Jason’s Challenge

The knife traced a bright thought between us and the yard inhaled. Frost held to the shaded places; the rest was churned to a damp brown from all the feet that had come to watch something called training and hoped it would turn into something called blood. The drum from last night had found its morning manners but it was still there, a steady pulse barely louder than breath, thud, thud, reminding my body what bodies are for.

Jason rolled his wrist and the blade listened. He was beautiful the way weapons are: simple, honest about their uses. He smiled like we were about to do a friendly thing. The pack made a shape around the circle. Vivian at the edge, still as a promise. Lyra had taken the place where the fence makes a shadow. Jasper stood near Vivian but not with her, like a tree that had chosen a piece of weather. Our eyes found each other and looked away in the space of a heartbeat. I didn’t need him telling me to be careful; my wolf had done nothing but whisper care, care, care since I woke with the blue strip of cloth warm against my skin.

“Training,” Jason said again, loud enough for the council members to hear their own fairness reflected back at them. “For safety.”

“Whatever keeps your conscience tidy,” I said, and stepped so the light wouldn’t blind my left eye. The knife tracked me like a cat watching a bird decide whether or not it believes in flight.

We had fought before. He’d made sure of that. Bruises from Ch.4 still knew his fingerprints. But those were drills with rules and laughter that broke too easily into something else. This was a yard full of witnesses and the thin order of morning.

“First blood, first bow,” someone called. “No shift. No call.”

“Training,” Vivian said without raising her voice. “Not trial. No blood if you can help it. No bows that cost us later.” Her gaze cut the circle. “And this is mine to call if it goes wrong.”

Jason’s mouth flattened but he bore it, because that is the weight you carry when you want power and the person with it says you will wait your turn. He nodded like a good soldier and then he didn’t look at Vivian again.

He looked at me.

We moved. He came in with a feint to the right and a low sweep. If I’d been the girl from my first day in the yard, he would have had me on my back by the third breath. But my feet remembered the way the Trial had taught them to be wider than fear. I let the sweep graze and stepped through the gap he thought he’d made for my panic. Our shoulders kissed; his breath flashed hot at my ear. He smelled like metal and the soap we all pretended wasn’t rationed. I brought my elbow toward his ribs and he caught it with his forearm, redirect, redirect, the way the good ones do when they’ve learned weather and body are the same thing if you are patient.

The drum threaded between us, thud, thud. Someone in the crowd laughed too early and bit it off. The knife hummed its little song.

He was stronger. I was quicker. He had more hours in this yard; I had a wolf who had not forgiven me for thinking about running.

I let her hum at the edges of my eyes. Not a shift. A tilt. The world sharpened into the exactness that makes choices hurt more. Jason’s weight sat too long in his left heel when he cut to my outside. The knife did an unnecessary flourish because it liked being admired. He blinked more than he wanted to. Sleep had not been his friend.

“Come on then,” he said, a little louder, for the ones at the back. “Show us the miracle.”

“You first,” I said.

He obliged. He threw a pattern that would have made a younger me proud to block. I didn’t block. I went where I knew he wanted me to, only faster than his plan could pivot. The blade whisked past the place my throat had been. My shoulder met his chest. We tangled. His knee came for mine; I turned and made it hit bone the way he’d intended but not in the order he wanted. Pain lit up in my leg and rang like a struck glass. He smiled into the win he thought he had and that was when I brought my forehead down hard into the place between his eyes.

Gasps, a scattered chorus. Not elegant, but sometimes the body wants a short word.

He stumbled; the knife left his perfect line and went wandering. I hooked his wrist with my hand and my weight and a promise. The knife tilted. He recovered with an ugly efficiency that told me he’d been taught by someone who didn’t care how you won if you were still breathing after. His elbow came up; I ducked, not clean enough, and it kissed my cheekbone hard enough to write its name there. The yard narrowed to a small circle that had the good manners to only include the two of us and the sound of my own blood. The necklace went warm against my sternum like a hand closing around a prayer. Under it, Elara’s cloth did its quiet work. Home is where your wolf can lie down without teeth.

