Rejected Luna, Stolen Mark

The Alpha read my name off the page, said nine words, and my neck came open in front of two hundred wolves. "A half mark is not a mate," he said. "No claim." I had heard the sentence twice before in my life, both times about other people, and both times I had thought it must sound like the wind. It does not sound like the wind. It sounds like a page being turned. Then the cold arrived under my jaw. It came up through the collar, small and round, a coin of it, and slid down toward the collarbone, and where it turned over it tore. My hand went up before I told it to. The linen went wet against my fingers, hot, and I kept my hand there, because a healer's hands go where the problem is and I have been Hessa's since I was eleven. The yard made a sound I had never heard it make. Not a shout. People said my name. Nobody shouted it. "Her neck." "It's opening." "She's bleeding." I bit down on the inside of my cheek, hard, and held it until I tasted iron. It is a thing I learned at eleven, standing at a table with a man's leg open in front of me and my hands doing what they had to do, and it works. It keeps the rest of you still. Two hundred people were watching me bleed, and I was not going to give them my hands as well. The Alpha was ten feet away with the book still open. Dain Kestrel had come down the steps with the council behind him, six of them, and his mother at the back of the platform where she could see the whole yard without being part of it. He had a short sleeve on. From where I stood I could see the mark inside his forearm, a thin white shape the size of a thumbnail with one side closed and the other side open, waiting for the rest of itself. His mother came down off the platform for the next part. She does not come down for anything. She had the knife out of the box, the flat one they use on the page, and she set the edge against the register and looked at me the way you look at a bill you have no intention of paying. "Name the girl's house." "Brann," said the man at the table. "Brann is a house with one grave in it and no wall. That is not a house, it is a plot." She pressed down and drew the knife through the paper, slow, from the top of the B to the end of the double n. "No mark complete, no wall, no name. She is off the register." The paper made a soft noise, like a page turning in another room. I had worn that collar since I was nine. High linen, buttoned to the jaw, the same collar in August as in January. Nine years of keeping one square inch of myself out of the eyes of this valley, and the inch was never once the thing they came for. They took the four letters in front of it. The man at the table turned the page. "Dalen Rush." "Here." I said, "Nadia Brann." The clerk's pen stopped. Nobody had asked me anything. There is no provision in the law for a person answering to a name that is not on the page, because a person not on the page is not a person, so nobody had ever written down what to do about one who spoke anyway. "Nadia Brann," I said again, louder, with the iron still in my mouth. "That is my name. Write it wherever you like." Ysolde Kestrel did not turn around. She said it to the yard, in the flat voice you use for weather: "The girl has a voice. Note it." The clerk noted it. I heard the nib. Then he went on down the list. Twenty more names after mine, because a register does not stop for one name, and every one of them answered and heard themselves answer in a yard where I was still standing with my hand on my neck. I stood through all of it. There was no line in the law for a person who had been taken off it, so there was nothing to be done with me, and so they did nothing, and I stood in the middle of Grayfell and was counted out with my head up. I have been called a lot of things in nine years. Nobody had ever taken my name. I found that the body does not know what to do with it. My legs stayed. My hands stayed at my neck. What happened is the sound went far away all at once, as if the yard had been moved behind a door, and the blood in my ears got loud enough that I could not hear the flag rope anymore. Then the wardens had my arms. They are not rough men. They do this every year, to drunks and to men who have to be walked out of their own parties. The one on my left knew me. He had brought his daughter to Hessa for the rash, and I had held her and sung to her, badly. He took my arm gently, because he knew me. "Take her to the west gate and let her walk from there," Dain said. Then: "Don't bruise her." Nobody in that yard missed it. I heard a woman on the left side say the two words back to the woman behind her, quiet. The cold thing in my neck went warm for a second, which I did not want and did not ask for. He did not look at me again. I looked at him, because I was going and he was not, and there is a kind of looking you are allowed at the end of things. He had the book open at my page. He had not turned it. Twenty names were waiting in it and he was standing there with his thumb on the paper where my name had been. I knew that arm. Two winters back a horse put him through a fence line and I was the one with the needle, because Hessa was three days north with the flux, and the whole yard stood in the doorway telling me how an Alpha should be sewn. He did not say a word for the hour it took. I have never been able to look at him since without knowing what is under the skin there. They turned me at the foot of the steps, which is the law, so that the pack sees the face of the person going out and can remember it. I had the whole yard in front of me and the platform over my left shoulder, and that is how it happened that I was the only person in Grayfell looking the right direction when Corinne Vane raised her arm. She was up where the claimed stand. The moon was coming over the ridge behind her. She had her arm up over her head for the blessing, because that is how it is done for a pair, and her sleeve came down, and inside her wrist the mark lit. Every mark has a shape, and they are more like the inside of a lock than a picture. I had spent nine years not looking at my own. I knew it without looking. The long stroke that turns left at the bottom, the short one that sits under it, and the little break in the middle where the two sides do not meet. Her mark had the same three things. The long stroke turning left. The short one under it. The gap in the middle. Mine stopped bleeding while I was looking at hers. It stopped all at once, the way rain ends while you are standing in it. "Walk," said the man on my right. Nine steps down to the dirt. I counted every one of them, the way I count everything, because a number is a thing nobody can take off you. Eleven since I was small. Fourteen buttons on the Vane girl's sleeve. Twenty minutes of another man's name being read out over my own. I had carried that shape under my collar since I was nine, in August and in January, and I had never once seen it anywhere but on my own neck. Corinne Vane was wearing it on her wrist. I did not stop walking, and I did not turn my head, and I did not say anything at all. I put the shape of it away in the place where I keep numbers, and I kept walking, because there is a time for knowing a thing and a time for letting everyone find out that you know it, and those two times are never the same time.