Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The Bond That Wouldn't Break

The pain came first.

I had read about it in my mother's books, the same way you read about drowning or childbirth: knowing the words, not the thing. A rejected bond does not snap clean. It tears. It feels as if someone has reached into your chest and found a thread that is sewn through every part of you, your heart and your lungs and the backs of your eyes, and is pulling it out an inch at a time, and every inch of it is barbed.

I didn't fall. I want that on record. My legs shook. My vision went gray at the edges, and the torches smeared into long orange streaks. But I stayed on my feet, because two hundred wolves were watching me, and because Selene Marrow had recovered from whatever had frightened her and was smiling again.

"She has to accept," someone muttered behind me. "Or it'll keep hurting the both of them."

"Will it kill her? If she's wolfless?"

"Who cares?"

I looked at Cassian. He was gray-faced, sweating, his breath coming short, and he would not meet my eyes. Good. I hoped it hurt him. I hoped it hurt him every day for the rest of his life.

But I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of watching me beg.

"Why?" I asked him. Only that.

His jaw worked. "You know why."

"I want to hear you say it."

"Because you're wolfless." He said it to the ground between us. "Because Silvercrest needs a Luna who can lead it, not one who can't even hear it. Because..." He stopped, and swallowed, and for a heartbeat he looked twelve years old again, sitting in the cedar. Then it was gone. "Because the moon made a mistake."

The moon made a mistake.

I had spent three years quietly believing that I was the mistake. Now he had said it out loud, on the Rite stone, in front of everyone who had ever known me, and made it law.

Something steadied in me then. It was strange. It felt like cold water poured into a burn. I lifted my chin, the way my mother used to lift hers when the elders came to our table.

"Then I, Wren Halloway," I said, "accept your rejection."

Those are the words. Everyone knows them. You say them, and the bond dies, and the pain fades over a week or two, and both of you go on with your lives as though it never happened.

I said them, and the bond did not die.

I felt the thread pull tight inside me, felt it reach the very end of its length, and then it caught on something deep down, deeper than my heart, deeper than anything I had a name for. Something that wasn't me. Something that had been asleep for a very long time and had just opened one eye.

A growl rolled through my chest.

It was low. Too low for anyone else to hear over the noise of the crowd. But I heard it, and I felt it vibrate in my ribs like a struck bell, and I knew, the way you know your own name, that it had not come from my throat.

I pressed my hand flat against my breastbone. Across the circle, Cassian's head snapped up. For a moment he stared at me as if he'd heard it too, and his nostrils flared, and something like fear moved over his face.

Then the horns began.

Three short blasts from the south ridge. Then three more. Every head on the hill turned at once. I had grown up hearing those horns in drills, twice a year, so the children would know what they meant. I had never once heard them for real.

Rogues at the border.

The Rite fell apart in seconds. Warriors tore off their shirts and dropped into fur in mid-stride, the crack of bones and the rip of cloth filling the dark. Alpha Roderick roared orders from the stone. Mothers snatched up children and ran for the stone hall. Somebody knocked over a torch, and the dry grass on the north slope caught with a soft whump and began to burn.

I ran too. But not to the hall.

If there was fighting, there would be wounded. And I was the only one in Silvercrest who knew where the yarrow was.

Pip caught up with me halfway down the hill, gasping. "Wren! What was that? The light. The pool. Are you all right? Is he...?"

"Not now." I shoved the herb room door open so hard it hit the wall. "Boil water. All of it. Every pot we have. Then go to the kitchens and bring me every clean sheet you can carry."

He didn't ask any more questions. He boiled water.

I laid out linen and needles and the brown bottles of tincture in their rows, and I did not think about Cassian. I did not think about the thing inside my chest. I lit every lamp in the room and I listened to the howls coming up from the south, the snarls and the yelps and once, horribly, a sound like a young wolf crying for its mother, and I counted jars.

While we waited, I made the mistake of looking out the window. From the herb room you could see straight up the hill to the circle, and the moon pool was still there in the middle of it, black again, perfectly ordinary. Nobody was near it. The torches had burned down to stubs.

