The Trial of Teeth

By afternoon the Holdfast had learned how to pretend it wasn’t braced for a storm. People carried buckets as if buckets alone could keep roofs. Children played in a corner of the lower yard and shouted too loud because adults wouldn’t. Someone sang near the kitchens, a work song with no words. It all added up to the kind of quiet that stands on tiptoe.

Vivian braided my hair back without asking. “So it won’t get in your eyes,” she said. Her fingers were sure. She kept tucking strays that didn’t want to be tucked. “Don’t be heroic. Be honest.”

“Those aren’t opposite?” I tried to joke.

“They are on bad days.” She tied the braid off with a strip of leather and thumped my shoulder, gentler than Lyra would’ve. “You come back and I’ll make soup so good Jason will claim he cooked it.”

“I heard that,” Jason’s voice carried from the doorway. He didn’t step in. He didn’t have to. His presence pushes through walls. “Don’t embarrass us,” he added to me, tone so flat it would’ve been easy to mistake for concern if you didn’t know he collects edges.

“I won’t,” I said. I didn’t add and if I do, I’ll own it. He likes when people throw words like shields and then trip.

Lyra appeared behind him and the doorway grew smaller. She looked me over the way scouts read a map. “At dusk,” she said. “By the Wound.”

“The what?” I asked.

Vivian grimaced. “The west ravine. Old landslide. We call it the Wound because the mountain never forgot it.”

“Seems rude,” I said.

“Names usually are,” Lyra replied and left before I could decide whether that counted as a lesson.

Dusk has many speeds. Tonight it arrived slow, aware of its own weight. The sky bled from blue to bruised and then to that thin silver that makes you think you can see better than you can. We walked out past the training yard and the old water trough where pups dare each other to dunk heads in winter. Jasper kept pace just behind my shoulder. He didn’t touch me. His silence was not absence. Vivian came to the gate and didn’t pass through. She pressed a small wrapped bundle into my palm. “Honey and salt,” she said. “For after. If after is greedy.”

“What if I need it during?” I asked.

“Then you aren’t in the trial,” Jasper answered. “You’re in dying. Different rules.”

“Comforting,” I muttered.

The path to the ravine cut through young trees trying on their taller relatives’ attitudes. My feet found the rhythm the Holdfast had been forcing into me since I crossed its wall: heel then toe; senses up; don’t stare where you think danger is, listen to where it isn’t yet. The necklace lay warm against my skin, not warning—present. The staff rode my back in a leather sling, a strange comfort. I had thought they would make me leave it. They hadn’t. Jasper had only said: “Don’t let it answer a question you haven’t asked.”

When we reached the ravine, I understood why Lyra had chosen it. The earth had torn there long ago—an ugly, sudden seam where the hill slid and forgot how to stop. Pine roots curled from the exposed wall like fingers that had almost held on. Rocks lay in a spill, angular, sullen. A narrow footbridge, not older than a summer or two, crossed the narrowest span. Below, thirty feet down, a trickle of water thread its way through stones too big for it.

A ring of wolves waited by the near bank. Not all. Enough. Elders who had stood trials. Young who wanted to pretend they weren’t afraid for the one about to take it. Lyra stood at the head of the ring. Jason lurked to the left, arms folded, eyes a dare. Others I didn’t know by name yet: a tall man with a crooked nose that said he’d lost more than he’d won and still kept stepping forward; a woman with storm-gray eyes and a scar through one brow; a boy about my age with a mouth too soft for the set of his jaw.

Jasper took his place at the edge, apart and not. Vivian had said he never watched trials. She had also said rules were suggestions he respected until he didn’t. He watched mine.

Lyra raised her palm, fingers spread. The murmurs died as if a lid had been put on them.

“Clara,” she said. She pitched her voice for me, not the crowd. “This is not a fight. Not a game. Not a ceremony you walk through to become a picture for other people’s comfort.”

“I gathered,” I said.

“It is a door,” she continued. “You will step to the threshold and decide if it is the right one. You will choose to knock, or not. You will decide how to listen and what to ignore. You will not be guided. You will not be helped across. If you break, it is because something inside you was brittle. If you do not break, it is because something inside you learned the shape of pressure. Both are information. Neither makes you worthy or unworthy. Worth is not a moon we pass around.”

“Then why do it?” Jason asked, too smoothly.

Lyra did not look at him. “Because clarity keeps people alive.”

She finally looked at me. “You understand?”

“I think so,” I said. “And I think I won’t until I’m inside it.”

“Good,” she said, and something like approval flickered and died. “Take the bridge. Stand in the middle. Put your hand on the air and ask it to show you your teeth.”

“That sounds metaphorical.”

“It won’t be,” she said.

I walked.

