Chosen by the Moon

The bond broke at dusk, in front of four hundred wolves, and all Ellie could think was that the honey cakes were going soft. She would remember that afterwards. She would not remember much else. The ribbon in her hair was pinching. Ellie stood on the raised stone platform of the Oakpine pack clearing, palms slick inside the pale blue gloves her mother had sewn. Her mother had been dead nine years now. The gloves were the last thing she'd finished. Blue thread, and the little knot at the wrist she always left undone. Ellie had worn them to every ceremony since. Three years. The whole pack had turned out for the mating ceremony: elders in their heavy wool coats, families with children perched on shoulders, the younger wolves already shifting their weight, restless for the feast that came after. She could feel every eye on her. Not in the way she'd imagined as a girl. In the way you feel a thing that has already been decided. Mrs. Dorn from the bakery stood in the second row with her hands folded the way she folded them at funerals. Behind her, Tam, the boy whose fever Ellie had nursed through last winter, was watching with his mouth a little open, as if he wanted to call out to her and had been told not to. Old Grett, who had known her mother, would not look at her at all. He studied the oak leaves under his boots like they were a text. Damon stood at the front, beside the old oak altar. He looked good. He always looked good. Broad shoulders, that dark hair the pack women whispered about, the Alpha in him already settling into his jaw. He wore the silver torc of the Oakpine heir at his throat, polished until it threw back the afternoon sun. She'd baked honey cakes that morning. She'd hidden them in her pocket, still warm, to slip him when no one was looking. He hadn't looked at her once since she walked up. The pack elder stepped forward. He raised his hands, and the clearing went quiet. A baby somewhere in the crowd started fussing and was hushed. "Three years," the elder said, "since Ellie of the healer's hut pledged herself to Damon, son of Oakpine. The pledge has held. The moon has been witnessed. Today, before ancestors and pack, we bind it—" "Hold." Damon's voice cut through the old man's like a blade through canvas. Ellie's heart jumped. He stepped away from the altar. "I'm not doing this," Damon said. Nobody breathed. Ellie could feel the quiet pressing on the top of her head, on the backs of her knees. She didn't move. She didn't look at him. She looked at the silver torc at his throat and thought about the honey cakes in her pocket, still warm. "Damon." The elder's voice was low. Warning. "Not here. Not like this." "Like what?" Damon turned. His voice carried the way an Alpha's does. When he decided a thing, the air leaned in. "She stands before all of us, and I've been standing here for three years pretending I don't smell what everyone smells." Ellie's gloves stuck to her palms. "What is that smell?" someone behind her muttered. A woman's voice. Not loud. Loud enough. "Water." Damon said it flat. "She smells like water. Like nothing. An Alpha heir doesn't bond to nothing." "About time," somebody said from the back. Low. Someone else shushed them. Nobody corrected them. Ellie looked for her father. He was in the third row with his hat in his hands, turning it around and around. He did not raise his eyes. Tam had gone very still beside his mother. Lila, her friend since girlhood, looked down at her shoes. The honey cakes were going soft. Somewhere behind her a bench scraped. Someone was leaving early. The scraping went on, and then another bench, and another, and the sound of it was worse than anything Damon had said. She found her voice. It came out smaller than she wanted. "Damon." He looked at her then. Really looked. His eyes were the color of rain on pavement. "Ellie." He said her name like he was setting it down. "Before this pack, before the old gods and the moon that watches us—I, Damon Greer, heir of Oakpine, reject you as my mate. The bond is broken. You are no longer mine." She knew the words. Every child in Oakpine knew them. They were what an Alpha said when the moon had chosen wrong. No one in living memory had said them out loud. She had never heard those words in that order. She should say something. People expected her to say something. To cry, to argue, to beg. She opened her mouth. Nothing came. Instead something jolted behind her ribs, small and impossible, like a door she'd never known was there had just clicked open. For half a heartbeat she was somewhere else. A stone platform. A crowd. A man's voice. This had happened before. The thought arrived and was gone before she could grab it. The elder cleared his throat. "The ceremony," he said, to no one in particular, "is concluded." A child's voice, clear and curious, carried across the clearing: "Is she still coming to the feast?" Somebody hushed the child. Ellie heard the hush more clearly than she had ever heard anything in her life. She took off the gloves. She set them on the altar, folded the way her mother had taught her. She turned and walked down the platform steps. No one called her back. The path out of the clearing went through