Sacrificed to the Cursed Alpha

They bound me to the stone before the moon came up, and they did it gently. That was the part I could not get past. Nobody dragged me. Nobody shouted. The pack walked me through the pines in a silent column, the way a bride gets walked up to an altar, and when the rope went around my wrists Elder Corvin laid a palm on my head and said, "Thank you, child." I nearly said you're welcome. That is how it works on you. Nobody takes anything. They thank you, and you hand it over yourself. "Will it hurt?" I asked. Corvin's hand went still on my hair. In the thirteen years I had lived in Blackmoor, the old man had never once hesitated in front of me. "Yes," he said. "Not for long." Two hundred wolves ringed the clearing. Every one of them in human skin. Every one of them watching a nineteen-year-old witch tied to a rock. Their names were all mine. I had stitched their coats, boiled their fever root, sat with their dying. Marta from the smokehouse was weeping into her sleeve. Her husband was not. A hunter's face, that was what he wore: the face of a man who had already loosed the arrow and was only waiting on the walking. I looked for Mira. Not there. Good. The moon would make her sick tonight, I had told her, which was a lie, and she believed it, being twelve and having me as the only person in Blackmoor who had ever been kind to her. Bolt your door, I had said. Open it for nothing, no matter what you hear. She was going to hear plenty. Somebody had dressed me in white. Nobody puts a prisoner in white unless they mean to make a ceremony of it. One of the elder women brushed out my hair, eyes fixed on the ground the whole time, as though the small kindness embarrassed her. Three days earlier, two of the elders' sons had come to my mother's house and carried my life out of it in two baskets: pots, bedding, the jar of dried thyme. I stood in the doorway and watched them go down the path. Nobody explained anything. At dawn, in the cellar where they had kept me waiting, Corvin came down the steps and said it plainly, because that was the kind of man he was. The pack has chosen you, child. It is an honor. Then he studied the wall instead of me, and we both understood it was not an honor, and he said it anyway. Three days I had, after that, to decide whether to be angry. Quiet won. Anger is a thing you spend, and something told me I would want everything I owned before the week was out. The stone at my back was older than the pack. Older than the pines. Marks had been cut into its face and worn shallow by a hundred winters of rain and a hundred winters of other things. On the road to the river I had walked past it a thousand times and never touched it. Now it held me up. There was nothing else. Above the ridge, the moon sat nearly full. Nearly. Then my left wrist began to burn. Not the rope. Under the rope: the small spiral of scar tissue my mother had put there when I was seven, no bigger than a coin, twelve years of doing nothing at all except itching in wet weather. Itching was finished with. Heat came off it through the binding, steady as a coal. Don't fight it, she had said, the night she made it. Her hands on my wrist. Her voice going very calm and very slow, which was what it did when she was frightened. Whatever happens, Wren. Don't fight it. I was seven. I assumed she meant the mark. "One hundred and seven years ago," Corvin said, and the clearing went quiet, "a witch of the old covens laid a curse upon our first Alpha." Those words I had heard before. Every child in Blackmoor hears them before they can write their own name. "Since that night, the beast in the Alpha's blood wakes with every full moon. It does not sleep again until it has tasted the blood of a witch." He paused. "We did not choose this. But we do what must be done, so that the pack survives." Two hundred heads bowed. Mine stayed up. Corvin used the bowing to come close. Three steps, unhurried, an old man checking a knot, and he put his palm flat on my shoulder and spoke low enough that the rows behind him heard nothing. "Whatever comes out of those trees tonight, child, do not answer it." "Answer it." "That is what I said." The hand went away. "Do not." Before I could get the question out he was back at the front of the ring with his staff planted, and the whole clearing had seen an elder bless a sacrifice, and I had been handed a sentence that did not belong in any speech I had ever heard at that stone. More to the story existed. There always is. Nobody in that clearing would say it out loud, though: that they had not picked me for being strong, or pure, or willing. They had picked me because I was a witch nobody would miss. My mother was dead. Her coven never came looking. And casting was a thing I could not do: not a spark, not a whisper, not a candle lit from across a room. Every child in Blackmoor could snap a twig in half with their hands. I could not boil water without a fire. Some sacrifices get honored. Some are just convenient. The moon cleared the ridge. It came to me before it came to my eyes. Two hundred throats changed their breathing at once, all of them taking the same shallow breath. Marta's weeping stopped. Then the pines at the north edge bent. Wind was not what moved them. Something walked through those trees that the trees did not want to touch. Out of the dark he came, larger than a wolf has any business being. Black nose to tail, chest like a warhorse, a head sitting too heavy on the shoulders, as though it had been built for something else and fitted to him by mistake. Gold eyes. Not yellow. Gold, the colour of coins in a dead man's pocket. The ring opened for him without a word being spoken. Running was beneath him. So was snarling. Across the clearing he came at a walk, unhurried, like a man who had settled his question days ago and was only now getting round to the doing of it. That was worse than running. I pulled at the ropes. Why, I could not say. Three days I had told myself I would not beg, not on the stone, not in front of them. Then his shadow came off the ground and covered me, and something older than my thinking took hold of my arms, and I pulled until the rope bit into both wrists. Blood ran down my hands and hit the stone. Under my fingers the marks flared. Thin, cold, the colour of frost catching moonlight, running the carved lines from my wrists outward across the rock face, down to its base. Behind me Corvin made a sound. Not a word. The sound a man makes when the ground moves under his feet. "Wren..." he began. The beast lunged. I closed my eyes. Nothing happened. For a long time, nothing happened. When I opened them again he was near enough that the scars in his fur could be counted, near enough that his breath moved the loose hair off my face. His jaws were open. The longest of his teeth rested against my throat, light, the way a hand rests on a table. He had stopped. Two hundred wolves stood frozen in the trees, and not one of them was breathing. His eyes were on my face. Not on the blood, not on the rope. On my face. And the beast was shaking. All that size, all that weight, and he stood over me shivering like a dog left out in the cold too long. Something had gone wrong in his eyes as well, the gold dulling at the edges, which is what a fire does when someone chokes it. Then he spoke. A wolf's throat did not make that voice. A man's did, from somewhere deep inside a ruined chest, and it sounded as though it had been dragged over gravel for a hundred years to reach me. "Wren," he said. Nobody had told him my name. In my life I had never spoken to him. No story I ever heard allowed a wolf to speak in the change. Do not answer it. From behind my own ribs, an answer arrived. "...Yes." The shaking worsened. Down came his head until his brow almost touched mine, and the heat of him came off like a stone left all day in the sun. Then he said something else. It was not my name. Two syllables, old sounds, ones that did not fit in the mouth of anyone living in Blackmoor. They went through me like a splinter going in. Behind me, Elder Corvin's voice cracked in half. "How do you know that name?" I turned my head as far as the rope allowed. Thirteen years, and I had never seen the old man afraid. Afraid was what he was now. His hands shook so badly that the staff needed both of them. "Wren," I said. "He said my name. He said Wren." "No." Corvin stared at the beast. Something sat in his face that had never been there before, and it was not fear of the wolf. It was fear of me. "No, child. That was not what he said." End of Chapter 1