Chapter Three: I Tell Sera

Sera finds me by the river. She always finds me by the river. She says it’s because she knows that’s where I go when things are bad, and things have been visibly bad for three weeks, so she has been checking the river regularly.

I believe this. She is a Beta’s daughter and she has her father’s instincts: she knows where the pack’s pressure points are, and I have always been one of them.

She sits beside me without asking. She does not speak for a while, which is one of the things I love most about her that she understands silence as a form of presence. She has never needed to fill quiet with noise. She just sits with me in it, and the sitting is enough.

Then: ‘Tell me.’

I have been trying to decide how to say it for three days. I have rehearsed sentences. None of them work. So, I say: ‘I’m pregnant.’

Sera goes very still.

I watch the emotions cross her face in order: shock, confusion, rapid calculation, and then something hot and protective that I recognize as fury, though she is holding it very quietly. ‘Who.’ Not a question. A demand. I don’t know.

The fury flickers. What do you mean you don’t know? I mean I don’t know his name. The Harvest Night. I didn’t see his face clearly. I didn’t think it would, I stop. I didn’t think.

She is quiet for a moment. I watch her set the fury aside not because it’s gone, but because she has decided I need something else from her right now. That’s a very Sera thing to do. She has always been better at deciding what I need than I’m.

‘Okay,’ she says. Okay. We figure this out. Sera. Together. You and me. Say it back.

I look at her. Her jaw is set. Her eyes are fierce. She is twenty-one years old and the only person in this pack who has ever looked at me like I’m worth the trouble.

You and me, I say. My voice is not quite steady. Again. You and me. Steadier this time.

‘Good.’ She takes my hand. Holds it. ‘How far along?’ Six weeks. So, four weeks before it shows. Approximately.

She nods. She is already thinking. I can see it the Beta’s daughter, organizing the problem into parts she can manage.

‘Your aunt will find out before four weeks.’

‘Yes.’

And when she does—’ I know what happens.’

We sit with that for a moment. The river moves. The morning is cold and the light is coming up grey through the trees and I’m pregnant and alone in a pack that has been looking for a final reason to be done with me for twelve years.

Sera’s hand tightens on mine. She doesn’t offer false comfort. She doesn’t tell me it will be alright. She is too honest for that and I love her too much to want her to lie.

She just holds my hand and stays beside me and lets me feel the weight of what is true without having to feel it alone. After a while she says: ‘Whatever they do, wherever you go I’m with you. Even if I can’t come with you right away. I’m with you.

I believe her. I have always believed her.

The silver light is strange today, warmer than the sun accounts for. I notice it again, that flicker under my skin when the light touches my hands. There and gone. Like something trying to tell me something I don’t have the language for yet.

There’s something else, Sera says quietly. She is looking at my hands. I don’t know what it is.

Does it hurt? No. It feels…’ I stop. It feels like being recognized.

Sera is quiet. There is something on her face I cannot read. Lyra. Her voice is careful. Your eyes. In this light. They’re silver.

I look at the water. My reflection looks back. She is right. My eyes which I have always been told are grey, an odd, watery grey that the pack considers one more thing wrong with me are not grey in this light.

They are silver. Bright and clean and certain, like moonlight given color.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what any of this means. But I hold the image for a long moment before the light shifts and they go back to ordinary, and I think: there is more to me than this pack ever let me believe.

I don’t know yet what the more is. But it is there. Sera is quiet beside me. When Sera goes quiet like this, not the companionable quiet of sitting together, but the specific quiet of someone processing something it means she is deciding whether to tell me something. I have learned to wait.

After a while she says: ‘My father has old books. Pack histories. From before the Ashcroft lines were redrawn. She pauses. There are mentions in some of them of silver-eyed wolves. A specific bloodline. Healers. Wolves who could draw sickness from other wolves’ bodies. Who didn’t burn in moonlight. She hesitates. The books said the bloodline died out two generations ago.’

The water moves. The light is very silver this morning. Lyra.’ Her voice is careful. ‘Your grandmother on your mother’s side. Do you know anything about her?

‘Nothing. My mother never talked about her family.’

Sera nods slowly. She doesn’t say what she is thinking. I appreciate that. I am not ready for it to be said out loud yet. I am still getting used to the idea that I might be something other than what this pack decided I was at nine years old, and that is already almost more than I can hold.

We sit by the river until the sun is fully up. We can’t solve anything yet. But when I walk back to the house, I walk differently. Something small and specific has shifted, like a bone that has been set wrong finally being put back in its right place.

I don’t know what is coming. I know I am more ready for it than I was yesterday.

That is enough for now.

Later that afternoon, while I’m mending a torn shirt at the kitchen table, I hold my hand up to the window where the light is coming through in a long silver stripe across the floor. I wait. For a moment, just a moment my skin shimmers.

I close my fingers. I set the mending down. I think about silver-eyed wolves in old books in the Beta’s library. I think about healers who didn’t burn in moonlight. I think about a bloodline that everyone believed had died.

I think about my mother, who never talked about her family. Who had grey eyes or eyes I was always told were grey. Who died when I was nine before I could ask her anything.

I pick the mending back up. I have four weeks before it shows. I will use them well.