But for a moment I could have sworn the water moved. Not a ripple. A pulse, slow and faint, like something under the surface was breathing in time with me.

I made myself look away.

"Wren," Pip said quietly, from the hearth. "When the pool went white. Has that ever happened before? To anyone?"

"I don't know."

"My gran says it's silver for a mate. Always silver. She's seen forty Rites." He fed another log into the fire and wouldn't look at me. "She says white is for something else. She wouldn't tell me what. She just made the sign against bad luck and went to bed."

I didn't answer, because I didn't have an answer, and because just then the first cart came rattling down the hill.

They brought the wounded in fours and fives. Rogue bites are ugly things, ragged and deep and dirty, and they fester in a day if you're slow, so I wasn't slow. I cleaned and packed and stitched until my arms ached and my good gray dress was black with blood to the elbows. Pip held lamps and fetched water and threw up once in the yard and came back white-faced and kept going. I was proud of him. I didn't have time to tell him.

Near midnight they carried in a warrior named Tobin Hale. He was twenty, handsome, loud. Two years ago he had stood outside the herb room with his friends and howled at me, laughing, because he thought it was funny that I couldn't howl back.

A rogue had opened his thigh to the bone. The big vessel was nicked. His blood was pumping out between his friends' fingers in bright, hot spurts.

"Hold him down," I said.

It took me twenty minutes to tie off that vessel. Tobin screamed the whole time, and then he stopped screaming, and I thought he was gone, and then I felt the thread of his pulse come back under my fingers like a fish rising. When it was done, he looked up at me through a haze of poppy and pain.

"You," he said thickly. "Why'd you...? I was..."

"Go to sleep, Tobin."

He did. I washed his blood off my hands and went on to the next one.

It was nearly dawn when the door opened and Cassian walked in.

He was in his human form, shirtless, filthy, with a long rake of claw marks across his ribs, still bleeding sluggishly. Everyone in the room went quiet. He didn't look at any of them. He looked at me.

The bond hummed. I felt it like a plucked string. I hated that I felt it.

"Sit," I said, because I was a healer before I was anything else, and he was bleeding.

He sat. I cleaned the scratches. They weren't deep. My hands were steady. His skin was hot under my fingers, and he flinched once, and I knew it wasn't from the pain.

"Wren," he said, very low, so only I could hear. "I didn't have a choice."

I tied off the bandage. "Everyone has a choice."

"Not me. Not tonight." He caught my wrist. His grip was gentle, which was worse than if he'd hurt me. "You don't understand what you saw up there. What that light means. If they find out..."

"If who finds out? Find out what?"

The door banged open again before he could answer. Cassian let go of my wrist as if it had burned him, and stood, and walked out without another word, past the man coming in.

Beta Garrick Marrow filled the doorway.

He was a big man, bigger than the Alpha, with a scar through one eyebrow that pulled it into a permanent sneer. He had never spoken more than ten words to me in my life. Tonight his eyes were very bright.

"How did the rogues get past the south gate?" he asked.

I dried my hands. "I don't know. I've been in here all night. Everyone in this room will tell you."

"The gate was held by four of my best men." He stepped inside. Pip went very still against the wall. "We found all four of them asleep at their posts. Not dead. Not hurt. Asleep, like babies in a basket. The rogues walked straight through and killed two of our warriors before anyone woke."

"Asleep?" That made no sense. A wolf on watch doesn't sleep. Not four at once. Not with rogue scent on the wind.

"Drugged," Garrick said.

He held up his hand. In it was a tin cup, the plain dented kind they used in the guardhouse, with a dark ring of dregs at the bottom. He held it out to me.

I didn't want to take it. I took it anyway and brought it to my nose.

Valerian. Hops. Passionflower. Lemon balm. Something snagged in my mind at that one, but I was too tired to catch it. And the faint bitter edge of poppy that I added only for the very worst nights, for patients in so much pain they couldn't stop screaming.

It was my sleeping draught. My mother's recipe, written in her book in the old script. Nobody else in Silvercrest knew how to make it.