Chapter 1: The Rejection

I counted the torches twice before Evander said my name.

Thirty-eight the first time. Thirty-seven on the second pass, because the wind had knocked one down near the granary and nobody had thought it worth relighting. Counting is what I do instead of shaking. My mother taught me that before she died, though I was six, and I've never been sure whether I remember her teaching me or only remember wanting her to.

The whole of Silverfang had come out for the Long Moon. Four hundred wolves in their good wool, breath steaming, boots packing the frost into a hard grey shine across the Reckoning ground. Children up on shoulders. Old women with their hands tucked into their sleeves. The bonfire threw more smoke than heat and everyone pretended otherwise.

I stood where a girl with no family stands, which is near the back, close enough to see and far enough to be forgotten.

Beatrice had braided my hair that morning. She'd used her own silver pins, the ones from her mother, and she'd worked in silence with her mouth pressed thin, and when she finished, she said, there, in a voice that didn't match the word at all. I should have understood then. Healers know things four days before the rest of us do.

The bond had come in at the turn of autumn. I'd been carrying water up from the washhouse when it landed in my chest like a struck bell, and I dropped both buckets, and across the yard Evander had stopped with his hand still on his horse's neck and looked at me across the yard.

Fated. That's the word for it. The moon picks two wolves, and the picking is supposed to be beyond argument.

For nine weeks I let myself believe in it. That's the part I'm least willing to forgive.

Alpha Edmund climbed onto the stone at the head of the ground and the crowd folded shut around him. He is a big man gone slightly soft at the jaw, and he has a way of speaking that makes his own opinions sound like the season changing.

"The moon has moved among us," he said. "Let it be witnessed."

Three pairs went first. A girl from the mill and a boy who were trapped in the river, both of them scarlet to the ears. Then the widower Halloran, forty-six years old, was standing next to a woman from Emberpine with her chin up like she'd been waiting decades and wasn't going to apologize for the wait. People wept. Somebody's dog got loose and had to be caught.

Then Edmund said, "My son." Evander came up onto the stone and the ground went quiet. Not the hush of a crowd waiting for news. The flat, embarrassed silence of four hundred people who had already been told the ending.

I felt it before he opened his mouth. The bond went thin. Not cold, not yet, just thin. Thin like a thread with the weight coming off one end.

"I, Evander, son of Edmund, blood of Silverfang." His voice carried. He'd practiced it. "I reject Elinor Marney as my mate."

The bell that had rung in my chest for nine weeks cracked straight down the middle.

I've heard rejected wolves describe it since and most of them reach for burning or for drowning, and neither is right. It's more like being unstitched. Something that had been holding my ribs to each other simply stopped, and everything below my throat came loose, and I went down on one knee in the frost with my hand flat on the ground and my vision had gone white at the edges.

Hundreds of wolves watched me do it. Not one of them moved.

Then the rest of it arrived, which is the part nobody warns you about, because the pain isn't the humiliation. The humiliation is that your body keeps reaching. Nine weeks of instinct kept groping down the broken line for a man who had just said my name in front of everyone I'd ever met to be rid of me.

"Say the words back," Edmund said, almost gently. "It's cleaner when both say it."

I looked up. Rosamund of Thornwake had come out of the dark at the edge of the fire in a grey cloak with a fox on her collar, and Evander had taken her hand, and the two of them stood on the stone in front of the whole territory. She wasn't smiling. I'd give her that much, and it cost me something to give her. She looked at me as though I were a broken cart blocking a road she still had to travel.

So, the alliance had been settled. Weeks ago, probably. Signed and sealed while I was carrying water and letting myself believe in the moon.

"Say them," Evander said. He wouldn't look at me. He was looking at a point three feet above my head, and his jaw was working, and I understood with perfect clarity that he was in pain too and had decided the pain was worth the province of Thornwake.

I got my feet under me. It took two tries. Beatrice had started forward from the crowd, and someone had caught her arm.

"I reject you," I said.

It didn't carry. My voice was a wreck. I said it again, louder, and the sound of my own voice doing it was worse than anything he'd done to me.

"I, Elinor Marney, reject Evander of Silverfang."

And I waited for the second half to break, as it is supposed to, as it has broken for every rejected wolf since the moon first started meddling.

It didn't break. The line went taut instead, and I felt it come back up out of the dark under my ribs, hot and wrong, and it wasn't Evander on the other end. It had a different weight. It had a grip. Something out past the treeline had hold of the far end of my mate bond and had just felt me pull.

My head came up. Past the bonfire, past the last torch, the black stand of pines went back and back and the snow between the trunks held that faint blue light snow holds at night.

Nothing there. No shape, no eyes, no breath.

In the dark past the treeline, something turned to look at me.