Chapter Four: The Elder’s Verdict

My aunt finds out in week three. Not because she is observant, she has never been particularly observant about anything that doesn’t affect her directly but because the laundry maid tells her.

I have been careful. Sera has been more careful. But the laundry maid has eyes and an arrangement with my aunt that I was not aware of, and so at dinner on a Tuesday, my aunt says my name in the voice that has meant trouble since I was nine.

I go to her. She tells me to sit. I sit. She asks me directly. I could lie. I have considered it. I am not good at lying and she is very good at identifying it, and I’m tired so tired, the kind of tired that goes bone-deep after weeks of keeping every emotion exactly where it won’t be seen so I told her the truth.

She does not shout. That has always been the thing about Aunt Mira: she is most frightening when she is quiet. She sits across from me at the kitchen table with her hands folded and her face composed and says: ‘You have shamed this household.’

I know. You have shamed this pack. I said nothing.

‘I took you in,’ she says. ‘When your parents were killed. When the Elders asked me to take in the curse-born child who cost us seventeen wolves and I had no obligation none, I did it. I have fed you and housed you and endured the pack’s whispers about what lives under my roof, and this is what you have done.’

There are things I could say. I keep them behind my teeth. I have kept a great many things behind my teeth over the years. It is one of the skills this house taught me, along with how to make myself small and how to work without being thanked and how to survive being told, over and over, that my existence is a weight someone else is generous enough to carry.

I am very tired of those skills. I have never had the luxury of setting them down.

The Elder Council meets the next morning. My uncle stands before them and delivers his request with the gravity of a man who has been waiting for his excuse. He has the face of someone performing reluctance he does not feel. I have watched him practice that face my whole life.

The Elders deliberate for eleven minutes. I stand against the wall and look at my hands and think of Sera’s face when she saw my eyes in the water. I think of the warmth of the moonlight on my skin. I think: whatever happens, I am not just a curse. I refuse to be just a curse.

The head Elder speaks. His voice is old and certain and final.

‘Lyra Voss. You have shamed the Ashcroft Pack. You are an unmated wolf with child, a burden already beyond the pack’s tolerance, and you have demonstrated beyond question that your presence among us is a liability we are no longer willing to carry.’

He pauses for the weight of it. ‘You are to be cast out at dawn.’ I breathe.

‘You will be escorted to the pack border. You will be given nothing beyond the clothes on your body. You will not return.’ I breathe again.

I look at my uncle. He is looking at the middle distance, satisfied. I look at my aunt. She is looking at her folded hands. I look at the Elders, old men in carved chairs who have never once in my memory questioned whether they were right about anything. Who have sat in those chairs and made verdicts about people’s lives with the certainty of people who have never had a verdict made about theirs.

I say: ‘I understand.’

My voice is very steady. I don’t know where that came from. I think it comes from twelve years of practice, having survived every other morning in this pack and knowing, with a certainty that surprises me, that I will survive this one too. I think it comes from the fact that somewhere in the last three weeks, between the river and the moonlight and Sera’s hand in mine, I have begun to understand that I am not only what this pack says I’m.

I turn and walk out of the room before they can watch me do anything else.

Sera is in the corridor. She has heard everything. Her eyes are wet and her jaw is set and she grabs my arm. ‘We’ll go together. I’ll leave with you.

‘No.’ Lyra.

‘No. Your father is Beta. If you leave with me, it becomes political and your life here becomes impossible. You stay. I pause. I’ll find a way. I always do.

She doesn’t let go of my arm. We stand in the corridor for a long time. I can feel her fighting with herself, the part of her that wants to argue and the part of her that knows I am right and hates that I am right.

 Sera has always been better at most things than I’m. She is not better at this: at knowing when someone needs to be allowed to do the hard thing alone.

At dawn, they walk me to the border. Pack wolves on either side, not touching, just present, making sure I go. Sera’s voice carrying behind me, getting smaller with each step.

I don’t look back. I walk into the dark.

I hear it before I see it: something in the trees ahead, low and fast and wrong.

I stop walking. The wolves escorting me stop too. One of them looks at the trees. The other looks at me with the expression of a man who has just decided that whatever is in those trees is my problem now.

They leave. Of course they left. They have delivered me to the border and their obligation ends here and there is nothing in the Ashcroft code that says they owe the curse-born any further consideration. I watch them go. I don’t blame them. I have spent twelve years understanding that I am not someone people choose to stay for.

The sound in the trees gets closer.

I am alone on a border at dawn with no wolf, no pack, no weapon, and something coming through the dark. I’m pregnant and my feet ache from walking and I have seventeen copper pieces in my coat pocket and nothing else.

I think: this is the worst morning of my life.

And then I think: no. The worst morning of my life was when I was nine and I didn’t understand what I had done and I came home and the bodies were cold and the pack was already deciding what I was. I have survived worse than this.

I run.

My legs carry me faster than I expected. Fear does that. Or maybe it is something else something silver and warm that has been building under my skin for weeks, pushing through now when I need it. I don’t have time to examine it. I just run.