Ronan’s Message

Morning wasn’t gentle, but it was honest. The ridge on the west line rose like a knuckle, the pines clenched tight around it. Dew slicked the rocks so every step had to be a decision. Jasper let me go ahead sometimes, then eased past, then fell back, not hovering—mapping. Vivian kept pace with me, talking to the wind the way you talk to skittish animals you want to trust you. We listened more than we spoke. That was the lesson. The ground will tell you things if you stop insisting on your own voice.

“Smell that?” Jasper asked without turning.

I lifted my head. Pine, wet stone, cold stream. Under it—smoke. Not Holdfast smoke. Bitter, like someone’s fire had been fed the wrong wood. Bitter, and a stitch of rot as thin as a string.

“Rogues,” I said, tasting the word. It didn’t taste like fear this time. More like a warning label.

“Downwind,” Vivian murmured. “Clever. Or lucky.”

“Nothing about them is lucky,” Jasper said, and the way he said it made it sound like a prayer and a warning both.

We reached a stand of old firs that grew in a half-moon. Jasper touched the nearest trunk, palm flat, and shut his eyes. When he opened them again, they were flint. “They’ve been testing the wards along this line. Pushing. Looking for a seam.”

“Did they find one?” I asked.

“For a moment,” he said. “Lyra closed it. But seams remember.”

Vivian knelt, fingers brushing a patch of ground where the needles had been churned up. “Here. Four sets of tracks, maybe five. One is light—scout. Three heavy. The fourth… limps?” She frowned. “No. Drags.”

“Wounded,” Jasper said. “Or playing at it.”

“And we just… follow?” I asked, because I’ve never been good at pretending I understand the plan if I don’t.

“We do not follow,” Jasper said. “We listen to where they wanted us to go and we go somewhere else.”

Vivian smiled sideways. “That’s the secret. Don’t ever go where they point. Even if you think you want to.”

I nodded like I knew how to apply that to anything other than trails and then realized I did—Jason’s taunts, Lyra’s slap, my own spirals. Don’t go where they point. Good rule.

We ghosted east instead of west, keeping the scent in the corner of the map I was building in my head. The ridge broke to a ledge that looked over a shallow hollow where the trees thinned. Jasper raised two fingers and we sank to our heels at the edge like we were all part of the same muscle.

At first I saw nothing but bracken. Then the bracken breathed.

A body lay half-hidden. Not a body. A wolf caught halfway between man and beast, the glamour torn where claws or grief had worked at it. His flanks heaved. Blood matted the fur along his side, dark and sticky. His eyes were open and wrong—the wrong color, the wrong depth, as if someone had painted life onto glass.

“Trap?” Vivian whispered.

“Yes,” Jasper said flatly.

“For us or for anyone decent?” I asked, because sometimes those are the same thing.

“For me,” he said, and there was a weight to it that made me want to put a hand to his shoulder and also not touch him at all.

We went down anyway, because leaving a breathing thing in the bracken wasn’t an option my feet knew how to take. Jasper went first. He moved like he was already inside whatever was going to happen. I came next, the staff light under my palm and also heavier than its wood. Vivian’s hand brushed my elbow and stayed there until it didn’t.

The Rogue’s head turned when our shadows fell over him. He snarled once, a weak try, more breath than threat. His chest stuttered. His gaze snagged on my necklace and everything in his face changed, like a curtain yanked. Not gentler. Hungrier. The kind of hunger that doesn’t require a mouth.

“Clara,” he said, shaping my name like a bite. His voice was torn cloth. “Daughter.”

“Not yours,” I said automatically, as if we had set up a script in the night and agreed on our lines.

His eyes laughed. His mouth didn’t. “He knows you,” he rasped. “Ronan knows. He speaks your steps before you make them. He knows the taste of your blood and the weakness of your heart.”

“I don’t have any,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say and also felt like armor for exactly three seconds.

Jasper’s blade hovered low, not yet kissing the Rogue’s throat. “Talk,” he said.

The Rogue coughed up something black. “Talk? Oh, we talk. We do nothing but talk. The Broken Pine is a choir now. We sing your names.”

“Do you sing mercy?” Vivian asked, and there was no kindness in it, only exhaustion.

He smiled, a strange, sweet curl that had no business on a face like that. “Mercy is a house that burned and forgot it was ever a house. But I brought you a message. He promised me a place at the table if I lived long enough to give it.”

“You’re not going to,” Jasper said, calm as stone.

“He says…” The Rogue’s voice thinned, but he pushed it through his teeth anyway. “He says return the heir. Bring her to the clearing under the Blood Moon with the staff. Bend. He will spare your mothers and your pups. He will let the Holdfast keep its roof a little longer.”

