His Rejected Luna, Tied by the Moon

The mate-stone sits on the ridge above the low pasture, and every soul I have ever fed stood on that hill to watch me take the hand of the man who killed my brother. I did not take it. I am ahead of myself. The Moon gave me its mark eight days ago, a white handprint under my ribs, cool as river stone, no cut I could name. I showed it to Magda, and Magda has buried four husbands and a war and does not change her face for weather. She changed her face. Then the rider came from Stormhold. He was polite. He gave me the other half of the story and the name that owned it. Roan of Stormhold, the strongest Alpha north of the middle river. "That is not a name," I told him. "That is a rumor with a horse." "It is a name," the rider said, "and he will be at your stone in a week." Everyone in Farrow knows what Stormhold is. Three winters back they came down for the low pasture and took it, and my brother Corran went up the ridge with a spear and did not come back down, and the pasture has been theirs since. My people do not say his name to me. They think I set it down. I set it down the way you set down a knife, not far, and by the handle. So a week later I stood at the stone with Stormhold's Alpha across from me and the whole of both packs on the hill below, and I kept my hands at my sides. Roan is big, and he stands like a wall that has decided to be a door, and he looked at me as if I were a thing he had already paid for. "You came," I said. "I came to end it." He said it loud, because he wanted the hill to hear. "The feud, the pasture, the dead. Take the stone with me and it ends here. Farrow keeps its houses, its herds, its graves. Stormhold keeps the low pasture, which we were going to keep regardless. Two packs on one bond, and the north stops bleeding over a field no one can eat from." "And Farrow," I said. "What does Farrow keep, on your ledger. A number." "Farrow keeps a wall." "Farrow has a wall. It is me." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. He did not let it finish. "Your brother is three winters dead," he said, quieter, just for us. "The pasture did not kill him. He came up the hill. I did not ride down into your village to do it." "You had already taken the hill." "Yes," he said. "I had." That was the whole of it, and that was the trouble. He had never once lied to me about any of it, and a man who tells you the true thing is harder to hate than one who does not. Below us Farrow watched. Brannon at the front with his arms crossed, telling the hill with his whole body that he was ready to be wrong about everything except me. Magda a step back, still. My pack, thin and small and mine. I thought about Corran. I am not supposed to. I am supposed to have set him down. It has never once worked. "I felt your mark the night it came," Roan said, low, so only the two of us could hear it. The hill had gone quiet behind that. "It pulled me south out of my own hall, in my own bed. You felt it too, or you would not be standing at this stone at all." "I am standing here to refuse you in front of both packs, and that is not the same thing." "It is the same thing," he said. "You came so the hill would watch you say no. I came so you would have to look at me while you did it." "Then look," I said. "You despise me," he said. "Good. That is the easier of the two." "The two of what." He did not answer that one. He looked at the stone. I put my hand flat on the stone and left it there, and Roan's hand came down beside mine, and the whole hill drew breath. Then I took my hand back. "No," I said, loud enough for the ridge. "Stormhold does not get the stone and it does not get Farrow and it does not get me. Not for a pasture, and not for a wall, and not for one dead man's name." Roan's hand stayed on the stone a moment longer. He looked at it. Then he looked at me. "You are refusing the Moon," he said. "I am refusing you," I said. "The Moon can take it up with me face to face." The mark went cold. I felt it turn over under my ribs like a page, and then I heard it, a sound like ice in a pail, like something that had been one piece deciding to be two. The stone went dark from the top down. Half the hill made a noise. Magda, who never makes noises, made one. A crack. I learned later what it meant. At the time I knew only that my mark had gone black and the man across from me had gone gray, and that whatever the Moon had been building between us, I had just split it down the middle. Roan took his hand off the stone. He did not look at his own mark. He looked at me the way a man does a sum. "Then we are both finished," he said, "and neither of us knows it yet." He walked down to his horses and Stormhold closed around him, and Farrow opened for me, and the two packs went down the hill on their own sides without one of them speaking to the other. Magda caught my sleeve at the bottom of the hill, which she has not done in nine years. "You split a bond," she said. "I saw it once, when I was a girl, on the far side of the mountain. Those two could not get more than a field apart after, and in the end they went down together, and no one ever said which of them went first." She let go of my sleeve. "Sleep alone tonight. I do not think you will manage it." "But I am not finished. When the pull comes, you will tell yourself it is only the mark. It is never only the mark." She looked up the empty hill. "Go to him before he comes to you. Pride is a cheap thing to die of." I slept that night, which surprised me. It woke me near dawn. A pull, low in my chest, with no direction to it, like the line of a fish that has not understood it is caught. I lay still and waited for it to mean something. It meant something. I got up and went out. Brannon was already at my door with a lamp and the wrong face. "You need to come to the fence," he said. "Why." "There is a horse." "Whose." "Stormhold's." We found him on the near side of the fence, at the very edge of my ground, down on one knee in the wet grass with one hand braced in the dirt. His horse stood off at the treeline and would not be ridden further. Roan's coat was open and his mark was black and out, and blood came through the fingers of one hand where he held his other arm, slow, like water off a roof. He did not stand. I do not think he could. "Go back," he said. "You are on my land." "I know where I am." He got the words out one at a time. "I rode for home. I got as far as the ridge above your valley. That ridge is a hundred paces from your door, near enough. When I crossed it, the mark tore open." He lifted his eyes to me, and they had the flatness of a man who has been shown the arithmetic and does not care for the answer. "It dragged me back." "You could have stayed at the ridge," I said. "You did not have to cross back." "No," he said. "But the mark knows your side from mine better than I do. A wall I could stand behind. This is a line I cannot cross, and I found its edge in the dark." He got his breath in slow. "You want to know if it hurts. Everything from here to my horse." "Then walk back to the fence line," I said. "If it is only distance, walking costs you nothing." "Nothing stops it," he said. "It only stops hurting when you are near." I did not move, and neither did he, and both of us heard what he had just said. Behind him was the whole north, and his wall in it, and the war he keeps off our fence. In front of him was my ground, and me. I looked at the blood on his arm and the black print over his heart and I understood what the sound at the stone had been. The Moon does not let a refusal go. It ties the two of you anyway. And it had tied him to me, at the edge of my ground, a hundred paces from the rest of his life, and it was not going to let go. "You cannot stay here," I said. There was no answer. He had passed out. Brannon came up the grass with the lamp and stood over him and did the thing with his mouth he does when he wants to say something and will not. "Say it," I said. "That is the man who killed your brother," he said. "On our side of the fence. Bleeding on our grass." "I know what he is." "Then what do we do with him." I looked down at him. Black mark over his heart, black mark over mine, both of them doing the same slow work. "We take him inside," I said. "He cannot be anywhere else."