The bridge flexed under my weight more than I liked. The ravine wind rose cold from below, smelling of wet stone and something older than the Holdfast, older than the packs, older than the argument between human and wolf. I stopped at the center. The footboards creaked like they were getting the jokes in advance.

I put out my hand, palm forward, the way you do when you approach a strange dog and want it to smell you and decide you mean well. I felt stupid. I felt seen. I felt the necklace heat and then steady. I touched nothing and something touched back.

Cold, at first. Then not temperature—texture. The air around my palm thickened, as if I’d dipped my hand into water. My skin prickled. The hairs along my arms rose, and I didn’t have to look to know some of them were already fur.

“Clara!” Vivian called softly from the bank. “Remember your name.”

Lyra didn’t shush her. Jasper didn’t either.

“I remember,” I said. To the air. To myself. To the wolf.

The bridge fell away.

No—that’s not it. The world fell into itself like paper burning from a match. The ravine became a throat I had to walk down. I didn’t move. I moved a lot. Hard to say. The first scent hit: iron. Not blood. Old iron—the kind found in forgotten nails and the mouths of wells. It coated my tongue. The second scent braided into it: wolf. Myself. My wolf. Not separate. Not fused. A braid you cannot unbraid without breaking strands.

The dark lightened by degrees until I could see a floor. Not a floor. Pine needles again. The clearing? No. A clearing. A cousin to my moon place, but rougher, stripped. No standing stone. No blessed bowl. A stump sat in the center, cut clean long ago and bled out sap until its core hardened. Across it lay a thing like a jawbone with teeth too long for any deer or hog. I didn’t want to touch it. I wanted to touch it very badly.

“Trial of Teeth,” a voice said, and for a second I thought it was mine. It wasn’t. It came from everywhere. It sounded like the first time a child hears her own growl and likes it.

“What do I do?” I asked it, and the question disappointed the voice enough to be funny.

You look. You choose. You tell the truth. If you lie, you’ll taste it.

“Are you the moon?” I asked.

Laughter that wasn’t a sound. The moon is a mirror. I am a door.

Same metaphor. Different day.

The stump shifted. I blinked and almost missed it. The jawbone had become a mirror. Not glass. Water—still, dark, as if winter had held it there for later. My face floated on the surface. My eyes looked more like my father’s than I wanted to admit—Kennedy’s, not Mr. Drake’s. The flecks brighter. The set of the mouth more stubborn than brave.

“What if I don’t like what I see?” I asked.

Then you name it. Then you decide whether to keep it.

“What if the thing is useful and ugly?”

Then you learn to use it without letting it own you.

“Can we speed this up?”

No.

Fine.

I bent and touched the water with one finger. It didn’t ripple. My reflection’s finger did. I wasn’t sure which hand belonged to which girl. I pressed harder, annoyed.

The surface broke and something bit me.

I snatched my hand back, a fine line of blood welling at the pad of my index finger. The blood looked black against the water-dark, then red in the next breath. The bite marks were spaced wrong for human teeth. Wolf? No. Too neat. Something else.

“Truth tastes like blood,” the voice said, almost tender. “And like metal. And sometimes like old coins you’ve kept for luck.”

“Do I put my whole hand in?” I asked dryly.

You put your head in.

“Of course I do.” I sighed.

I leaned, careful, hair falling forward, braid tugging at my scalp. The water held. It reflected a sky that wasn’t the ravine’s, a sky too deep for dusk. I lowered my face until the water kissed my lips. Cold shocked my mouth. I kept going. It took my nose, eyes, forehead—and then the rest of me followed.

Under.

No breath. No panic. No need. The world changed temperature and shape. I was not swimming. I was walking on the inside of a mouth that never bit down.

Three doors waited in a row. They looked like the doors in my old school: chipped paint, scuffed kick-plates, windows with wire inside the glass. Cheap. Familiar. Terrifying. Each had a number burned into the wood where the room number would’ve been. 1. 2. 3.

“Pick,” the voice said.

“I hate this,” I said.

Yes.

I went to the first door. It smelled like old gym socks and chalk and the lemon cleaner the janitor used to pretend a day had not happened. I put my palm to it. It was warm, like someone had just closed it from the other side. I opened it.

I stood in my living room at home. The light through the blinds struck the coffee table in bands. Mom was at the sink, hands in soapy water. Dad (Mr. Drake) sat on the edge of the couch tying his shoe, his head bent. I was twelve again, maybe thirteen, carrying my backpack, pretending I didn’t want him to look up and ask me how the math test had gone because I wasn’t sure it had gone and I hated talking about numbers like they were enemies.

“Clara,” Mom called, not turning. “Dinner in ten.”

“Okay,” my younger voice answered from nowhere and everywhere. “Not hungry.”