Rage rose in me so fast I had to swallow it like bile. “He took my mother.”

The Rogue looked at me with something like pity, which cleaved me. “He took what he always takes,” he said. “He thinks the taking is love if he calls it that.”

“Enough,” Jasper said, and he meant enough of this man’s blood struggling to find something to keep it warm. He meant enough of this voice in the trees. He meant enough of Ronan in our mouths.

The Rogue’s gaze shifted to Jasper, and for the first time something like fear flickered there. “Ah,” he breathed. “Ghost.” The word shivered, not with cold. “He told us to keep away from you. He said you were the line that didn’t break when he broke the others.”

Jasper’s face didn’t change. That’s how I knew something inside him did.

“Please,” the Rogue whispered, and all the hunger went out of the sound. “Not for me. For what I was before he named me wrong.”

Jasper’s blade moved like a prayer. Quick. Clean. The breath left the body with a soft, surprised sound. The forest did not cheer. It didn’t judge either. It just was.

I stood there with my hands tight on the staff until my knuckles hurt. I wanted to be sick and wasn’t. I wanted to cry and didn’t. Vivian touched my back, light.

“We’ll bury him,” she said.

“We can’t,” Jasper answered. “They’ll scent death and come take their message back.”

“Then what do we do?” I asked, and every answer felt bad.

“We burn,” he said quietly. “We give him to smoke so nothing with the wrong hands can use what’s left.”

He didn’t ask me to help. He didn’t stop me either. We built a pyre that wasn’t a pyre, just branches and the dry brush under the firs, an old trick fire knows for making itself without feeling cruel. Vivian set it, her mouth a line. We stood until there was nothing to stand for except the idea of not leaving and the certainty we had to.

Back on the ridge, the wind carried the smoke the right way. Jasper watched it go, his eyes narrower than the sun required. “He wanted us to carry the threat home,” he said. “So we will. But on our terms.”

“What are our terms?” I asked.

“We don’t bend,” Vivian said simply. “That’s the first one.”

I nodded like I owned that answer. I wanted to.

The Holdfast felt different when we returned—smaller and larger. Smaller because grief had a way of shrinking rooms, larger because fear had a way of expanding shadows. Wolves gathered in the council chamber—a circular hall with a domed ceiling and a hole cut clean at the top so the sky could listen. The first time I stepped into that space, my feet wanted to back out again. Today they held.

Lyra stood at the far side beneath a carving of the moon at its thinnest. Jason leaned against a pillar like it belonged to him and he was doing it a favor by touching it. Others took their places with a choreography I hadn’t learned yet: elders near the center, fighters along the ring, witches like Vivian in the seams.

Jasper laid the facts out. He didn’t dramatize. He didn’t underplay. The Rogue, the message, the names. Ronan. Blood Moon. The bargain dressed as mercy.

When he said “heir,” heads turned to me. I tried to stand straighter. The necklace warmed like it had my back. The staff’s weight at my side made sense for once.

Lyra’s voice came clean and cold. “We move the pups below the third level. We double the watches on the east and west lines. We send a runner to the Owl Creek and the Hollow Ridge to tell them the Broken Pine have found their teeth again.” She paused. “We do not send the girl anywhere.”

“Woman,” Vivian said under her breath, but not under enough. Lyra’s eyes clicked over and back again like a well-made lock.

Jason pushed off the pillar. “Or we do send her,” he said. “On our terms. Not to him. To the Court. Make them look her in the eye before they write long letters about what they think we should do. Some of us remember how that went the last time a bloodmark showed up without a plan.”

“Some of us remember nothing and love the sound of our own voice,” Vivian said, sweetly enough to salt the wound.

Jason’s jaw ticked. “I fought while you hid in libraries.”

“And who set half the horrors you fought on fire with words you can’t pronounce?” she shot back.

“Enough,” Jasper said. He didn’t have to raise his voice. It landed where it needed to. “We’re not a stage for your old arguments. We’re a roof for the people under it.”

Lyra’s gaze returned to me. “What do you want?” she asked, and it wasn’t a trick, or maybe it was and she was too tired to make it pretty.

“Want?” I repeated, stupidly.

“Yes,” she said. “Not what you fear. Not what he promised. Not what we say you should prefer. Want.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. The honest answer was small and reckless and impossible: I want my mother. I want my old life until I remember it was never enough. I want Jasper to stop looking like the end of the story and start looking a little like the middle. I want my hands to not tremble and my wolf to not be a stranger and my name to fit and the staff to stop burning when someone says it belongs to me.

“I want to not be used,” I said. It was the truest thing that fit in the room. “By Ronan. By fear. By anyone.”

