Chapter 6

Chapter 6: The First Shift

Nobody tells you how loud it is.

In my mother's books, the first shift was a page and a half. The bones lengthen, the books said. The skin gives way to fur. The young wolf may feel discomfort. Discomfort. I had sat with women in labor for two days straight, I had held Tobin Hale's leg together with my bare hands, and I would have traded every one of those nights for that single minute on the stone floor of Lucan Draven's house.

It was the sound that frightened me most. Not the screaming, though I was screaming. The cracking. Every joint in my body popping open one after another like knots in a burning log, my spine bowing up off the floor, my ribs spreading with a noise like green wood splitting. My jaw stretched forward and my teeth went with it, and I tasted blood. My skin burned and then my skin was gone, or not gone, only buried, under something thick and soft and cold.

Don't fight it. The voice again. The calm voice in my head that was not mine. You're fighting it. Every time you fight it, it hurts more. Let go, Wren.

"I can't," I tried to say. It came out as a howl.

You can. You've been letting go of things your whole life. Let go of this.

Hands on me. Someone's hands, strong and cool, pressing my shoulders down against the floor so I wouldn't break my own neck thrashing. A woman's voice, sharp and steady. "Breathe through it. Like a birth. In through the nose. Good. Again. Lucan, get her head. Don't let her bite her tongue."

"She's going to bite me."

"Then let her. You'll heal."

I felt another pair of hands, bigger, rougher, cupping my skull. The smell of woodsmoke and snow came with them. The torn place in my chest where Cassian had been stopped screaming for one breath and simply ached, and the ache was easier, and I clung to it.

"Wren," Lucan said, close to my ear. "Listen to my voice. You're not dying. I know it feels like it. You're being born. It hurts because it's twenty years late and your body's in a hurry. Breathe."

I breathed.

The last bone went with a crack I felt in my teeth. Then everything stopped.

I lay on the floor and panted. The fire was very loud. I could hear every log in it, every hiss of sap. I could hear a heartbeat somewhere above me, steady and slow, and another, quicker, to my left. I could smell everything. The comfrey in the poultice that had fallen off somewhere. Old smoke in the beams. Wool. Leather. Sweat. Blood, mine, a little. And under all of it, threading through everything like a bright cord, woodsmoke and iron and snow.

I opened my eyes.

The room was different. The colors had gone strange and soft at the edges, the reds dull, the blues and grays sharp as cut glass. But I could see into the corners where the firelight didn't reach. I could see the grain of the wood in the beams overhead. I could see the woman kneeling beside me, a young woman with black hair in a dozen thin braids and Lucan's dark eyes, staring at me with her mouth open.

"Moon and stars," she whispered. "Lucan. Look at her."

I lifted my head. It was heavier than it should have been, and it was the wrong shape. I looked down at myself.

Paws. Two great paws on the stone floor in front of me, where my hands should have been. And fur. Fur everywhere, thick and soft, not gray like a Silvercrest wolf, not black like an Ashborn wolf.

White.

Not the yellowish cream of an old dog. White like the moon pool on the night of the Rite. White with a faint, cool sheen to it, as if there were silver dusted through the hairs. In the firelight it seemed to give off its own light.

I scrambled up onto four legs, and my legs went in four different directions, and I crashed into the end of the bed.

"Easy," Lucan said. He was crouched by the hearth, out of reach, and he was looking at me in a way that nobody had ever looked at me in my life. Not pity. Not contempt. Something more like awe, and underneath the awe, fear. "Easy, little wolf. One leg at a time. You've had two legs for twenty-one years. Give yourself a minute."

He's right, said the voice. Front left. Then back right. Like walking down stairs in the dark.

"Who are you?" I thought at it. Not in words, exactly. More a shape of a question.

I'm you. The part of you she kept asleep. A pause, and something like amusement. You can call me Esk. It's what she called me when you were in the womb, before she had to start the teas.

"The teas?"

Later. Stand up.

I stood up. Front left, back right. Front right, back left. It worked. I took one step toward the fire, and then another, and the floor felt strange under my pads, cold and gritty and alive. I caught sight of myself in the polished copper of a kettle hanging by the hearth: a long white muzzle, two pale pointed ears, and eyes.

My eyes had gone silver. Pure, bright silver, like coins under water.

The black-braided woman let out a long breath. "I've read about this," she said. "In Grandmother's books. I thought they were stories."

"So did I," said Lucan.

The walls of the room began to close in. Suddenly it was much too small, much too warm. The fire roared in my ears and the smell of so many people in so small a space crowded into my nose, and every instinct I had, every new instinct I had never had before, screamed out.

There was a door. It was open a crack. I went through it.

"Wren! Wait!"

I was in a stone corridor, then a wide hall with long tables and a cold hearth, then another door, and then I was outside, and I didn't stop.

It was night. It had snowed while I slept. The air was so cold and clean it hurt, and it was full of a thousand new things, pine and frozen earth and rabbit and a fox that had passed this way an hour ago, and the cold glitter of starlight on snow. I could see the whole world. I could see a village of low stone houses spread down the mountainside below me, roofs heavy with snow, windows glowing. I could see the black teeth of the forest beyond it, and the far white peaks beyond that.

I ran.

I didn't decide to. My body simply did it. My legs stretched out and the snow sprayed up behind me and the wind tore past my ears, and it was like nothing, nothing I had ever felt. All my life I had watched the Silvercrest wolves run on the night of the Rite and wondered what it felt like. Now I knew. It felt like falling, except you never hit the ground. It felt like the world had finally let you in.

This, Esk said, inside me, fierce and joyful. This is what she took from us. This is what they all took.

Something big and black was running beside me. I hadn't heard it come. Lucan, in wolf form, keeping pace with me easily, his great shoulders rolling. He didn't try to stop me. He ran at my side down the long white slope, past the edge of the village, and when I swerved, he swerved, and when I leapt a fallen tree, he leapt it too. Once, his shoulder brushed mine, and the bond between us rang through my whole body like a struck bell.

I didn't see the people until I was among them.

The village had come out of their houses. Of course they had. Their Alpha had been shouting for the hall to be cleared, and then a white wolf had burst out of his door into the night. They stood in doorways and in the narrow lanes between the houses, wrapped in blankets and furs, children on their hips, staring.

I skidded to a stop in the snow. Lucan stopped beside me.

Nobody spoke. I could hear their hearts, dozens of them, all racing. I could smell their fear. It was thick and sour and it was all for me.

Then an old woman at the front of the crowd, gray-haired, bent over a stick, put her hand over her mouth and dropped slowly to her knees in the snow.

"Moonborn," she breathed.

The word went through the crowd like wind through grass. Moonborn. Moonborn. Some of them knelt beside the old woman. Some of them took a step back. A mother pulled her little boy behind her skirts. A man near the back made a sign with two fingers that I recognized. Pip's gran had made the same sign on the night of the Rite. The sign against bad luck.

Then a voice rose over all of them, harsh and cracked with age.

"Get away from it! All of you! Do you know nothing? Have you forgotten what the last one did?"

An old man pushed his way through the crowd. Tall, thin as a heron, with a white beard down to his belt and a staff of black wood. He pointed the staff at me as though it were a sword.

"Alpha," he said, and his voice shook with fury. "You have brought a Bondbreaker into the heart of Ashborn. You will put it down. Tonight. Or I swear by the stone, the council will do it for you."

Something hissed through the air.

An arrow buried itself in the snow a hand's width from my front paw.