“Don’t you dare lie down,” I told her without words. “Not yet.”

We went around again. He wanted to make it look like he was teaching me something. He wanted me to be an example of a lesson everyone could nod at later over stew. My job was to ruin his story in a way that didn’t ruin us.

“Knife swap,” someone called, irritated at being bored. “Let the girl hold steel.”

Jason flicked his eyes toward Vivian as if he wanted the rule changed mid-rule. Vivian did not move. The knife was his. He had chosen steel on a morning when wood would have kept this honest. The crowd knew it and pretended not to, because fairness makes for bad stories if there’s not a villain to carry it.

“Stay,” Jasper said, low enough that it might have been for the ground.

Jason pressed. He tried for my wrist again, trying to take the hand that had its own small mind. I let him think he had it and used that attention to step into him so hard it bent the part of the fight that had been upright into something else. We went down together, ugly as rumor. Dirt in my teeth. His breath knocked out in a bark he couldn’t catch. The knife flashed near my face, then the ground, then his own thigh, and then my hand had it because hands learn by watching and mine had been watching all my life.

We held still.

The point of the blade made a polite promise to the hollow of his throat. The yard went so quiet the drum had to work to convince anyone it was real.

Jason looked up at me from the ground, eyes wider than the distance he wanted to keep between us. Sweat made neat rivers from his hairline to his jaw. His pupils took a moment to remember the size of day. Something animal flickered there—not his wolf, not yet, something older and particular to men who thought obedience was the only door to worth and then watched someone walk in through a window. His mouth twitched. I could taste the next thirty years of his choices in that twitch.

“Yield,” I said. I didn’t say it like an order. I said it like a mercy I hoped he’d take.

His jaw unclenched, clamped. He looked past me toward the edge of the circle. Not to Vivian. Past her. Toward the line of fence where the shade stuck. Lyra didn’t move. Someone else did. A small man with hands like reeds shifted his weight and then realized he had done it in a way that counted. My wolf turned her head. Not now. Not that. The knife huffed a cold breath where it balanced. Jason pulled his eyes back to my face as if he’d yanked them on a leash.

“Training,” he said, his voice kind again, the kind that lets you pretend he hasn’t just decided something about you that doesn’t include your opinions. “For safety.”

He brought his knee up to my ribs, fast and mean. It would have worked if I’d been in yesterday. It landed, and my vision went white at the edges, but the hand that held the knife had its own idea of balance and it pressed just enough to remind his pulse what steel can do to arguments.

“Yield,” I said again, mouth full of breath that wasn’t ready to be words.

A long moment where his brain made a list. Pride. Pack. The story he’d been writing for himself since he was a boy with flour on his shirt in a kitchen that smelled like garlic and milk. The way men like Ronan hold their mirrors up and let young wolves mistake reflection for future. Something in him was a locked door and any key would have to be a violent one.

He exhaled. Closed his eyes. Opened them. “Yield,” he said, and if he hated me for it, he hated himself more.

I moved the knife away from his throat before I stood. I didn’t throw it. I set it down where the light could find it, in a clean corner of the dirt, like an apology for not being something else.

The yard remembered how to breathe. The drum picked up like a heart realizing it hadn’t died after all. Talk began in low packets, like the sea thinking about a storm. Vivian clipped the space with a single nod that said, Enough, and Thank you, and We are not done.

Jason stayed crouched, one knee down, one foot under him, not the posture of a bow, exactly. He was deciding what it would mean if he got up like nothing had happened versus if he got up like everything had. Blood had made a neat line from the place the knife had nicked his throat after all—just a kiss. Lyra saw it and lifted her chin half an inch. She didn’t smile. She didn’t need to.

He stood. He did not look at me. He looked past my shoulder, at nothing, at a future where this would be a story with an ending he chose. When he finally found my face, he made care of his mouth like an instrument.

“Good,” he said. “Better.”

I shrugged. It felt small next to the size of the morning. The wind ate it. “We both learned something,” I said, and that was true, but what we learned was not the same lesson.

