The Ceremony Approaches

By midweek the whole pack house smelled like beeswax and cut flowers, and Ava had polished enough silver to lose feeling in her fingers.

“Not like that,” Delia said, appearing behind her without warning, the way she always did when there was something to correct. “You’re smearing it. Use the soft cloth, not the one you’ve been using on the andirons.”

“I didn’t realize there was a difference.”

“There’s always a difference, Ava. That’s rather the point of having more than one cloth.”

Ava switched cloths without arguing. Arguing cost more than it was worth, and there was still a full cabinet of serving trays waiting behind her.

Bree swept through a moment later trailing ribbon samples, holding two shades of gold up to the light like the fate of the pack hung on which one won. “Mother, look, tell me honestly, does this one read as brass in the evening or does it hold the color?”

“The left one,” Delia said, without even glancing up from the silver she was inspecting over Ava’s shoulder.

“That’s what I thought too.” Bree beamed like she’d been handed a verdict from the moon goddess herself. She caught sight of Ava mid-polish and her expression flattened into something more familiar. “You’re doing the trays wrong too, probably.”

“I haven’t started the trays.”

“Well, when you do.”

Ava didn’t answer that one either. She’d learned there wasn’t a version of these exchanges where answering back improved anything, only one where it dragged the moment out longer than it needed to last.

“The ceremony’s in four days,” Bree went on, mostly to their mother now, Ava already forgotten. “Do you think Rowan’s mother is going to wear the blue again? She wore it last year and everyone talked about it for a week.”

“I imagine she’ll want something new, given the occasion,” Delia said. “It’s not every year the pack gets to watch its next beta claim a mate.”

“If he claims one,” Bree said. “What if the goddess doesn’t give him anyone at the ceremony? Some wolves wait years.”

“Rowan won’t wait years,” Delia said, with the flat certainty of someone stating the weather. “Wolves like that don’t wait for anything.”

Ava had heard some version of that sentence a dozen times that week alone. Wolves like that. She’d started to understand it as its own kind of pack law, unwritten but absolute: some wolves were owed things simply by being who they were, strong, respected, born into the right kind of favor, and everyone else arranged themselves around that fact without ever being told to.

She met Mira in the hallway outside the linen closet, arms full of tablecloths that needed pressing.

“You look like you want to set something on fire,” Mira said.

“I want to finish the trays and go to bed.”

“That bad?”

“Bree asked me if I was doing the trays wrong before I’d started them.”

Mira snorted, taking half the tablecloths without being asked. “In fairness, statistically, you probably will do something wrong. She’s just getting ahead of it.”

“Thank you for that.”

“I’m trying to cheer you up. It’s not working, I can tell.” Mira bumped her shoulder against Ava’s as they walked, an old habit from childhood neither of them had grown out of. “Are you even going Thursday? To the ceremony?”

“I have to. Dad wants the whole family there.”

“I meant are you going to actually watch it, or hide by the food table the whole time like you did at the last one.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the food table.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the food table,” Mira agreed, entirely unconvincingly. “I just think it might be nice. Watching a happy thing happen for once. We don’t get a lot of those.”

Ava didn’t say what she was thinking, which was that watching other people’s happy things happen had never once made her feel like happiness was a category that included her. She let Mira have the moment instead.

“Maybe,” she said. “If the food table’s good enough to lure me over there.”

“That’s the spirit.”

She saw Rowan twice more before the ceremony, both times by accident, both times brief enough that she told herself they didn’t count as anything.

The first was in the yard behind the training hall, where she’d gone to return a crate of borrowed tools. He was talking with two other warriors, laughing at something, easy in his own skin in a way that made the space around him feel smaller just by him standing in it. He glanced up once as she crossed the yard, and their eyes caught for exactly as long as it took her to look away first.

“Ava, right?” he said, and she froze, because she hadn’t expected him to know her name at all, let alone say it out loud in front of anyone.

“Yes,” she said. “Sorry, I’m just returning these.”

“You don’t have to apologize for walking through a yard.” There was no mockery in it, just mild amusement, like he found the apology more curious than the interruption. “You’re the alpha’s daughter. The younger one.”

“That’s me.” Younger. Not the one who mattered. She didn’t say the second half out loud, but she heard herself think it clearly enough.

“I’ve seen you around. You keep to yourself.”

“I like being useful more than I like being seen,” she said, which was truer than she’d meant to admit, and immediately felt strange for having said something true to someone who had no reason to want the truth from her.

Something in his expression shifted, just slightly, like he was recalculating an assumption. “That’s a good way to be, probably. Better than most people manage.” He nodded once, a small courtesy, and turned back to the warriors he’d been talking to before she’d even set the crate down properly.

She walked away faster than the moment required.

Later that same afternoon, she nearly collided with Elder Rasha coming around the corner of the herb garden, arms full of dried lavender bundled for the ceremony hall.

“Careful,” Rasha said, steadying the bundle with one weathered hand before it could scatter across the path. “You’ve got the look of someone who’s been running from something all week.”

