he can do things to people and nothing happens to him afterwards.

"You looked at the steward. Wards don't."

"No, sir."

"Say the rule."

"Wards yield, sir."

"Wards yield." He came down another step and the vault got out of his way without appearing to move at all. "You'll go in that ring with the rest of them, and you'll come out of it wolfless. You will, you've got the look, you've got that thin starved little look about you. And I'm the one who fits the collar."

He tapped two fingers against his own throat.

"Personally," he said. "I do them personally. It's a hobby of mine."

He was watching my face. Everyone in this country is always watching my face. So I gave him what he'd come down the stairs for: eyes dropping half a second too slow, so he could tell himself he'd frightened it out of me and stop looking for whatever was underneath.

He went back up pleased with himself. The vault started breathing again. Somebody two shelves over began to cry and somebody else told her to shut up, not unkindly.

I lay down on a stone shelf under forty sleeping dogs with the drain at my back and did arithmetic, which is what I do instead of sleeping.

Nine nights to the new moon. One rite ground, witnessed. One archive behind one door. And one collar, offered personally by a man too vain to wonder why the girl he'd picked out looked at him a beat too long before she looked away.

And underneath all of it, running like a wire nobody else could see, the thing that had happened to me twice in the mud of that yard, in daylight, in front of six riders, for which I had no arithmetic at all.

Wren of Vale.

I said it to myself in the dark, the way you press on a bruise to find out how deep it goes.

The wire pulled.