The yard broke the way flocks of birds do: all at once, for no reason in particular except that a moment has closed and people have remembered they have hands. Disapproval that had been waiting for an excuse to be proud found one. Curiosity that had been pretending not to want my name tested it out in private and decided to think about it later. Children who always manage to be exactly where rules say they shouldn’t be pretended they hadn’t seen any of it and ran the long way to kitchens.

Jasper stepped into my space the way careful people do around injuries you can’t see. He touched my cheekbone with the air two inches from it. “You’ll bruise,” he said.

“It matches my insides,” I said, and only realized I’d said it out loud when Lyra snorted behind me.

“You didn’t kill him,” she said to me. “I’ll put that on today’s list of surprises.”

“It’s early,” I said. “Plenty of time to disappoint.”

Her mouth did the thing that lives between respect and sport. “Don’t. He’d like that too much.”

Jason had not left the ring. He was talking to three men who had grown into their shoulders late and learned to use the inconvenience as a philosophy. He said something and their faces did that loyal thing faces do when they’ve decided you are the kind of man who will tell them who to be. Jasper watched the group for a long breath and then stopped, not because his interest ended but because Vivian’s did.

“Enough spectacle,” she said. “We have a day.”

The council peeled away. The ones who keep the Holdfast standing when glamour sleeps began to move in their practical ways. Brooms. Ledgers. Water. I could feel my body wanting a corner and a quiet to shake in. The necklace cooled against my skin. The blue cloth lay steady, a hand on a child’s hair.

Vivian came close but not too. “You kept it to training,” she said. “Thank you for not ruining my morning.”

“Happy to ruin your afternoon instead,” I said, because mouth.

She let herself show a fraction of the smile she uses in winter. “Please don’t. There are three supply runs that think they’re forests and a border that thinks it’s a rumor. Eat. Then find me.”

“Border?” Lyra said, quick. “East?”

“East,” Vivian said. “Too many eyes. Not all of them ours.”

“Gawkers?” I asked. The word came out before I had an idea to fasten it to. Something from the night had left a shape in my mind, a lean at a door, a weight testing a bar. It turned over, showed me its other side. Humans. Not hunters. Not yet. Just the kind who wandered too close to the line because the line had started to sing.

“Maybe,” Vivian said. She watched my face like she was watching weather make a decision. “Maybe that, maybe something else wearing the same boots.”

Jason drifted by us like a possibility refusing to be dismissed. He didn’t look at any of our eyes. “Good lesson,” he said to the air, and was gone, his chosen men folding into his wake. One of them—the reed-handed one—didn’t fold quickly. He glanced back, just once, over his shoulder, a glance that didn’t belong to any of us. My wolf put her ears up. Not now, I told her, but later comes whether you invite it or not.

The yard resumed its hum. I found a corner of fence and leaned until my legs promised to act like legs again. The bruise in my side announced itself in a more adult voice. Jasper held out a strip of cloth soaked in something mean and cold.

“Hold,” he said.

I held it to the place the elbow had named. The world clarified. Pain can be a good editor.

“Thanks,” I said. I didn’t mean just the cloth.

He nodded. Neither did he.

“You saw him look,” I said.

“I saw you see him,” he said, which is the difference between people who want to be right and people who want to be alive.

Lyra kicked the fence post like it had insulted her shoes. “If there are humans at the line, I’m volunteering the first watch.”

“Eat first,” Vivian said, already turning away, already the weight of a hundred angled problems in her shoulders. “Then argue. Then go.”

Jasper’s hand hovered near the back of my arm like he wanted to do the thing where he steadies you and then remembers you are not his to steady unless you say so. I saved us both the trouble. “Walk me to the kitchen,” I said, which was a way of saying yes without making it about hands.

On the way, three different people stopped me to say things that made me into a story they could tell later. “Good footwork.” “You held the point clean.” “You didn’t flinch.” When I thanked them, I listened for the other thing beneath their words: fear, curiosity, hope. They were there in strange ratios, like a recipe someone had added to from memory and then blamed the oven for.

