Rejected at the Stone

"Hold still," the housekeeper said, and the comb caught in my hair and tore through it hard enough to pull my head back. "You are the one they give to the stone tonight. Do not make a scene. I am not going to be remembered as the woman who let the Reject cry." "I have never cried in front of anyone," I said. "You will tonight." She turned me by the shoulder to face the small mirror above the sink, and I looked at the girl in it the way you look at a table you have already set. Brown eyes. A thin face. No mark on me and no wolf at my side, nothing that had ever been worth a name spoken out loud. I have been the Reject since I was four years old. They told me what the word meant before I could read it, so that I would grow into it the way a foot grows into a shoe, until it stopped hurting and simply fit. Every season the heir of Thornhollow walks up to the mate-stone and refuses one girl, with the whole pack standing below the hill to watch. The elders say it hardens him, that it proves a man can take the Moon's worst blow and keep his feet. The girl is called the Reject. There is only ever one, chosen young and raised for it. That girl is me. Everyone says the Reject survives. She takes the refusal, the bond breaks, the pack claps for the new mates, and she walks back to the scullery with a bruise where her mate used to live. Every Reject in living memory has walked away. The elders call it a gift. The woman who raised me told me the truth the night I turned thirteen, and made me swear on her life never to say it out loud. The Moon does not lend you a mate and take it back. It gives you one, and then it watches what you do with him. When the heir refuses the Reject at the stone, the Moon does not forgive it. It takes the girl, every season, which is why no one here has ever seen a Reject two winters past hers. They are not a gift. They are the price, and this year I am the price. Under my dress, flat against my ribs, I keep an iron key that opens the stone-house where they lock me at night. I stole it three winters ago and have never once been brave enough to use it, though I have held it in the dark more times than I could count. Tonight I think I will be. Enid found me in the yard by the kitchen door, where the housekeeper could not see us. She is small and old and has been in this pack longer than the stone. She took my wrist in a grip still stronger than mine. "Tamsin," she said. She almost never says my name. "When they take you up there, you will want to run, and you must not. Whatever the heir does, you stand where they put you." "I know." "Then say it back to me." I did not want to. Saying it out loud felt like making it true. But she waited, and I said it low, the way you say a curse you are afraid to hear come back. "When he says the words, I let the Moon hear me." "Again." "When he says the words, I let the Moon hear me." She let go of my wrist and went back inside before I could ask her anything, and I stood in the dark with the words still in my mouth like a stone. Before the pack comes, the Reject cleans the stone. It is the last work I am allowed to do. I carried my bucket up the hill while the light behind the ridge went from gold to red. The stone stands alone in the grass, taller than a man, gray, and cold no matter what the sun has done to it all day, with a seam down its face as straight as a ruled line. I put my hand on it the way I always do, and for the first time in all my life, it was warm. I did not have time to be afraid of that, because a voice came from the far side of it, quiet and flat, the voice of a man who did not need to raise it to be heard. "There you are." I turned, and I knew him the way you know your own name. Everyone in Thornhollow knows Thane's face. That is not how I knew him. Something low in my chest turned over and pulled at me, like a line on a river with weight on the far end of it. The warmth from the stone climbed my arm and settled under my ribs, and where it settled, it burned. He stood with his hands behind his back, looking at me the way a man looks at a door that has opened on its own. "You are the Reject," he said. It was not a question. "Yes." "Then you belong at the house, not up here." "I clean the stone. It is my work." "Your work is finished after tonight. Someone else will do it." He did not say it cruelly. He had been told it his whole life and never told the second half, and so he did not know he had just spoken the words a man speaks over a grave. I could have opened my mouth and told him everything. I looked at the old scar through his eyebrow and the flat gray of his eyes, and I said nothing. He came around the stone slowly. Up close he was younger than the elders made him sound, and he looked at me the way everyone looked at me. Once. And then down. He did not look down. "You are shaking," he said. "No," I said. I was. He took one step closer, and the pull in my chest drew so tight that I had to lock my knees to keep from swaying toward him. "Do you feel that," he said, low, so the hill would not hear it. "Feel what, my lord." He did not answer. His hand rose halfway to his own chest and stopped, and he frowned at it as though it belonged to someone else. Something had followed him up this hill tonight, and he had felt it, and it had not let him go. Then he stepped back as though I had caught fire. "Go to the house," he said, and his voice was not flat anymore. "Before the pack comes." The horns sounded from the packhouse, low and then lower, and he turned and walked down the hill without looking back. Long strides. The pull in my chest stretched after him until it ached. I stood alone at the stone with my palm flat against it, and under my hand the cold moved. Not the stone. The cold. It came up through me in one long stroke, from the stone to my arm to the hollow place under my ribs, and there something turned over that had been asleep since long before I was born. A wolf. Not mine. Mine never came to me and never would. This one had been inside the stone the whole time, waiting for blood willing to touch it to wake it up. The horns sounded a third time, and the whole of Thornhollow began to climb the hill. I understood two things at once. The elders were going to stand me in front of this pack and end me with a refusal I was never meant to survive. And whatever the stone had just put inside me was the one thing in this valley their old law had never counted on. I let go of the stone. There was nowhere to run but down the hill, and down the hill was the pack, so I did not run. I picked up my bucket, turned my face toward the packhouse, and went to be given away.