The Rejection Keeper.

The Bond that Bit Back.

They make it public.

That's a decision about something, and it isn't about me, though I'm the only person standing on the floor.

You don't invite four neighbouring packs to a severing. You don't invite anyone. It's private and fairly ugly work, and in eight years nobody has ever watched me do it except the person bleeding.

But a coronation needs a demonstration, and a man who cannot be rid of a woman is a man whose packs start asking whether he can be rid of anything.

So they light the hall. They fill it. They lay down salt and ash and the boards of a house that burned with wolves still in it. And they bring out the girl with the scars and tell her to open the Alpha of Runegrave in front of everyone who has ever doubted him.

They take my coat at the door.

That's a small thing to a normal girl. To me it's the entire performance. My arms are bare from the shoulder down, and I walk the length of that hall with four hundred wolves watching forty-one pale lines catch the light.

I don't look at any of them. They all look at me.

I hear a woman near the front say, "Is that all of them?"

Another says, "That's what they're for."

A third says nothing, which is somehow worse.

Cassian is already on the floor. Someone has unbuttoned his shirt, which I hadn't expected and which I make a point of not noticing.

He does not look at me.

That might have been a kindness. It doesn't feel like one.

Here is what the room thinks is happening.

The room thinks a girl with damaged arms is going to reach into the Alpha of Runegrave and pull out a woman he loved. That is what they've been told a severing is: an operation on the heart, performed by a professional, with the woman taken out and thrown away.

That isn't what it is. A severing is not a cure. It's a transfer. Somebody has to end up holding the thing, and it will not be the man on the floor, because he's the reason there's anything to hold.

Four hundred wolves are about to watch a girl take his damage into her body, and then thank her for it by looking away.

I have done this forty-one times. I have never once had an audience.

"Keeper," he says, for the room. "State your intent."

"To sever the bond," I say. My voice comes out steady, which is its own small miracle. "Full severance. Done properly, it takes about four minutes. Done badly, it takes about four minutes and then you die."

Somebody in the back laughs.

I look for a face I know and there isn't one.

Four packs, and I know every wolf in Silverpine by their walk. The front rows are Runegrave — that's easy, they're the ones with their chins up and their hands still. Behind them, the southern packs, who arrived yesterday and have spent two days being fed and shown the gardens. To the left, a bloc in grey-green: twenty easterners, and at the front of them an elder with a grey beard and a gravel voice I can hear all the way from the floor, even when he's talking to the man beside him.

He isn't looking at Cassian.

He's looking at me. He's looking at me the way a man looks at a horse he's thinking about buying.

And in the second row, on the aisle, there is an empty chair with a cushion on it, and nobody has moved to fill it, and I understand — without being told, the way I understand most things, by watching where people put their hands — that the chair belongs to Marena Vāle-Sorrell, and that she was invited, and that she did not come.

I hate them. I want to be honest about that, because I remember the feeling exactly: I stand in the middle of the finest hall I have ever been inside, and everything I feel is hate.

"Yeah," I say, to the room. "Funny. Let's begin."

Here is what a severing actually is.

You find the seam. You take hold of the thread on the side that's dying. And then you pull it into yourself — all of it — so that the part of the bond holding the other person up is being held up by you instead.

That's the whole trade. Somebody has to carry it. It's never the person who caused it.

I put my hands on him.

For the first heartbeats, it works.

I want to write that down and look at it, because it's the last time for a long time that anything works the way it's supposed to. For perhaps eight seconds I do my job in front of four hundred wolves and it goes fine. His breath hisses. His shoulders come down. The thread moves the way threads move — like wet paper, like a letter that never should have been sent.

I can feel the shape of what he lost. That's not unusual. Severing always comes with a taste of the thing being taken, and this one tastes of a house with the shutters closed, and a treaty signed by two fathers, and a girl of nineteen standing in a doorway being told what her life is for.

Then it stops.

Not slackens. Stops. Like a hand closing.

"Keeper—"

"Don't touch me."

I don't know who says it. It might be me.

Because his pain has stopped coming apart in my hands. It has turned in them, like something being offered. And it's reaching — not for Marena, not for the woman four hundred people have come here to watch him forget.

For me.

And the truly terrible part, the part I have never told a single person since, is that it fits.

It settles into the space behind my ribs where forty-one other threads already lie. It does not feel like a wound.

It feels like a key going home.

I should let go. I know that. If I let go in that moment I can walk out of Runegrave tonight, get on a cart back to Silverpine, and be a girl with forty-one scars and a bad job and nothing else wrong with her.

I don't let go.

I stand in the middle of four hundred wolves with the Alpha of Runegrave's bond inside my chest like something that has finally found the shape of me, and I say the only sentence I have left.

"You weren't bound to her."

Silence. Total. Four hundred people, and I can hear the candles.

"Then who," Cassian says, very quietly, "am I bound to?"

I look down at my own bare arm.

At the forty-first scar, and the new line above it, still coming up like a bruise.

And I can't say it. Not for the crowd. Not for the packs. Not for the woman in the front row who asked whether this was all of them.

So I say it to him instead, in a voice that only carries four feet, and the whole hall watches his face change and has to guess why.

"You're bound to the Keeper," I say. "You always were."

Then his hand closes around my wrist — hard, fast, no ceremony at all — and he turns my arm over into the light so the whole room can see the new line.

And he says, loud enough for every wolf in the territory:

"What have you done to me?"