Chapter 5

Delilah's face went red to the ears.

She had come here to make me kneel, and instead the boy she'd summoned as a weapon had turned the blade on her, in front of everyone. She had no answer for it. She never did have answers — only volume, and the volume had just failed her.

I looked at Callan for exactly as long as it took to decide he didn't matter, and then I picked up my tray, left it on the rack, and walked out with Mia at my side. Whatever he'd done, he hadn't done it for me. I owed him nothing for it.

The next class met in a long hall floored with packed sand. Combat training. The wolves paired off for one-on-one sparring, and the teacher — a broad woman with a whistle on a cord — drew lots from a tin to set the matches.

She read the last pair off her slip. "Selah Ellowen. Callan Mortimer."

Of course.

He crossed the sand toward me without hurry, and the room quieted to watch. Up close he was taller than he'd looked at the pillar, and there was a lazy certainty in the way he held his shoulders, the ease of someone who had never once lost.

"You're wolfless," he said. Not unkind. Just fact. "I won't use my gift. It wouldn't be a fight."

I didn't argue. In this body, thin and hollow and two hundred years out of practice, I couldn't have taken an alpha's son head-on if I'd wanted to. That wasn't why I'd stopped arguing.

I needed to know what this body could do. There was no better way to learn it than to be hit.

The teacher blew the whistle.

Around the edges of the ring I could hear it already — the low certainty of a crowd that has decided how a thing will end. The last-ranked girl. The wolfless one. Watch her fall.

I let Callan come to me. I didn't lunge, didn't try to trade blows I'd lose. I read his shoulders, his weight, the tell in his lead foot, and I gave ground — slid back, turned his first strike past my shoulder, ducked the second.

But the body was worse than I'd feared. My feet were slow where my mind was quick. When I did get a forearm up to block him, the force of it still knocked me sideways into the sand, and I had to spit grit and push myself back onto my feet before he closed the distance again.

I got up fast. I'd learned that in a life before this one: getting up fast is its own kind of armor.

"Selah!" Mia's voice cracked from the sideline, thin with worry. "It's okay — you can yield! Nobody expects—"

"Queens don't have that word," I said.

I don't think she heard me. That was fine. It hadn't really been for her.

I stopped trying to hold my ground. That was the mistake everyone in the ring expected me to keep making — meeting his strength with strength I didn't have. So I stopped.

Instead I gave him what he wanted. Every time he pressed, I yielded — but I chose the direction. A half-step back and to the left. A duck that drifted right. Each retreat looked like losing, and each one walked him a pace nearer the line raked into the sand at the ring's edge.

He didn't see it. Why would he? He was winning. Winning makes you stupid.

On the last exchange he lunged to finish it, all his weight thrown forward into the strike, exactly where I needed it. I stepped inside instead of away, hooked my ankle behind his, and used the whole of his own momentum to put him down.

He hit the sand hard, past the line, and rolled to come up swinging.

"I won," I said.

He froze, half-turned, fist cocked.

I looked past him to the teacher. "He's over the boundary. Both shoulders, both feet, outside the ring." I brushed the sand off my sleeve. "By the rules, that's the match. Does it count toward my grade?"

The hall had gone silent. Then it broke — a mutter that swelled fast. She tripped him. That's not fighting. That's a trick.

It is exactly fighting, I thought. It's the only fighting that ever mattered. You don't win a war by being stronger. You win it by choosing the ground.

The teacher looked from the line in the sand to Callan sprawled behind it, and something in her weathered face shifted. "…Out of bounds is out of bounds," she said. "The match is Ellowen's."

There was no anger in Callan's eyes. Only confusion.

No one laughed this time either.

The bell rang through the sudden quiet. Students filed out in twos and threes, throwing glances back at me the whole way. I told Mia I was going to wash the sand off and that she didn't need to wait. I wanted a moment alone to take inventory of a body I was still learning to wear.

I didn't get it.

Footsteps caught me in the empty corridor, quick and sure, and then Callan was in front of me, cutting off the hall.

"Move," I said.

He didn't. He stepped into my path, blocking the corridor.

This close, the traitor body did its trick again — a flush of warmth, a stupid quickening of the pulse, the ghost of everything the girl had felt every time this boy walked past. I stood inside it like standing in someone else's coat. It was hers. It would always be hers. I let him have none of it show on my face.

"That thing in the ring," he said, low. "Selah couldn't do that. Selah has never done anything like that." His eyes searched my face, and there was no laziness left in them now. "This morning you looked me in the eye and said the diary didn't exist. You. Who wrote three pages about the way I hold a pen. And just now you ignored me like I was furniture." His jaw tightened. "Who are you?"

It was, I had to admit, the right question.

So I answered it the way a soldier answers a threat in a corner.

I drove my knee up into him, hard, exactly where it would end the conversation. The breath went out of him in a sound I recognized from a hundred battlefields, and he folded, one hand still braced on the wall, the other going where all men's hands go.

I stepped out of the corner while he couldn't follow.

I was tired of pretending.

Tired of letting this world decide what weakness looked like.

I crouched down so he could see my face.

"You want to know who I am?" I said.

"I'm your queen."