Chapter 8: The Walk Across the Border

SERAPHINA

"By the law of Moonridge," Elder Orson said, "the theft of a sacred heirloom carries one punishment, and it is banishment."

I heard every word, and my body did not move at all.

"Seraphina Dale, you are cut from this pack. From its name, its roof, its table, its protection. From this hour you are counted a rogue, and no wolf of any allied territory is bound to give you bread, or water, or a roof, or a road."

"Or mercy," somebody said from the third bench, and a few wolves laughed, and the laugh ran along the row like fire in dry grass.

"Alpha." My voice came out thin and strange. "Please. One thing."

Corvin's hard blue eyes came up at last.

"Let Alaric hear it from you. Not from Damon, not from a messenger, from you, when he comes back."

"It is better this way."

"Better for whom?"

"For everyone."

My mother had said the same sentence in the dressing room, in the same tone, and I wondered then how many people in this house had been taught the same little phrase, and who had taught it to them.

"There is one more clause," Damon said, stepping forward, and he was holding my stone in his open palm, where it lay dull and gray, like any pebble out of any river. "The old law of the carried theft."

"That clause has not been used in a century," a woman objected from the benches.

"It has not been repealed either."

"What is it?" Corvin asked.

"The thief carries her theft out across the border on her body, so that every wolf who meets her on the road may read her crime without being told." Damon smiled. "So that no pack can ever say it sheltered her by mistake."

"That will paint a target on her," Corvin said slowly.

"She is a rogue now, Uncle. They are all targets. This merely saves the hunters a question."

I watched my stepfather's mouth tighten, and I watched him look at the floor, and I watched him say nothing at all, and that was the moment, more than the cane, more than the verdict, that I understood exactly where I had been living for eleven years.

Damon came and fastened the chain around my throat himself. His fingers were cool and careful at my nape, like a man dressing a doll.

And the instant the stone touched my skin, it warmed.

Not brightly, not enough for anyone else to see. Just the small steady warmth of a thing that knows you, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek, because I would not cry in that hall, and because it was unbearable that the kindest thing in the room was a rock.

"There," Damon murmured, close to my ear. "Now everybody will know exactly where you are."

They gave me a canvas bag at the great doors. Two shirts, a bottle of water, a comb, and the folded notes from my own purse. They kept the sketchbooks. They kept the bird book with the pressed wildflower in it. They kept the blue dress my mother had bought me in spring, which I had worn exactly once.

At the threshold, I turned around.

"Mom."

She stood three steps back, in the gold gown, her hands wrapped around each other like two frightened animals.

"Say one true sentence to me. One. That is all I am asking."

Her lips moved before the sound came.

"Be safe," she whispered.

"That is not a true sentence."

"It is true, I want you safe, I have wanted nothing else since the day you were born."

"Then you should have said it on a day when saying it cost you something."

She flinched as if I had struck her across the face, and I walked out into the cold morning with my chin up, because my chin was the only thing in the world I still owned.

Two guards drove me down the mountain in a gray truck. Nobody spoke. We went past the stables, past the training field where the young wolves were running drills, past the stone arch with the wolf's head carved into the keystone, and every one of those places had a memory in it, and every memory went by at forty miles an hour.

At a crooked fence post painted with a faded wolf's head, the truck stopped.

"Out," the younger guard said.

"Here?"

"This is the border."

I climbed down, and my legs nearly folded, and I made them hold. The older guard leaned across the seat. He had not said a single word the whole drive.

"Girl."

"Yes?"

"Walk fast, and keep off the main road."

"Why?"

"Because there are men paid by the mile past this post, and they have been told about a thin dark girl with a white stone at her neck and a gray bag on her shoulder." He spat out of the window. "Somebody wanted you found before dark, and somebody paid for it this morning, which means somebody arranged it yesterday."

"Who?"

"Go," he said, and the truck reversed, and gravel sprayed across my shins.

I stood alone at the fence post. The road ran down into pine forest in one direction and back up the mountain in the other, and the morning was bright and cold and completely silent.

Then, from the top of the mountain, a howl rose.

It was long and low and climbing, and I knew it, because I had heard it twice as a child and had been sent out of the room both times. It is the old song Moonridge sings when it cuts a wolf away. A second voice joined it, then a third, then the whole pack, and the sound rolled down over the trees and over the road and over me.

Something behind my ribs snapped like a thread pulled too tight, and I made a sound I had never made before, and I put my hand over my own mouth to stop it.

"They are only noises," I said out loud. "They are only wolves making noises."

The howling went on.

And then, from the dark green ahead of me, down in the trees where no Moonridge wolf had ever been allowed to go, a single voice answered it.

It was not mourning.