At the kitchen door, steam greeted us like a relative who only shows up when you’re starving. The girl with the scar under her eye saw me and made herself busy with bread like she was not about to cry from relief that the thing she’d been imagining had ended in the shape it had. I put the cloth Vivian had given me last night back on the counter. The baker—square man, big hands, tasting every sentence before he committed to it—looked at it, then at me.

“Fair trade?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said, and tucked Elara’s blue back under my shirt like a sin. “Soon.”

He grunted. Approval, or at least understanding that debts need breathing room.

We ate standing, because chairs felt like promises we couldn’t keep. Jasper chewed without looking like he’d put food in his mouth. My hands shook just enough to make the soup feel like the sea.

“Your cheek,” he said around a piece of crust.

“Your temple,” I said.

He touched the bruise like it belonged to someone else. “Jason has friends.”

“We all do,” I said. “Some of us just don’t like them.”

“I don’t mean men who clap when he talks,” he said. He did the thing where he found a wall with his eyes and spoke to it to keep from using too many words on me. “I mean men who prefer simple stories. Men who would rather answer to a loud voice than a hard question. If the border is pulling humans in like tide, and we have a leak—”

“We don’t say leak,” Lyra said, appearing with a cup of something that would keep anyone awake past regret. “We say we have a member of our beloved community who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word inside. Also, your cheek is ugly. You look more trustworthy.”

I let my face have its own laugh, small and mean. “Do you think Jason is the beloved community member who doesn’t understand walls?”

Lyra blew across the top of her drink. “He’s beloved by himself.”

“It might not be him,” Jasper said, which is not the thing you say if you want your morning to be neat.

“Then it’s one of his second mouths,” Lyra said. “Men like that outsource their thinking to whatever face agrees with them that day.”

“Eat,” Vivian said again from the doorway, the way mothers in stories say it when they are about to ask you to lift something too heavy and don’t want to be blamed if you drop it.

I ate. The soup was better than it needed to be. The bread had knife marks from a hand that had been rushing and then remembered not to. The kitchen noise worked its needles into the tight places until the tight places gave up and pretended to be muscles.

When I’d finished, when the bowl had been clean enough for the girl with the scar to give me a look that meant I was allowed to come back and ask for more another time, Jasper touched my sleeve with his none-hand.

“Walk the east,” he said.

“You and me?” I asked.

“Lyra,” he said. “And two who don’t talk except when silence needs translation.” His mouth did a private trick. “You and me would be a song. We need a net.”

“Flattering,” Lyra said, already moving. “Come on, moon-girl. Let’s see what your wolf thinks about footprints.”

We took the trail that pretends not to be one. The Holdfast fell behind, reshaping itself into the story of home if you squint. The forest did its usual work of pretending to be singular when it is a thousand different cities stacked on top of each other. The morning had the bite of a thing that wanted to be winter and wasn’t ready to admit it.

“You good?” Lyra asked, without looking at me.

“No,” I said. “Yes. Is that the right answer?”

“It’s the real one,” she said. “Keep that. Jason can have whatever’s neat.”

We moved quiet. The east line isn’t a wall you can touch; it’s a set of agreements between trees. Still, you know when you’re near it. The air changes its tone. Birds rehearse and then decide not to perform. Jasper lifted his palm once and we sank into the soft patience of ferns.

“Boots,” he said.

I saw them a breath later. Not ours. Too narrow, too deep in the heel. The kind of print you get from a shoe made by a man who has never had to think about how a shoe is made. The step paused at the exact place where a person who was not from here might say, What a beautiful view, and then moved on like it had been pulled by a string.

“Gawkers,” Lyra said, satisfied. “They bring binoculars and sandwiches and the exact amount of guilt they can live with.”

“Maybe,” Jasper said. “Maybe not.”

The not hung there like a smell you can’t name. I looked through it. In the distance—far enough to be safe, near enough to be a stain—a glint. Not tooth. Glass. It flashed and went away, the way prey will hold your eye and then stop being an idea and become a muscle again.

“Hunters?” I asked, my voice doing that thing where it tried to be softer than the fear inside it.

“Could be birders,” Lyra said, cheerful. “Could be men who like to think the world is theirs because they bought a map. Could be the kind of curious that gets other people killed.”

