Chapter 8

Wren

The mornings had a rhythm to them now that Wren hadn't expected to find comforting, six weeks into a life she still sometimes couldn't quite believe was hers. Water before breakfast. Roof repairs if the weather held. Milo underfoot with a hundred questions about training that Ezra mostly deflected and Wren mostly answered, because somebody in this pack needed to remember what it was like to be twelve and starving for someone to take you seriously.

"Teach me the vanishing thing," Milo said, for what had to be the fourth time that week, trailing her toward the training clearing with the single-minded persistence of a boy who hadn't yet learned that adults said no for reasons that usually made sense eventually.

"I don't know how to do the vanishing thing. That's sort of the problem."

"You did it during the fight."

"I got lucky during the fight."

Ezra, already waiting at the clearing's edge, didn't look up from the knife he was sharpening. "Wasn't luck. Luck doesn't happen the same way twice, and I've got a feeling you're about to prove that today, one way or the other."

Ezra's idea of teaching her control turned out to be standing at the edge of the training clearing with his arms crossed, watching her get knocked flat by Rennick for the fourth time in an hour, and offering exactly one piece of advice between attempts: "Stop thinking about it."

"That's not advice. That's a shrug with words attached."

"It's the only advice I've got." He didn't sound sorry about it. "Whatever you did during that rogue fight, you didn't do it on purpose. You did it because you were about to die and some part of you that isn't in charge of thinking decided it wasn't going to let that happen. Can't exactly replicate near-death on command, so we work with what we've got."

Rennick came at her again — slower this time, telegraphing it, the kind of attack a training partner threw when he wanted you to succeed and not the kind rogues threw when they wanted you dead — and Wren tried, for the fifth time, to find whatever door she'd stumbled through by accident six weeks ago.

Nothing happened. Rennick's hand closed around her wrist exactly the way it was supposed to, and she hit the dirt exactly the way she had the last four times, and she lay there for a second looking up at the sky and wondering if Ezra's old story about Nightshade blood had just been wishful thinking dressed up as history after all.

"Again," Sable called from the fence, unhelpfully cheerful about it in the way she got when she was trying to keep Wren from spiraling. "Come on. Fifth time's the charm, or sixth, or whatever number we're actually on. I lost count."

"You could help."

"I am helping. I'm providing moral support and mild judgment from a safe distance."

She tried again anyway, because trying again was mostly what her life had turned into these days, and this time, instead of bracing for the hit the way she had the last five attempts, she let herself think about the one thing she'd spent five years training herself not to think about: the exact feeling of being looked straight through by someone who was supposed to see her.

It wasn't fear that had done it in the fight. She understood that now, with a clarity that felt like it belonged to someone smarter than she usually gave herself credit for being. It was that. The old, familiar nothing of being unseen — except this time she was choosing it instead of having it done to her.

Rennick's hand closed on empty air.

He stumbled forward with the momentum of an attack that had nowhere left to land, and Wren stood two feet to the side of where he'd expected her to be, breathing hard, staring at her own hands like they belonged to someone she was still getting introduced to.

"Ha." Sable, from the fence, considerably less unhelpful now. "There it is."

Ezra didn't say anything for a moment, just looked at her the way he'd looked at her the day of the rogue attack — careful, recalculating. "Do it again."

She did. Slower this time, more deliberate, and it cost her something to hold onto that particular memory on purpose — the ceremony, the silence, forty faces not quite looking at her — but it worked twice more before exhaustion caught up with her hard enough that she had to sit down in the dirt and put her head between her knees.

"That's enough for today," Ezra said, crouching down beside her, something that might almost have been pride sitting uneasily on a face that mostly specialized in stubborn. "You just did something on purpose that most Nightshade wolves for three generations couldn't do at all. Don't push it further than your body's ready to go."

"It felt like giving something away." She hadn't meant to say it out loud. "Not like using a muscle. Like — spending something I don't get back."

Ezra's expression didn't change, but something behind it did. "That sounds about right, from what the old stories say. Power like that isn't free. Never has been, not for anybody who's actually carried it instead of just wishing for it." He stood, offered her a hand up. "Something to keep in mind, next time you're tempted to use it just because you can."

Wren took the hand, let him pull her to her feet, and decided, privately, that she'd worry about the cost later. Right now, for the first time in longer than she could comfortably remember, she'd made something happen instead of something happening to her, and that alone felt worth whatever it had taken out of her.

That night, lying on the pallet they still shared because neither of them had gotten around to building a second bed, Sable propped herself up on one elbow and studied Wren in the dark for longer than was strictly comfortable.

"What."

"Nothing. Just — you looked different today. Out there." Sable settled back down, voice going quieter, more careful than her usual register. "Good different. Like something that's been waiting a long time finally got let out."

Wren didn't have a response ready for that, so she said the only honest thing available to her. "It felt like giving something away, using it. Ezra thinks that's normal. I keep waiting for it to feel like something else instead — like winning, maybe — and it just doesn't yet."

"Give it time."

"That's what everyone keeps telling me lately." Wren stared up at the dark ceiling, and for one unwelcome second, the ache behind her ribs made itself known again, quieter than it used to be but never entirely gone, a reminder that some wounds didn't close just because you'd found something new to be instead of the girl who'd been standing in that clearing. "I'm starting to wonder if time's actually the thing that fixes anything, or if it just teaches you to carry it better."

Sable didn't have an answer for that either, and for once, she didn't try to invent one. She just reached over in the dark and found Wren's hand, and held onto it until they both fell asleep.