“Just from Bree, mostly.”

Rasha laughed, a low, real sound. “That’ll do it. Walk with me a minute. My knees have opinions about stairs today and I could use the company on the flat ground.”

Ava fell into step beside her, matching the older woman’s slower pace without being asked. Rasha was one of the few people in the pack who’d known her mother, and one of the fewer still who ever mentioned her without treating the subject like something shameful.

“You excited for Thursday?” Rasha asked.

“Not really my ceremony to be excited about.”

“No,” Rasha agreed easily. “But you’ll be in the hall. Might as well see what you make of it.”

“I’m sure it’ll be exactly what everyone expects. Rowan gets his mate, the pack throws a party, I stand near the food table.”

“You say that like the goddess only has one trick.” Rasha shot her a sideways look, sharp despite her age. “I’ve seen a lot of ceremonies, child. More than most people currently breathing in this pack. She doesn’t always do the expected thing.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning nothing in particular. Meaning I’ve learned not to assume I know what she’s planning before she’s finished planning it.” Rasha shifted the lavender to her other arm. “Your mother used to say something like that. That the goddess keeps her own counsel and shares it when she’s good and ready, not when the rest of us think we deserve to know.”

Ava’s chest did something complicated at the mention of her mother, something it always did, equal parts hunger and caution, wanting more and afraid of wanting too visibly. “You don’t talk about her much. Around the house, I mean.”

“Your father doesn’t like it. So I don’t do it around him.” Rasha said it plainly, without apology, the way she said most things. “Doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten her. Doesn’t mean I think you should either, whatever anyone else in that house has decided about how much space she’s allowed to take up in it.”

“I don’t remember her,” Ava admitted, quieter than she meant to. “Not really. I just remember the space where she should have been.”

“That’s its own kind of remembering.” Rasha stopped at the garden gate, studying her with an expression Ava couldn’t quite name, something between pity and something sturdier than pity. “You’re more like her than your father wants to admit, you know. Steadier than anyone gives you credit for. That’s not nothing, whatever this house has taught you to believe about yourself.”

Ava didn’t know what to do with that, so she said nothing, and Rasha, who seemed to expect exactly that, patted her arm once and turned toward the ceremony hall with her lavender.

“Go on,” Rasha said over her shoulder. “Wherever you were running to. I’ve kept you long enough.”

Ava watched her go, the words sitting strangely in her chest, warm and unfamiliar, the way anything kind tended to feel when you weren’t used to being handed it.

The second time was at dinner two nights before the ceremony, when her father invited a handful of senior pack members to the house, Rowan among them, seated near enough to the head of the table that his placement alone told you everything about how the pack ranked him.

“You’ll do the pack proud on Thursday,” her father was saying to him, warm in a way he was never warm at his own table with his own children. “Whoever the goddess gives you, they’ll be lucky.”

“I’m not sure luck is the word most people would use for me,” Rowan said, and there was laughter around the table, easy laughter, the kind that came from people who liked him and wanted him to know it.

“Modesty,” someone else said. “From our best warrior. There’s a headline.”

“I’d rather be modest than disappointed,” Rowan said. “Ceremonies don’t always give you what you expect.”

“They gave me your mother,” said an older warrior further down the table, raising his glass slightly. “Best mistake the goddess ever made, apparently, according to her.”

More laughter. Ava sat near the far end, beside Mira, mostly unnoticed, which suited her fine until Bree, seated closer to the good end of the table, leaned toward Rowan with a smile clearly rehearsed in a mirror beforehand.

“Are you nervous?” Bree asked him. “For Thursday?”

“Not nervous. Curious, maybe.” He said it evenly, without performing for her the way half the table seemed to be performing for him. “It’s not something you can prepare for. Either the bond’s there or it isn’t.”

“And if it isn’t?” Bree pressed. “For anyone in the hall, I mean.”

“Then it isn’t, and you go on living,” he said, simple, unbothered. “The goddess doesn’t owe anyone an explanation. She just does what she does.”

Ava, who had said almost nothing all evening, found herself listening more closely than she meant to. There was something in the plainness of it, the way he didn’t dress the ceremony up as either a guarantee or a tragedy, that she hadn’t expected from someone the whole pack treated like a promise about to be fulfilled.

She didn’t say anything. Nobody at that end of the table was waiting for her to.

Walking back to her room after the dishes were finally cleared, long after the guests had gone and the house had settled into its late, tired quiet, Ava found herself turning his words over without meaning to. Either the bond’s there or it isn’t. She wondered, briefly, uselessly, what it would feel like to be someone the goddess considered worth giving an answer to at all, instead of someone who’d learned to expect silence from every direction, divine or otherwise.

She caught herself at it and stopped. There was no version of Thursday that involved her standing anywhere near the center of that hall, and she knew better than to let herself imagine one. She had a food table to hide behind and a family to stand quietly beside, and that, she told herself, firmly, was the whole of what Thursday would ask of her.

She almost believed it by the time she fell asleep.