“Or could be bait,” Jasper said. He crouched without making the kind of sound gravity expects. “Tracks double back here. He wanted to be seen at the line and then didn’t want to be seen leaving.”

“Which is dumber?” Lyra asked.

“Being seen leaving,” I said, feeling the shape of it. “It means you don’t know the kind of eyes that live in trees.”

We followed the second path where it tried to pretend it had never existed. It went west, then north, then undecided. Twice we lost it and twice it remembered it had a destination. Once the wind brought us a smell that had nothing to do with our kind or the others: oil, cheap and loud.

We came to a small hollow where the earth had tried to make a nest and something else had borrowed it. There was a square of fabric stapled into the ground like a thought someone hadn’t finished. I crouched. The fabric was the kind you use when you want rain to think it is not a problem. A curl of orange peel lay beside it, fresh. My mouth filled with the memory of sweetness that is mostly bitterness. Next to that, a cigarette butt, pressed out carefully—no ash scattered, no burn to the plastic. Someone had been tidy. Tidy is worse than careless. Careless tells you its name.

“Not a kid,” Lyra said softly. “Not a drunk. Not lost.”

“Not our only problem,” Jasper said, standing and leaving the place exactly as we’d found it. “We go back. Vivian will need the shape of this.”

“Jason will need a new story,” Lyra said, grinning without joy. She looked at me. “You shook him.”

“I didn’t want to break him,” I said.

“You didn’t,” Jasper said, eyes on the trees. “That’s his work.”

On the way back, the forest made us smaller in the way it does when it is teaching you perspective you didn’t ask for. The Holdfast roofs appeared like knees under a blanket. Smoke tried to be a straight line and failed. The yard was less crowded, but the kind of quiet that had replaced the crowd was louder than noise.

Because in the center of the circle, on the packed dirt where our breath still lived, someone had drawn a mark.

Not a crescent. Not the kind the necklace had burned in memory on my skin. Not mine.

A full, perfect circle in black ash. Inside it, a line. Across it, another, making a crude eye. It stared up at the sky like sky meant to do something about it.

Lyra swore softly. Jasper’s jaw did not move and somehow I could hear it break. Vivian stepped into the ring like stepping into a possibility you don’t get to refuse. She did not step on the eye. She went around it and made the pace of her body into a fact.

“Who?” someone asked, as if saying the word would pull a confession out of a throat made of fog.

“Everyone,” Vivian said. “And no one. Clear this. Then bring me coal. If someone wants to leave their little drawings in my yard, I will make sure the next one burns.”

Jason stood at the fence. He was not the one who had drawn it. He was the one who wanted it to be known he had not drawn it. He caught my eye, then didn’t, like he’d told himself a rule and found out he didn’t like following it. The reed-handed man beside him looked at me once, flat, the way a man looks when he has been paid to look.

The drum started without the drum. My ribs did it for me.

“Training,” Jason said under his breath as I passed him, and I couldn’t tell if it was a joke he was telling himself or a word he was trying to insult.

“Safety,” I said back, because if we were going to build a house of lies to live in, I wanted at least to have picked the paint.

We cleared the mark. The ash got into the lines of our hands and made everything look older. The coal came. Vivian’s eyes made a place for it. Jasper said nothing and was louder than anyone.

By noon, the yard looked like itself again—the way a face does after tears if you don’t know what to look for. By noon, the bruise in my side had set like a stone you could build a wall with. By noon, a runner came from the eastern line with his breath torn and his mouth trying to be useful.

“Humans,” he said, and swallowed. “Not gawkers.”

Jasper’s eyes found mine. Lyra’s found Vivian’s. Jason’s found whatever place inside him keeps score. The runner kept speaking, the words too fast and then too slow, tripping over each other at the gate.

“Scope. Camouflage. Scent blockers,” he said. “And something else.” His hand made a shape in the air that wasn’t a shape. Fear.

Something else. My wolf lifted her head.

I put my hand on the place where Elara’s blue lay and felt the thread stir like a small river that knows the way home even when the trees have tried to rearrange the map.

The drum hit a new measure.

We all turned east.