“You’ll eat anyway,” Dad said without looking, and the gentleness in it undid me because of everything I know now about what he held quiet.

The door tried to close. I shoved a foot in. “No,” I said, a beggar at a gate. “Please.”

The scene shifted. Mom turned. Her face was younger in a way that had nothing to do with skin and everything to do with not carrying me and my secrets yet. “If you go out, take your jacket,” she said. “The air lies about itself this time of year.” She dried her hands and kissed my hair when I walked by. I smelled rosemary and flour and the lemon soap, and then the bite of winter from the door she opened to shake the rug.

The scene broke without warning, like a song cut off mid-word.

I stumbled back into the hall. My lip hurt. I realized I had bitten it. I tasted iron. I swallowed.

Second door. This one smelled like metal and wet fur and the copper of blood. The number 2 looked derisive. I put my palm to the wood. It was cold. I opened it and stepped into a night I tried not to remember while trying to memorize it on purpose.

James on the landing. The mother with flour on her hands. The window exploding. The snarl like a word that had broken its own teeth. My own breath. The staff moving like it knew the choreography and I knew only the beat. The sound of bone. The sound of not-bone. The small noise Mrs. Juliet made when she realized what she was watching. The way I missed James’s fingers by less than a finger. The part of me that wished I had missed less and the part that knew I would never forgive any part.

“Stop,” I said, but I watched anyway. The trial didn’t make me watch. I made me. The truth of that lodged where lies like to nap.

“Stop,” I said again, softer. The scene kept going. Then it didn’t. The door shut itself politely in my face.

Third door. No smell. Nothing. The number 3 burned black. My skin crawled before my hand rose. I pressed my palm. It was the exact temperature of my skin. Nothing happened for a second. Then the door leaned into my hand like a friend who needs to be held up.

I opened it and walked into a clearing that was and wasn’t the moon bowl. Ronan stood in the exact center, hands spread. Behind him, a shape that resolved into my mother, bound but not hurt. Yet. Her mouth was gagged. Her eyes were clear. She saw me and did not panic. Something in my ribs unknotted a fraction and then tied itself into a different shape.

“Daughter,” Ronan said, and I did not let the word land.

“Predator,” I said, and tossed the word back like a bone.

He smiled as if he’d trained me. “Bring me the staff,” he said. “Bring yourself. I will make you whole.”

“You’ll make me yours,” I said. “Different math.”

“Is there a difference?” He tilted his head like a man listening for rain. “Ownership is a form of belonging. Vows are cages if you dislike the wallpaper.”

“Your metaphors are bad,” I said, because humor is a knife people forget you carry.

“Your mother will live,” he said, not bothering to pretend he hadn’t heard what I’d done.

“She’s living now,” I said. “Under your lie.”

“You cannot win this alone,” he said. “The Trial won’t make you ready. It will only make you honest about your weakness. I already know yours.”

“What is it?” I asked, a reckless curiosity popping its head up like a rabbit.

He didn’t answer. He just looked at my mother and I knew. I’ve always known. Love makes a lever. He enjoys that truth the way a cruel child enjoys ants.

I stepped closer. The clearing smelled wrong—no creek, no frog drone, no owl. The sky above us had too few stars.

“Say my name,” I said. It came out calm, softer than I expected. The wolf’s way.

He blinked, surprised. It was small. I saw it anyway. “Clara,” he said, like a man trying a fruit he’s eaten his whole life and discovering a different sweetness.

“Not like that,” I said. “Like she said it.”

His face did something I will replay when I need to feel brave. He frowned, and for a breath the glamour around him sagged. I saw the tired there, the old anger, the edge of fear that makes men crueler than they were born.

“I will not chase you,” he said finally. “You will come. That is how this story wants to be told.”

“Change the story,” I said.

He vanished on the line between a laugh and an insult.

The hall with the three doors dissolved. The water spit me out. I landed on my knees on the bridge, palms slamming planks, breath burning back into my lungs. The ravine wind hit hard. The world smelled like wet rock and pine sap and the specific clean of stone in shade.

My hands shook. Someone made a low sound on the bank. Vivian? I didn’t look. I stayed on my knees and counted my bones with my breath like Jasper taught. Toes. Ankles. Shins. Knees. Thighs. Hips. Spine like a set of keys. Ribs, rib, rib. Shoulders. Elbows. Wrists. Fingers. Neck. Skull. Jaw. Teeth.

“Stand when you can,” Lyra called. Not unkind.

I stood. I swayed. I did not fall. I looked at the far side of the ravine and found Jasper’s face. There was nothing open in it. All the relief stayed behind his eyes. It was enough.

“Is it done?” I asked, when I reached the bank, voice hoarse like I’d been shouting into wind.

Lyra studied me like the mountain studies storms. “The first door,” she said.