the lower pastures, where the sheep had already been herded in for the evening. Her heels sank into the soft earth. She walked fast, then faster, until the sounds of the pack faded behind her: the low murmur, the scraping of benches, someone's cough. Her throat was tight. Not with tears. With something else. Rejection sickness, her healer's mind supplied. It starts in the throat. Then the fever. Then the rest. It had started the moment he said the bond was broken. It had closed like a hand. By the time she reached the stile her fingers had gone cold. That was the order of it: throat, then fingers, then the fever that came at dawn and stayed three days. She had watched two Omegas go through it. One of them had not left her bed for a month. She should get home. She should mix the willow bark and the comfrey root, she should lie down in the dark, she should— Her feet stopped. The dreams had started three nights ago. She had not told anyone. A stone platform. A crowd. A voice saying a word she did not know. She had woken with her palms wet and the taste of smoke in her mouth. She took one of the honey cakes out of her pocket. It was still warm, soft at the edge, stuck to the cloth. She had made twelve. She had meant to give him the first one before the whole pack. She set it on the fence post at the edge of the pasture, the way she set out bread for the crows in winter. Below her, in the fold, an old shepherd was closing the gate. He saw her. He did not lift his hand. He turned his back and went into the shed. The wind changed. It came off the western ridge, cold, sharp, and it carried something. Pine. And snow. She'd never smelled anything like it. Not in the whole pack, not in the markets down in the valley. It was clean. It was dangerous. It smelled like something that could pick her up and carry her off without breaking stride. Her body had no doubt about it. This was the thing she had been waiting for her whole life. She looked around. The pastures were empty. The ridge was dark against the sky. She must be feverish already. She must have walked into the wrong part of the woods, must be smelling pine resin on the wind— Her neck burned. Not metaphorically. The skin at the back of her neck, the place every Omega knew, began to heat. She clapped her hand to it. The skin was warm. Too warm. She walked home faster. The healer's hut was small. One room, a shelf of dried herbs, a cot, a stove that never quite stayed lit. She locked the door behind her. She bolted it. Then she stood in the middle of the floor and breathed. Her hands were shaking. She lit the lamp. The flame wavered. She pulled off the blue ceremonial dress, the one her mother's hands had stitched along the neck, and changed into the old cotton shirt she slept in. She went to the chest at the foot of the cot for the cooling salve, and her fingers found the wrong thing first: a small bundle of cloth pushed down the side of the chest, wrapped twice and tied. She knew every corner of that chest. She had never seen it. Inside was a brass stamp, no bigger than a thumbnail, green at the edges where it had not been handled in years. A crescent. Thorns around it. She turned it over twice. Her mother had stamped every poultice bag with something. This was not it. This was older, and heavy, and it made her uneasy without giving her a reason. She put it back where she had found it, wrapped the same way, and closed the chest. Then she turned to the mirror. The mirror was a cracked thing, hung above the wash basin. She leaned in close. She pulled her hair aside. The skin at her nape was pink. Not bruised. Not marked. Pink, the way skin gets when it's been near something hot, like she'd held it too close to the stove. She touched it. Heat answered. It was alive, that heat. It pulsed, slow, in time with her heart. She pressed her palm flat against it and counted. Nine beats. Nine beats, and the skin had not cooled under her hand at all. She'd read about this. Every Omega read about this, in the long nights when the adults thought they were asleep. Fated bond. The one the moon picks, not the pack. A bond that doesn't ask permission, that doesn't wait for a ceremony, that doesn't care if you were just rejected in front of four hundred people. It was impossible. A fated bond had to come from an Alpha she had met. The only one she had ever stood before had just thrown her away. And yet. Pine. And snow. She let her hair fall back into place. She stood there a long time, looking at the cracked glass, at the girl in it whose hands were still shaking, whose neck was still burning. Out beyond the pasture the pack was still at the feast. She could hear it: laughter, a fiddle, somebody's dog. They were eating. Somebody had probably said her name once, and then stopped. Outside, a dog barked. Somewhere in the pack, a door slammed. Then, closer: footsteps on the path. Slow ones. They stopped on the other side of her door. She did not move. She did not breathe. The footsteps stayed there a long time. Then they went away. She didn't light the stove. She didn't mix the medicine. She lay down on the cot, fully dressed, and stared at the ceiling. The heat at her neck didn't go out. It didn't go out all night.