Rejected by His Luna, Kneel for Me

The first rogue came over the east fence while I was still pulling on my boots. I heard the wood crack. Dorn shouted from the watch post. Then the whole ridge went quiet, all at once, and every wolf in Ashfell knows that quiet in the gut. Something up there is hunting. "Children into the long house," I said. "Sena, take them." She caught Bess by the wrist and pulled her toward the door. "Kaia, the fence is down on the east —" "Go. Lock it behind you." I ran for the fence with one boot laced. There were eight of them on the slope. Nine, maybe. I could not count in the dark. They came down through the birches half-shifted, caught between wolf and man, and their faces did not sit right. Their eyes threw the torchlight back flat. "Hold the line," I said. "Nobody chases. If one of you runs past that fence, he is on his own." "How many are there," Ivo said. "Count them after." "I do not like the after." "Neither do I. Hold the line." "Stay at my shoulder," I said. "If it breaks, it breaks on me first." "And if you go down?" "Then you hold it if I fall." "You are not going down." "Nobody plans to. Stay at my shoulder." Dorn took the left. Ivo took the right. I stood in the middle, at the gap where the fence had already come down, and the first one came at me with his mouth open. I put the hatchet through his throat. I am quick with a hatchet. I do not stop to think about it, which is the only reason I am still alive. He went down spraying, and the second one hit me before the first one stopped moving, and I went over backward into the mud with a hundred and eighty pounds of starving wolf on my chest. He snapped at my face. I got my forearm under his jaw and my boot in his gut and rolled him off me, and Dorn put a spear through his back. Blood in my eyes. I wiped it on my sleeve and got up. Behind me, Sena had the children at the long-house door. In front of me, the rest had stopped at the fence line. They stood in a row and looked at us, and the biggest one, the one on the left, lifted his head and breathed. He was smelling me. Not the pack. Me. I felt it in my arm before I understood it. A cold pull under the skin, like a hook set in muscle. The big rogue's head came down. He looked at me like a dog at a door its owner just walked through. "Kaia." Dorn's voice went tight. "Your arm." I looked. There it was. The mark I had woken up with two mornings ago, a pale handprint on the inside of my forearm, no cut, no burn I could remember. I had told myself I slept on it wrong. I had told myself a lot of things. It was glowing. Soft and gray, like moon behind cloud. The big rogue took a step toward the gap. I did the only thing I could think of. I turned the mark into the firelight. Held my arm up until the torch caught it full. Every rogue on that fence line went still at once, and then they turned and climbed back up the ridge without a sound, one after another, and were gone. They came for it. They could not have it. So they left. I stood in the broken fence with my arm raised until the last of them cleared the trees. Then I lowered it, and my knees went soft, and I sat down in the mud, because sitting was better than falling. Dorn crouched beside me. He had a shallow cut along his ribs and was not doing anything about it. He looked at my arm and did not touch it. "What is that," he said. "I don't know." "You know." I knew. I had known for two days. I had not said it out loud, because out loud made it real, and I had sixty-one people who needed me to hold one thought at a time. "It's a mate-mark," I said. "The Moon's." Dorn said nothing for a moment. Then, quiet: "Whose." "I don't know yet. Someone north." I looked at the ridge where the rogues had gone. "Someone with enough pull that nine starving wolves would rather run from it than bite." Dorn sat back on his heels. Behind us, Ivo was walking the line with a lamp, counting. Four of ours in the mud. Two of theirs. Sena came out of the long house with her bag and started on the worst of the wounded, and somewhere in the dark Bess was crying, which meant Bess was alive. Sena got to me last, because I was standing and she had better things to do. "Arm," she said. "It is a scratch." "It is a gash, and it will go bad by morning if I let you be stubborn about it." She took my wrist and turned it into the lamplight, and then she saw the mark, and her hands went still on my skin. "What," I said. "Nothing." She cleaned the gash and sewed it without another word about it, and she did not look at the mark again. Sena had seen one before, and had already decided not to say so. Ivo came back up the line with the lamp and the tally. "Four," he said. "Three at the fence, and Renn at the north gap." "Renn." Renn had two sons who would look for him at first light, and nobody had told them yet. "Their two," Ivo said. "I walked it twice." "Walk it once more. In the morning I want to say the number out loud without guessing at it." Colm came out before Sena could stop him, in his nightshirt, barefoot on the cold ground, and walked straight to the row of our dead without looking away from them. "Colm." I caught his shoulder. "Inside." "You said you would wake me." "I said I would wake you if it was bad." "It's bad." He looked at the sacking and his jaw worked. Eleven years old. He has our father's jaw and none of his luck. "You're bleeding." "It's mostly not mine." "Mostly." He said it flatly, like a man twice his age who has stopped being impressed. "Who were they," he said. "Rogues." "Rogues come in ones and twos. Ivo says so. There were nine." "Then Ivo is wrong today." I turned him by the shoulders toward the door. "Bed. We count in the morning." I put my hand on the back of his head and turned him toward the house, and he went, this time, because he is eleven and it was cold and he knew I would carry him if he made me. Dorn was at the fire with his shirt open, wrapping his ribs. "How much do we tell them," he said. "The truth. There was a mark on my arm, the rogues came for it, and I turned it to the fire and they went." "Then they will count the nights until it comes back." "Let them." "And if it comes back bigger." "Then it will find us still standing here." "They will count anyway. I would rather they count with me than behind my back." I held my hands over the coals. "Have Ivo bring me the elders at first light." He nodded. Then his eyes went past my shoulder, up the track, and narrowed. "Then bring them fast," he said. "There is a rider." The rider came up the north track an hour later. One horse. Gray cloak, a white thread of Kingsmoor on the saddle. Which meant he had been out there the whole time, in the trees, watching. I did not like that at all. He rode to the gap in the fence and looked at the bodies and did not get down. "Which of you leads," he said. "I do." I stood up. "Until my brother's of age. Acting." He looked at me the way men from big packs look at women from small ones. Then his eyes found my arm, and the look slid off his face. "You carry the Moon's mark," he said. "I carry a mark. I don't know what it's for." "Then I will tell you." He settled both hands on the saddle horn. "My Alpha carries its pair. Wilder of Kingsmoor. The Moon has named you his and him yours, and it does not ask either of you first." I said nothing. Behind me, Dorn had gone very still. "You'll come to Kingsmoor before the full moon," the rider said. "You'll kneel at the stone. The bond takes, the mark closes, and you are Kingsmoor's Luna. That is the whole of it." "And if I don't kneel." "Then it stays open." He looked past me at the two dead rogues. "You saw what an open mark draws. Tonight was thin. They double every moon. By the third, you will have no fence left to mend." He said it flat, reading me a number off a page. "The full moon is eleven days out." Eleven days. I looked at my arm. At the fire in the long house where Sena had the children. At the window where Colm should have been asleep and was not. I could see him standing in it, watching, eleven years old and already too good at keeping his face still. "Tell your Alpha no," I said. The rider's mouth moved. "No." "No. And tell him if he wants this mark so badly, he knows where to find it." I folded my arms so he would not see my hand shake. "He can come down to Ashfell and kneel to me for it." He stared at me for a long moment. Then he turned his horse and rode back up the north track, and Dorn let out a breath he had been holding since the fence went down. "You just told the strongest Alpha north of the river to kneel to you," Dorn said. "I did." "He'll come," Dorn said. "Good." "Good." He looked at me like I had lost my mind. "Kaia—" "Every wolf in this valley learns tonight that a woman told Kingsmoor no and went on standing," I said. "I want them to learn it before he rides in, not after." I picked up my hatchet and went to help Ivo with the dead.