Chapter 2: The Severance That Fails

They cut me at dawn, in the healing house, on a table that had held three generations of birthing women and two of my own childhood fevers.

Severance is old work and it is not delicate. Beatrice laid out the moonwater and the grey salt and the little curved knife with the bone handle, and she set them in the order her mother set them, and I lay on the boards with my sleeve pushed up past the elbow and my heart going like a bird in a sack.

"Look at the ceiling," she said.

"I'd rather watch."

"Elinor."

I looked at the ceiling. Nine beams, and a wasp nest in the corner of the eighth that had been empty since I was a child, and a water stain shaped like a running dog.

The mark sat at the inside of my left wrist. A crescent about the width of my thumb, silver-white against the blue of the veins. It had come up the night the bond did. On a properly severed wolf, it goes grey within the hour and then fades over a season to nothing but a shine you can only find in certain light. Mine was brighter than it had been the day before.

Edmund stood by the door with his arms folded. Osbert had come as well, who told me the thing had already stopped being a healing matter and started being a political one. Osbert is the sort of man who arrives where he'll be needed the day before anyone knows they need him.

Beatrice cut me. Grey salt, moonwater, the words in the old tongue that I've heard at four other severances and never once needed to understand.

The crescent flared white.

She wiped it and cut again, deeper, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted iron, and the mark burned brighter still, and the third time she cut me my blood ran silver for the length of one heartbeat before it went red again. Beatrice went the colour of the wall.

"Enough," Edmund said.

"Alpha, I can try the long rite. If we wait for the dark of the—"

"I said enough."

She put the knife down. Her hands were not steady, and Beatrice's hands were always steady.

Here's what nobody in that room knew. From the moment the salt touched me, I could see the whole shape of it, plain as furniture. Not with my eyes. With whatever it is I've had since I was small and always assumed everyone else had too, the sense that told me which of the kitchen girls were sisters before anyone said so, and which of the border wolves would break and run into a fight.

I could see Evander's bond with Rosamund. They'd made the declaration at midnight and the thing between them was already there, gold-bright and neat.

It was lying on top of them. Painted on, like a beam of paint across two chairs. A true bond puts roots down into a wolf. Ivy into mortar, patient and invasive. This one had roots nowhere at all.

Someone had put it there. Someone had made it.

And my own broken line ran out of my chest and through the wall of the healing house and away east into the hills, and it did not end anywhere I could follow.

"The bond has not severed," Osbert said. He said it to Edmund, not to me. "A mate bond that survives mutual rejection is not recorded in Silverfang. It is barely recorded at all."

"It's recorded," Beatrice said, and everyone in the room turned to look at her.

"There are perhaps four cases," she said, and she was folding a cloth over and over that didn't need folding. "They're old. They're not good at reading."

Edmund unfolded his arms. He came to the table and looked down at my wrist and I watched a man decide something and dress the decision up as regret while he was still deciding it.

"You'll leave," he said. "You've until dawn tomorrow. Take what's yours."

"I've done nothing."

"You are carrying something we can't cut out of you, and the King's men are on the road, and I will not have Silverfang explaining to you." He turned for the door. "Rejected wolves leave. That's the custom. Nobody will say you were driven."

"Everyone will say I was driven."

He stopped in the doorway with the grey morning behind him, and for a moment I thought he'd argue, and I think that's the closest Edmund of Silverfang ever came to being decent with me.

Then he said, "Yes," and went out, and Osbert followed. I heard their boots go down the steps and their voices start, low and careful, pitched for a door that hadn't shut yet.

Beatrice bandaged my wrist. She did it slowly, wrapping four times when three would have done, and I understood she was buying seconds and I let her buy them.

"Beatrice."

"Don't."

"Four cases. What happened to them?"

"Two were burned," she said. "One walked into the Hollowmere and didn't come out. And one lived to be ninety-one and outlived every wolf who ever tried to explain her." She tied the linen off. "Guess which one I intend you to be."

She pressed my hand shut over the knot. Her fingers were cold.

"Listen to me. Don't let anyone cut that mark again. Not a healer, not a priest, not the King himself if it comes to it, and it may come to it." Her eyes came up to mine and there was something in them I had never once seen in Beatrice, who had held people's insides in her two hands and hummed while she did it. She was frightened. "Not for any reason. Do you hear me?"

"Why?"

"Because your mother said the same thing to me," Beatrice said, "the winter before she died. Word for word. And I didn't ask her why, and I have had eighteen years to be sorry."

I sat up so fast the room tilted. "You knew my mother?"

Beatrice, who has never lied to me, who taught me to set a bone and gut a hare and hold my tongue in front of men, looked me straight in the face and said, 'no.'