Silverblood Mate

The hall has to be perfect before the sun clears the ridge. Aunt Odessa has told me this six times since midnight, and each time her voice gets a little sharper, like volume is the thing I've been missing. I scrub anyway. My knees have gone past aching into numb, which is almost a mercy. Above me the Hollow Pine banners hang from the rafters, a grey wolf stitched on deep green, and I am on the floor beneath them, which has always felt about right. Tomorrow is the Choosing Ceremony. Every unmated wolf who has turned nineteen this year gathers in this hall and waits for the Moon Goddess to do what she does. The bond finds you. A pull in the chest, they say. A face across the room that suddenly means everything. I have been trying not to think about it for months and failing every single day. "Wren." Marisol's voice comes from the doorway, dragging my name out like it costs her something to say it. She's sixteen and has never held a scrub brush in her life. "Mother says you missed a spot by the east window." I didn't. I go check anyway, because arguing costs more than checking, and I have gotten very good at that math. There's no spot. I scrub it regardless. I have been the reason for things in this pack since before I could walk. The night I was born, the Hollow Fever swept through Hollow Pine and took eleven wolves in six hours, including my mother, my father, and the twin brother I never got to meet outside the womb. I lived. The healers couldn't explain why. The Elders decided, before my mother's body was even in the ground, that a baby who survives what should have killed her must be the reason it came at all. I don't remember any of it. I've just spent nineteen years living inside what they decided about it. Aunt Odessa took me in because she was my father's sister and the Elders asked her to, and she has never once let me forget what that cost her. I understand the debt. I just don't believe I caused the fever anymore. That's the one rebellion I let myself have, quiet and private, in the back of my own skull. Whatever I am, I don't think it's a curse. By the time the hall is done, the moon is dropping low and my whole body is one long ache. I sit back on my heels and look at what I built with my hands, long tables for the Elders, a wide circle of open floor for tomorrow's ceremony, torches waiting in their iron brackets. Tomorrow this room will hold something I have never once been given here. Hope. I let myself feel it for exactly one more second before boots sound on the stone behind me. Bryn drops down beside me like she owns the floor, which she basically does, her father is Beta, and she moves through every room in this pack like it already welcomed her. She's got half a loaf of bread tucked under one arm, clearly stolen from the kitchens. "You've been in here for four hours," she says. "Someone had to clean it." "Someone should be asleep." She tears the bread and hands me half. "You need to rest before tomorrow." I eat because I'm starving and arguing with Bryn is a losing sport. She doesn't fill the quiet after that. It's one of the things I love most about her, she knows how to just sit in it with me. Then, right as I'm about to get up, she says, "Whatever happens tomorrow, I'm right here." Something warm moves through my chest. Not the bond. I know what that's supposed to feel like, or I think I do, from every story anyone's ever told me. "I mean it," she says. "Even if it's not what you're hoping for." "Do you know something?" "No." Too fast. Bryn always knows something. I don't push. She'll tell me if I need it. I finish the bread. I walk back to my room in the dark and sit on the edge of my bed and think: tomorrow. The Moon Goddess doesn't consult Aunt Odessa. She doesn't care what this pack decided about me before I could talk. Tomorrow I might get someone of my own. I sleep maybe four hours. I dream of silver light moving under my own skin like something alive. I'm awake before the horn, dressed before Marisol can bang on my door to remind me not to be late, moving down the corridor before the sun clears the trees. The hall has been transformed since I left it. Someone who was not me strung flowers along the tables, lit the torches, laid embroidered cloth over the Elders' chairs. It's beautiful. I cleaned the floor it's standing on and I will not be invited to sit at any of those tables, and I find, standing at the back of the room, that I'm all right with that. The pack fills in around me. Elders first, then families, then the unmated, nineteen of us this year. I can feel the nerves in the room like a second heartbeat, everyone hoping, everyone pretending they aren't. Then the doors at the far end open, and I feel him before I see him. Not the way you notice a person walking in. The way you notice weather changing. Pressure dropping. Something in my chest going very still and saying pay attention. I lift my eyes from the floor I've been staring at and a man is crossing the hall, and every wolf in the room straightens without meaning to. I know the name before anyone says it. King Alaric Thorne. Ruler of the Thornecrown Kingdom, here as a guest of honor because our Alpha has spent years trying to build an alliance with a kingdom that could crush us without noticing. He's tall, dark-haired, and his eyes move over the room the way a king's eyes do… counting, measuring, already bored. Then his eyes find mine, and the pull that goes through me is not a feeling. It's a fact. It moves down my spine and into my feet and I think, distantly, that I might need to sit down. I watch his face change. I watch him feel it too. He crosses the circle. The crowd parts around him like water. He stops in front of me, and I have to look up to meet his eyes, and what's in them isn't wonder. It's the look of a man who's just been handed something he didn't order and already intends to send back. "I reject you," he says, and his voice fills the entire hall without any effort at all. "Wren Sorrel of Hollow Pine. Fully. Publicly. Permanently." The room goes silent enough that I can hear my own pulse. "A bloodline the Fever couldn't touch is not a gift from the Goddess," he says. "It's a warning. I won't dishonor my crown by pretending otherwise." He steps back. He looks away from me before I've even had time to answer. I don't move. I don't make a sound. I feel the bond snap, his rejection tearing the thread the universe just tied between us, and it is exactly like someone reaching into my chest and ripping out something I didn't know I was keeping safe in there. Someone laughs, somewhere behind me. I hear Aunt Odessa's voice, low and satisfied: "Of course. What did we expect." I turn around. I walk to the door with my spine very straight, because I have never once let this pack watch me fall apart, and I am not about to start today. I don't run until I'm outside.