“More?” I asked, because of course there were more.

“Later,” she said. “You didn’t lie to yourself, so you don’t have to do it again tonight.”

Jason stepped forward, slow clap on his face without bothering to use his hands. “She didn’t cry,” he said, and couldn’t help the respect that snuck into it. He hated that. He swallowed it. “Mostly.”

“I cried on the inside,” I said. “Very convincingly.”

A ripple of laughter moved the ring and then moved out. Lyra didn’t smile. Her eyes had softened a sliver. “Eat,” she said to me. “Salt. Honey. Sleep with the window open. If you dream, don’t go where they point. If you wake, don’t decide anything important before your heart remembers where it is.”

Jasper fell in beside me as the ring broke. He didn’t talk at first. We walked until the voices were behind us and the trees leaned in like we were telling secrets they’d already heard.

“How many doors are there?” I asked.

“As many as you need,” he said. “Fewer if you listen faster.”

“I saw him,” I said. “Again.”

“I guessed,” he said. “Your mouth had the shape of a word you didn’t want.”

“He thinks I’ll come because I love her,” I said. The her needed no name.

“He thinks love is a leash,” Jasper said. “He’s never learned to be led by it.”

I stopped. He stopped, to be polite or because he does that when I do. “You watched,” I said. “I thought you don’t.”

“I don’t,” he said. “I did.”

“Why this time?”

He considered the ground so I couldn’t read his face and then decided to let me anyway. “Because you walked at the right angle toward something sharp. I wanted to know if the angle would hold.”

“Did it?”

“Yes,” he said. Then, after a beat: “Barely.”

“I’ll take barely,” I said. “Barely is still yes.”

We reached my door. Vivian was already inside, laying out a small plate like I was a child she meant to trick into eating. Salt. Honey. A slice of bread. A cup of tea that smelled like woodsmoke tried to be sweet.

“Sit,” she said. “Before you fall.”

I sat. The first lick of honey made my tongue shake. The salt after steadied it. I ate the bread with both hands like my body had been waiting to be allowed to be that simple.

Jasper hovered at the threshold. He has made a home out of thresholds.

“What’s next?” I asked when the plate was empty and my hands stopped being birds.

“Runners to the Court by dawn,” he said. “The Owl Creek will send an answer before noon. Hollow Ridge will take longer because they dislike admitting we exist.”

“That’s not next for me,” I said.

“Sleep,” Vivian answered before he could give me a stoic answer that would hold and also make me roll my eyes. “Then tomorrow we practice hearing again. And we go to the east line with Lyra and let her pretend she doesn’t like us.”

“And the second door?” I asked.

“Not tomorrow,” Jasper said. “You’ll feel when it wants you. It’s impolite to knock early.”

“I’m very polite,” I said.

“You are very something,” Vivian said. “Which is better.”

Jasper’s gaze found the bruise on my cheek, now almost gone. He didn’t reach. “You did well,” he said.

“Standing on a bridge?” I said. “Not jumping off it?”

He huffed out that almost-smile. “Not lying to yourself. Harder.”

I didn’t say the confession that wanted out: that for a second, in the door with my mother, I felt my feet shift toward him and had to pull them back with both hands. I didn’t say I wasn’t sure I could do that twice. I didn’t say how much I hated that love could be used like a map against me.

“Goodnight,” he said instead, which sometimes means I know and I will let you keep the knowing alone until you ask me to carry it. He left. Vivian tucked the blanket around my legs like I wasn’t eighteen and something dangerous now.

“Proud of you,” she said, and flicked my forehead because she refuses to let tenderness get sticky.

“Thanks,” I said. “For the braid.”

She touched it. “Tomorrow we do two,” she said. “For speed.”

The window let the night in. The Holdfast breathed its enormous breath. I lay back and stared at the ceiling and thought about doors. About teeth. About how some doors are mouths and some mouths are doors and both can bless or bite depending on whether you walk in hungry.

Sleep came, but not hard. On the edge of it, I heard a howl far off—my wolf, not asking for me, not commanding. Announcing, maybe. Or just being. I let the sound place me in the world like a pin in a map and then closed my eyes around it.

When the dream came, I stood in front of three doors again. The middle one had no number now. The first one smelled like home and the second like old rage. The third waited, patient as winter. I didn’t open any of them. I sat down. I said my name the way she had said it. The wood listened. For once, I didn’t hurry.

Barely is still yes. I slept on that like a vow.

Outside, somewhere on the far side of the Wound, someone who thought owning was the same as loving looked up at the same moon and mistook it for a mirror. The trial hadn’t made me stronger—not like a montage. It had only taken a lie out of my hands. The space it left was sharp. The space it left was clean.

Three nights. Less again.

We would fill the space with teeth.