The Collar-a

Hello, Sloane. 

I had never told him my name.

That thought went around and around in my head like a moth at a lantern. Not the ribs. Not the mud. Not the three armed men who had been about to put iron on my neck. Just those two words, said so softly, like he'd been saving them.

"How do you know my name?"

It came out cracked. Vane didn't answer. He was still crouched in front of me, his thumb still resting on my cheekbone, and he looked at me for so long that I forgot to be afraid. It was the wrong kind of looking. Nobody looked at me like that. He looked at me the way you'd look at a locked door you've walked past for years, when someone finally puts the key in your hand.

Then he sighed. One short, tired breath that fogged in the cold. It was the most ordinary sound he'd made, and somehow that scared me more than anything.

He took his hand from my face and stood. He didn't hurry.

"I said she's mine," he told the guard who'd had his fist in my hair.

The man was still on his knees, sweat running down his temple in the freezing air. "My Lycan. With respect. She's a Moonstone stray. Border law says strays go to the pens, and I was only..."

"The pens."

"Yes, my Lycan. Same as any..."

Vane's hand moved.

I didn't see it. That's the honest truth. One second his arm hung at his side, and the next his fingers were around the man's throat, and there was a sound like someone stepping on a dry branch.

The guard's eyes bulged. His hands came up and clawed at Vane's wrist, small and useless, a child tugging at a grown man's sleeve. Vane turned his hand a fraction of an inch. That was all it took. A fraction.

The man went slack. Vane opened his fingers and he dropped into the mud with a wet, heavy thud and lay there facing me, eyes still open.

I've thought about those eyes many times since.

A noise came out of me. I don't know what kind. I was scrabbling backward on my elbows before I knew I'd moved, boots skidding, until a root caught me between the shoulder blades and there was nowhere left to go. The other two guards hadn't so much as flinched. They stayed folded over with their foreheads almost in the leaves, like this was weather. Like this happened here.

Vane wiped a fleck of blood from his thumb onto his trousers, absently, the way you'd brush off a crumb.

"You killed him," I said. Stupid. It was the only thing in my head.

"Yes."

"He was on his knees."

"He was." There was no heat in it at all. "He touched what belongs to me."

What. Not  who. Even through the terror, some small furious part of me noticed.

"I don't belong to you." My voice shook, but the words scraped up my throat anyway. Hours ago I'd walked out of a clearing with one man's rejection still bleeding in my chest. I was not going to get claimed twice in a single night. "I don't belong to anyone. I'm nobody's. You can't just..."

Vane tilted his head. He studied me like an insect that had said something unexpectedly clever.

Then he bent and picked up the collar the dead man had dropped. The iron clinked, small and bright.

"You crossed into Riven land," he said. "By our law I should feed you to the hounds. I'm feeling generous."

I tried to get up. My ankle, which I'd turned somewhere in the dark without noticing, folded like wet paper, and I went down on my side. Before I could roll, his knee settled between my shoulder blades and pressed me flat, not even hard, the way you'd press a flower in a book. His fingers wound into my hair and dragged my head back. There was nothing gentle in it. The night air touched my bare throat.

Cold iron. A click.

It was so heavy. That was what I couldn't believe. It sat on my windpipe like a block of ice, and then the magic woke up, a sharp, deliberate sting that went through my skin like a needle through cloth.

"Ow, that..." My hands flew to it and clawed at the metal. No gap. No seam. "Take it off!"

"You're property of the Riven pack now." His mouth was right beside my ear, his breath warm against the cold. "You belong to me. You'll do exactly as I say, or I'll give you to the hounds. Do you understand?"

Deep in my gut, the wolf lost its mind.

He collared us.  It wasn't a voice, but it was the closest thing to one it had ever made. *He put iron on us. Let me out. Let me tear his face off.* It slammed into the wall I'd spent ten years building and slammed into it again, and pain went off behind my eyes like a struck match. I squeezed them shut. I bit down on the inside of my cheek until copper flooded my mouth for the second time that night.

No,  I begged it.  Please. If you come out, the collar burns us alive. Stay down. Stay down.*

"Do you understand?" His fist tightened in my hair.

"Yes." It cracked in half. "I understand."

He let go. My forehead dropped into the mud. I heard him stand and step back, and I lay there shaking, waiting for whatever came next.

"Good," Vane said. "Walk."

He didn't carry me. He didn't offer a hand. He clipped a chain to the ring at the front of the collar, looped the slack around his fist, and turned toward the trees like it had never occurred to him I might not follow. I found out how long the chain was by falling on my face when it ran out.

So I got up. Every breath had a knife in it. Something in my left side had cracked when that boot landed, and my ankle was swelling hot and tight inside my boot. I kept my eyes on the back of his dark coat. Left. Right. Left. Right. Don't cry. Don't let her out.

I cried a little anyway. The kind that just leaks. It ran down my face and I let it, without a sound, and I hated that I was so good at that.

Somewhere in that hour I caught myself wondering if the hem of my mother's dress had come undone. That's what my brain reached for. The hem. I'd sat on my bed the night before with a needle and a cheap lamp, humming, so careful with it. And Garrick's hand shaking against my jaw behind the granary. Just trust me. 

Something in me went cold and stayed that way.

Under the iron, my mother's stone lay against the base of my throat. It was hot. Hotter than it had ever been. I didn't have room to think about that yet, so I didn't.

The Riven camp didn't come into view so much as rise out of the dark. First the smell: woodsmoke and roasting meat and wet leather and too many bodies. Then a wall of sharpened logs three men high, and watchtowers of black stone with archers pacing on top. Torchlight leaked through the gaps in the palisade.

Moonstone was a pack. Cabins, a fire pit, a kid's bicycle left on a porch. This was an army that had decided to stay put.

The gates opened before anyone called. Inside, black canvas tents in rows. Men sharpening blades. Women hauling sacks of grain. A few in half shift, fur rippling

along their forearms, sparring in rings churned to mud. Everything was moving, loud, alive.