chapter 2 wolf and a Briken sword

Nobody breathes when three Alphas walk down a staircase.

I know because I counted. Eleven steps from the top bench to the yard, and on every single one of them, the whole academy forgot how lungs worked.

I should have run. Every instinct I'd built over twelve years said run, or at least kneel, or at the very least, say sorry. The word was already in my mouth. It always was.

But my knees wouldn't bend, and my feet wouldn't move. My wolf had planted herself in my bones like a flag.

Stand, she said. You've been on the ground long enough.

"Easy for you to say," I whispered. "You're not the one they're looking at."

I am exactly the one they're looking at.

She had a point. I hated that.

Rhys reached the bottom first. Up close, he was worse. Worse than the stories, worse than the distant glimpses across the dining hall. He was taller than I'd realized, with rain-gray eyes and a mouth that looked like it had forgotten how to smile, and he stopped about an arm's length away. Close enough that I could smell him. Cedar smoke. Cold air. Something underneath, warm and wild, that made my wolf lift her head like she'd heard her name.

He didn't speak. He just looked at the dust on my palms, then at my face, then at the dust again.

"That," Kieran Voss said from behind him, in a voice like honey poured over a knife, "was a training sword. Oak core. Iron-bound." He tilted his head, grinning with too many teeth. "And you just turned it into flour."

"I didn't mean to," I said.

"Pity." He stepped around Rhys and circled me slowly, the way you'd circle a car you were thinking of stealing. "I'd have loved for it to be on purpose."

Behind him, Sable Thorne hadn't moved. He stood at the edge of the circle with his hands in his pockets, dark eyes fixed on my face, and he looked at me the way you look at a sentence in a language you almost understand.

Then, in the dead silence, Cassia found her voice.

"She cheated!"

It came out as a shriek. Heads turned. Cassia was on her knees in the dirt, hair come loose, face blotched red. She was pointing at me with a shaking finger, and for the first time in four months, I saw something in her eyes I'd never seen before.

Fear.

"She's useless!" she cried. "She's always been useless! She has no wolf, my father told everyone, she's a, she's a nothing, she must have used some kind of, of trick..."

"A trick," Rhys repeated. His voice was low and quiet and absolutely flat. It was the first thing he'd said, and every person in that yard went still. "That's your theory."

Cassia swallowed. "She's lying about what she is."

"Maybe." Rhys finally looked at her. It lasted about a second, and it was like watching frost crawl across a window. "Or maybe you spent four months standing next to something you didn't bother to notice."

Somebody in the crowd let out a small, shocked laugh and then clapped a hand over their mouth.

Cassia's face went white.

I should have felt triumphant. Instead, I felt sick. Because I knew exactly how this would end. Cassia would pick herself up and walk out of that yard, and by dinner, a letter would be flying north to Ashfen, to the man who had told me, you come straight to me, before anyone.

I had twelve years of evidence of what Alpha Dorrell did with things he couldn't control. I'd just handed him the biggest one he'd ever met.

"Excuse me," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted. "I have to go."

I turned.

A hand closed around my wrist.

It wasn't rough. That was the strange part. It was a careful grip, almost gentle, and it sent a shock up my arm like I'd touched a live wire. My wolf went completely, utterly silent.

I looked up.

Sable Thorne.

He'd crossed the yard without a sound. He was close enough now that I could see the thin silver scar cutting through his left eyebrow, and the way his eyes weren't really black at all. They were the deepest, darkest green, like a forest at midnight.

"Don't," he said.

One word. Quiet, rough, like a door that hadn't been opened in a long time. Around us, I heard someone gasp. Apparently, ten words a year was not an exaggeration.

"Don't what?" I managed.

"Run." His thumb moved, once, over the pulse in my wrist. His eyes flickered. "It makes them chase."

Then, so softly I almost didn't catch it: "And he hates it when they chase what's his."

"What's whose?" I said.

But he'd already let go, and stepped back, and was looking at nothing again like I'd imagined the whole thing.

I stood there with my skin burning where he'd touched me and my heart going like a trapped bird, and a terrible, impossible suspicion began to uncurl in the back of my mind.

No, I told my wolf.

Mm, she said, noncommittal. But she was smiling. I could feel it.

I made it to the supply closet behind the east library in record time.

I shut the door. I sat down on an upturned bucket. And I shook so hard my teeth clicked.

"Okay," I said to the dark. "Okay. Okay. Okay."

You're panicking, my wolf observed.

"Yes."

It's very loud.

"Then help!"

I did help, she said, sounding hurt. I broke a sword for you.

I put my face in my hands. "You broke my life."

I broke your cage. A pause. Then, quieter: You never even tried the door, Mara. I've been scratching at it for twelve years.

That stopped me.

Because she was right. Even before I turned eighteen, even when I thought she didn't exist, there had been something. A restlessness. A hum under my skin on full-moon nights. A feeling that I was waiting for something I didn't have a name for.

I'd called it loneliness. I'd called it grief. I'd called it nothing at all.

It had been her.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, and for once, I wasn't saying it to a person who wanted me to.

Don't be sorry, she said, and her voice was warm now, steady, the first thing in my life that had ever felt like a hand to hold. Be careful. Be smart. But don't ever be sorry for me.

I wiped my face on my sleeve and nodded.

And that's when I heard the footsteps outside.

Slow. Measured. Unhurried.

They stopped at the closet door.

I held my breath.

"Mara Ashfen."

A man's voice. Not one of the three. Older, silkier, and wrapped around my name like a hand around a throat.

"I know you're in there," said Headmistress Ilvane. "Open the door. We need to discuss your... situation."

I looked at the door. I looked at the only window, a tiny, grimy square too high to climb through.

Mara, my wolf said sharply. That isn't the Headmistress.

I frowned. What?

The scent. Her hackles rose in my mind, bristling. It's wrong. Under the perfume. It smells like Ashfen pine and iron.

Cold crawled down my spine.

Alpha Dorrell's pack-iron. The smell of the old forge back home, the one that clung to everything he owned. The one that clung to me, I realized, to my winter coat, to my blankets, to every memory I had of being taken care of.

That's not the Headmistress, my wolf said again, very quietly. That's one of his.

"Mara," said the voice through the door, soft and patient and very, very close. "Your father sends his love."

The handle began to turn.

And through the wall, through the plaster, through the dust and the dark, I heard the one sound in the world I hadn't been ready for.

A low, rumbling growl.

Not mine.

Three of them.