Left to Die in the Rogue Lands

Banishment, I learned in the first hour, is not a sentence they carry out. It is one they let the forest carry out.

I had nothing. No bag, no cloak, no shoes fit for the mountains, only the thin ceremonial dress I had been rejected in and the raw, bleeding ache where my mate bond used to be. Every step past the boundary stones seemed to pull another thread of it loose. By the time the moon stood straight overhead, I was walking with one hand pressed to my ribs, as if I could hold myself together by force.

The rogue lands began where Blackthorn's scent markers ended: a valley of broken pines and burn scars, where no law ran but appetite. Every exile knew the rule. Reach the river by dawn and a neutral town beyond it, and you might live. Stop moving, and you would not.

I stopped anyway, for one traitorous minute, and listened behind me for footsteps. For a voice calling my name. For Damien, come to his senses, crashing through the trees to tell me it had been a mistake.

Nothing came. Of course nothing came. He had a new Luna to crown.

"Move, Sera," I whispered, and my voice cracked on my own name. "Move or die politely. Those are the choices."

So I moved, until my feet were cut and numb, until the cold stopped hurting, which frightened me more than the pain had. That was when the wind changed.

I smelled them before I heard them. Rogue wolves carry a sour, unwashed stench, pack-scent rotted away to nothing, and it slid through the pines from three sides at once. My whole body understood before my mind did. I ran.

Twenty-two years of being told I had no wolf, and still my legs knew how to flee like prey. Branches tore my arms. Stones turned under my feet. Behind me the pursuit was almost lazy, the unhurried lope of predators who knew the ground and knew I did not, and that terrified me most of all. They were not hunting in a frenzy. They were herding me.

The ravine ended my run. A drop of black water and broken rock, too wide to jump, too steep to climb in the dark. I turned at its edge with my back to the void, and they came out of the trees: four wolves, and a fifth still in human skin, a scarred man with a knife loose in his hand and amusement in his eyes.

"Look at that," he said. "She ran straight to the pretty spot. Saves us digging."

"Please." The word shamed me even as it left my mouth. "I have nothing. No money, no pack, nothing worth—"

"We know what you're worth, sweetheart." The man turned the knife so it caught the moon. "That's the job. The lady paid good silver. No witnesses, she said. No body to find. Just" — he smiled — "gone."

The lady.

There are many ladies in the world. But I had seen a face slip its mask that very night, above a stolen necklace, and triumph had shone out of it, naked and bright. Vivienne had not been content to take my husband, my title, and my home. She had bought my grave in the same evening's work, the way another woman might order flowers.

Rage is a strange fuel. It does not make you strong, but it makes you fast, and it makes you mean. When the first wolf lunged, I did not scream. I drove the heel of my hand into its eye with every scrap of strength in my body, and I heard it yelp as we went down together in a tangle of fur and teeth.

It was not a fight. A wolfless woman against four wolves is not a fight; it is an ending that takes a little while. Claws opened my side. Teeth found my forearm when I threw it up to guard my throat, and I felt the hot, bright shock of it all the way to my shoulder. The world narrowed to pain and breath and the bitter taste of my own blood.

I thought, absurdly, of the packhouse kitchen. Of all the mornings I had risen before the sun to light other people's fires. I had believed that if I only served well enough, loved well enough, endured quietly enough, one day it would be enough.

It had never been going to be enough. That was the last clear thought I had.

Then my shoulder ignited.

The crescent on my skin blazed, far brighter than at the border, silver light bleeding through my torn dress, and the empty place inside me, the place where no wolf had ever lived, opened its eyes.

She did not ask my permission. She never had, I understood in that blazing second, because she had been locked behind a door I never knew existed, drugged quiet, starved, sealed away in the dark of my own body. And now the door was cracking.

Strength poured through me like a river through a broken dam. I caught the wolf on my chest by the scruff with one bleeding hand and threw it. Threw it, as no human woman and no omega ever born could throw a grown wolf, and it struck a pine trunk with a sound like a felled tree and did not rise. Silver fire ran along my arms. The other wolves skidded back, ears flat, whining at a scent rolling off me that I could not smell but could feel, old and royal and furious.

"Run," I heard myself say, in a voice that was mine and not mine, doubled like an echo in a cathedral. "Run, or kneel."

They ran. Two of them. But the scarred man, braver or stupider than his pack, came at me with the knife while the light was already guttering, because whatever had woken in me had burned three years of poison and twenty-two years of silence in a handful of seconds, and it was spent.

The light died. My knees folded. Pain returned all at once, enormous and total, and the ravine tilted sideways into darkness.

I did not hear the horns. I did not hear the clash that followed, the short and professional violence of trained soldiers falling on ragged killers. Later, strangers would tell me the Royal Enforcers had been sweeping the valley for the rogue band for two nights, tracking them by their kills.

I heard only, as if from the bottom of deep water, a man's voice shouting for a healer. And I felt, gentle against the ruin of that night, a hand turn my face toward the moonlight, and stop.

"Hold the light," the voice said, suddenly hoarse. "Hold it here. On her shoulder. Do you see that mark?"

Boots shuffled. Someone swore softly, in the tone men use in temples.

The hand holding my face began, unmistakably, to tremble. And Commander Ronan Drake, whose name even Blackthorn's warriors spoke with respect, the King's own sword in the wild country, went down on one knee in the mud beside a dying, wolfless exile.

His voice broke on two words.

"Your Highness?"