Silverblood Mate

Chapter Three: What Bryn Found in the Old Books

Bryn finds me by the creek. She always finds me by the creek, she says it's because she knows where I go when things are bad, and things have been visibly bad for three weeks now, so she's been checking regularly.

She sits beside me without asking and doesn't fill the silence, which is one of the things I love most about her. Then, finally: "Tell me."

I've rehearsed this for days. None of the sentences worked. So I just say it. "I'm pregnant."

Bryn goes very still. I watch shock cross her face, then confusion, then something hot and protective that settles into her jaw like she's decided to be angry on my behalf and needs a target.

"Who," she says. Not a question. A demand.

"I don't know. The Longnight bonfire. I never saw his face clearly." I stop. "I didn't think it would matter."

She's quiet a moment, setting the anger aside — not gone, just filed for later, because she's decided I need something else from her first. That's a very Bryn thing to do.

"Okay," she says. "We figure this out. You and me. Say it back."

"You and me," I say, voice not quite steady.

"Again."

"You and me." Steadier.

"Good." She takes my hand and holds it like she means to keep holding it. "How far along?"

"Six weeks. Maybe four before it shows."

She nods, already thinking, the Beta's daughter breaking the problem into pieces she can manage. "Your aunt finds out before four weeks."

"And when she does, I know exactly what happens."

We sit with that. The creek moves. The morning comes up grey through the trees and I'm pregnant and alone in a pack that's been waiting for a reason to be done with me since before I could talk.

Bryn's hand tightens on mine. She doesn't offer false comfort. She's too honest for that, and I love her too much to want the lie. "Whatever they do," she finally says, "wherever you end up, I'm with you. Even if I can't come right away. I'm with you."

I believe her. I always have.

The light on the water is strange this morning, warmer than the season should allow. Bryn is looking at my hands.

"Does it hurt?" she asks.

"No. It feels like…" I stop. "It feels like being recognized."

She goes quiet again, the specific kind of quiet that means she's deciding whether to tell me something. I've learned to wait her out.

"Lyra." She catches herself. "Wren. Your eyes. Look at the water."

I look. My reflection looks back, and my eyes. which I've been told my whole life are an ordinary grey, one more thing wrong with me, aren't grey in this light. They're silver, bright and certain, like moonlight given a color.

I hold the image until the light shifts and they settle back to ordinary. I think: there is more to me than this pack ever let me believe.

"My father keeps old pack records," Bryn says slowly. "From before the border lines got redrawn. There's mention of a bloodline. Healers. Called them the Veilborn. Wolves who could draw sickness right out of another wolf's body. Who didn't burn under silver moonlight the way the rest of us do." She hesitates. "The records say the line died out two generations back."

The water moves. The light stays strange and silver.

"Wren. Your mother's mother. Do you know anything about her?"

"Nothing. My mother never talked about her family."

Bryn doesn't say what she's thinking. I'm grateful. I'm not ready to hear it out loud yet, I'm still getting used to the idea that I might be something other than what this pack decided about me before I could walk, and that's already almost more than I can hold in two hands.

We stay by the water until the sun is fully up. Nothing is solved. But when I walk back to the house, I walk differently, like a bone that's been set wrong is finally sitting right.

I don't know what's coming. I know I'm more ready for it than I was yesterday.

That evening, mending a torn hem at the kitchen table, I hold my hand up into a stripe of moonlight coming through the window. I wait. My skin shimmers, just for a second.

I think about silver-eyed healers in old records. About a bloodline everyone assumed was gone. About my mother, who never once mentioned where she came from, and who died before I was old enough to ask.

I pick the mending back up. Four weeks, maybe less. I intend to use every day of it.