Lyra nodded once. It might have been the first time she agreed with me about anything. “Good,” she said. “Then we will not use you either. Not until you can stand under your own weight.”

Jason’s laugh was short and ugly. “She just threw me into a tree. She stands fine.”

“Skill is not weight,” Lyra said. “It’s paint.”

Jasper didn’t look at either of them. He looked up, through the hole in the dome, at the sliver of daylight like he could read the moon’s future in it. “He’ll push again before the Blood Moon,” he said. “Small ways to make us nervous. One big way to make us run. We don’t run.” His eyes dropped to me. “You train. You learn to hear your bones before they tell you what to do. Trial of Teeth at dusk tomorrow.”

A ripple went through the room—approval, unease, both. Vivian’s fingers brushed mine under the edge of my sleeve. Jason’s mouth tilted like he’d just been paid. Lyra’s shoulders didn’t move, but something in her jaw softened and then corrected itself.

“What is it?” I asked, because no one had explained the trial beyond the name, and the name did a lot of work without context.

Jasper’s answer was simple. “You go to the border between what you are and what you are becoming and you don’t lie.”

“That’s a terrible sales pitch,” I said.

“It’s an honest one,” he replied.

Lyra stepped forward. “She’ll have a guide.”

Jasper shook his head. “No. Not for the first door.”

Vivian bristled. “She won’t be alone. That’s not how we—”

“She isn’t alone,” Jasper said, and put a hand against his own chest, then nodded at the floor, the walls, the air, all of it. “But she chooses the first step by herself or she doesn’t take it at all.”

Lyra looked like she wanted to argue and then didn’t. “Fine,” she said. “But if she breaks, you answer for it.”

“If she breaks,” Jasper said, “I won’t have to answer to you.”

Silence swallowed us for a beat too long. Then the room exhaled into movement—orders, assignments, runners sent. The Holdfast did what it always did when someone tried to make it smaller: it made itself larger by moving.

I stepped out into the corridor with Vivian tight at my side. Jason intercepted us, carrying his smirk like a gift. “Congratulations,” he said. “You get to bleed on purpose this time.”

“Go find a wall to glare at,” Vivian said without heat. “This one is busy.”

He leaned, low, so only I heard. “He’ll try to break you in the trial. Not Jasper.” His eyes flicked to the window where the sky showed its thin coin of morning. “Him. The one who thinks he owns your name.”

“My name doesn’t fit in his mouth,” I said before I could stop it, and the way Jason’s eyebrows lifted told me he hadn’t expected that answer.

“Maybe you’ll do,” he muttered, as if he’d been trying to decide which cupboard to put me in and now he had to consider I might be furniture.

Vivian tugged me away because she is allergic to giving him the last word. “Tea,” she said. “Then a nap that pretends to be a meditation. Then I show you how to listen to water and not just watch it.”

“Water talks?” I asked.

“It complains a lot,” she said. “Like Jason, but useful.”

We were half down the hall when a cry went up from the east parapet. Not a panicked scream—a bell in a throat, practiced. Alarm but not surprise. Wolves moved like the room had tilted. Jasper ran without looking like he was running. My body went with him without asking me if that was what I wanted.

We reached the parapet and the world beyond the wall sharpened. On the near slope, in the bright disorder of noon, fire crawled across the underbrush in a line—small flames, placed. Not an accident. Smoke spelled an old word, the kind you don’t say in houses. At the base of the smoke, something fluttered on a stake driven into the ground.

A strip of cloth, white once, now marked in a crescent of mud.

No. Not mud. Blood, dry, brown. The crescent was jagged, wrong-handed. Someone who didn’t know how to draw the moon had done it anyway. My necklace burned, a sick, angry heat.

“They want us to open a gate,” Lyra said, voice flat as she came up beside us. “They want us to put out their fire and get our scent on their sticks.”

“Or they want us to look and miss the hand under the table,” Jasper said.

Vivian’s hand rose to shade her eyes. “There,” she said softly. “Left of the second birch.”

I followed her finger. For a heartbeat I saw nothing. Then a flicker that wasn’t flame. A shape low to the ground, too smooth for brush, gliding. Another. Three. Rogues, bellies close to the slope, using the smoke as cover—patient as winter.

“They’re not attacking,” I said.

“No,” Jasper agreed. “They’re reminding us they can.”

He didn’t raise a horn. He didn’t shout. He lifted two fingers and a bow string hummed somewhere behind me. A flaming arrow arced and landed short, setting their fire ahead of itself, cutting it off from the trees that wanted badly to be tinder. The smoke shifted. The shapes froze. One lifted its head and I could feel its stare find me like a touch.

“Don’t,” Jasper said, without looking at me. “Don’t give them your face.”

I looked anyway because I am twenty percent disobedience on a good day. The Rogue’s eyes were pale, too pale, blue washed with milk. He smiled—no fangs, all human—and pressed two fingers to his lips in a mocking kiss.

“Charming,” Vivian muttered. “Tell him we’re taken.”

I didn’t have to. Jasper raised his bow, notched a second arrow without flame, loosed. The shaft sprouted from the earth a handspan from the Rogue’s snout. Dirt jumped. The smile slid off his face like a bad mask. They backed away, not running, the way people leave rooms when they want you to think they were never interested.

The strip of cloth on the stake fluttered once in a wind that had not existed a moment before. The crescent flapped and flapped, then tore loose and skittered into the cleared dirt. I don’t know why that small surrender undid me more than the fire.

“We hold,” Jasper said. It wasn’t an order. It was a statement of what we were already doing. “We burn what we have to. We starve what we can. We don’t chase.”

“And the message?” Lyra asked.

Jasper’s mouth thinned. “We heard it. We’ll answer the only way it hears.”

“How?” I said, because I wanted to know the choreography I’d been folded into.

“By standing,” he said. “By not handing him the only thing he can’t take.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

Jasper looked at me for a long beat the way you look at a fire you’re deciding whether to feed or smother. “Our choice,” he said finally. “He can steal hands, and mothers, and the names of boys who wanted to be men. He can’t make us bend. Bending is a thing you give.”

The smoke thinned. The burning line guttered and went out where the arrow had eaten its path. The slope looked scorched and ugly. It would green again. That’s what slopes do if you let them.

I stepped back from the parapet and the world reeled for a breath. Not from the height. From the knowledge that there would be more days like this, and worse ones, and we had to keep choosing in every hour who to be.

Vivian’s fingers crooked. “Come on,” she said, softer. “We’ll practice listening someplace that doesn’t smell like someone else’s threat.”

“Trial’s tomorrow,” Jason said from behind us, because of course he was there, and because of course he had heard the one sentence that left a bruise when it landed. “Try not to cry in front of the pups.”

“Try not to cry when she doesn’t,” Vivian shot back, and dragged me away before I said something that would make me feel big for three seconds and small all night.

We passed Lyra in the hall. She stopped me with a look; I stopped with my whole body.

“You did well,” she said, as if the words were iron filings she hated parting with.

“Standing on a wall?” I asked. I couldn’t help it. My mouth is a thief.

“Not jumping off it,” she said. “That’s harder.”

I nodded. She nodded. It felt like a treaty signed without ink.

In my room, the window was a cut of blue sky with a smear of cloud. I sat on the bed, staff across my knees, necklace a warm coin. I closed my eyes and saw the Rogue’s face and the flapping white cloth and my mother’s hands the last time she braided my hair while I pretended I was too old to like it. The three things didn’t belong together and did anyway.

Jasper came to the threshold and didn’t cross it, as always. “We’ll go to the pool at dusk,” he said. “The one under the west fall. Water will tell you what the trial won’t.”

“What will it tell me?” I asked.

“If you’re listening to it,” he said. “Or to yourself pretending to be it.”

“Is there a difference?” I asked.

He almost smiled. “That’s the question.”

“And Ronan?” I asked, because the name tasted wrong and that was reason enough to spit it out.

“He’ll push again before dark,” Jasper said. “A whisper, a trick. We don’t open the door.”

“Not even a little?” I said, trying to joke and failing, the way a voice cracks after screaming at a concert.

“Not even to see if he’s really there,” he said. “He is. That’s enough.”

He left me with that, and strangely, it steadied more than anything else had all day. He is. That’s enough. We are. That has to be.

Outside, the Holdfast exhaled, then inhaled again. Somewhere on the east wall someone laughed too loud because that’s what fear does when it borrows mouths. Somewhere below, a pup whimpered and was hushed and then giggled like it had been a test. Somewhere beyond the ridge, the Broken Pine rechecked their maps and redrew their versions of our faces.

I lay back and stared at the ceiling’s rough plaster, tracing cracks like they were letters and I could learn to read the story the room had always been telling. The necklace warmed, a little, then cooled. The staff’s crescent was smooth under my palm. My bones felt like they had chosen to be mine, for now. Good enough. We’d write better agreements tomorrow.

Three nights. Less now. I didn’t say it out loud. I let the number sit in the corner like a guest who might be polite. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, not to hide, but to gather. If he came in dreams, I would say my name the way the wolf had said it. I practiced it once, silently. It didn’t sound like surrender.

It sounded like a door.