Chapter Two
Zaden
I made it as far as the tree line before my legs stopped working, and I leaned against a pine and breathed like a man who had been held underwater.
Mate . The word was still ringing through me, through bone and blood and the howling wreck of my wolf, who was currently trying to claw his way out of my chest and run back to that hall and that woman in white.
Sana Clawfore. The Clawfore Luna. The sunshine girl with the lethal smile, daughter of the Alpha whose pack had killed my grandfather, and the Moon had looked at all of that history and decided it would be funny.
"You absolute disaster," said a voice from the dark.
Ivan came out of the trees with his hands in his pockets, strolling, because my Beta had never hurried toward anything in his life except dinner. He was lean and sandy haired and he had been my best friend since we were pups, which meant he was the only wolf alive allowed to talk to me like that.
"Not now," I said.
"Oh, I think now," Ivan said. "I think very much now.
I was standing in the back of that hall, Zaden.
I watched the Moon hand you a fated mate, an actual fated mate , the thing wolves write songs about, and I watched you spit on it in front of the entire Council inside of ten seconds.
That has to be a record. Somebody should carve it on something. "
"She's Clawfore," I said.
"She's your mate," Ivan said.
"She is the Luna of the pack that has been killing our wolves over the Springline since before either of us was born." I pushed off the tree and started walking, because if I kept moving maybe my wolf would stop howling. He didn't. "It's a trick of fate. It changes nothing."
"It changes everything and you know it," Ivan said, falling in step beside me. "Your wolf knows it. I can hear him from here, by the way. He sounds like somebody is standing on his tail."
"He'll quiet down,” I said.
"Will he?" Ivan asked. "Because your father's wolf never did."
I stopped walking.
Ivan didn't flinch, which took a kind of courage, because I felt my eyes flash Alpha red and the forest itself seemed to lean away from me.
He just stood there with his hands in his pockets and his head tipped, watching me with the patience of a man who had hauled me out of every dark place I had ever fallen into.
"That was low," I said.
"It was honest," he said. "There's overlap.
Zaden, I know what the bond did to your father.
I was there. I helped you bury what was left of this pack when he burned it down chasing a mate who used him like a key in a lock.
But that was him. That was her. This is a girl who, from where I was standing, looked like you had reached into her chest and pulled something out with your bare hand. "
"She'll recover," I said. "She has twelve Alphas lined up to console her."
"Eleven," Ivan said. "The one from the eastern range left before you did. Funny thing about fated bonds. Nobody wants to mate a Luna whose wolf already belongs to another man. You didn't just reject her, Zaden. You might have killed her pack."
I started walking again, faster, and the words followed me anyway, because the truth has longer legs than I do.
We crossed onto Nightsteel land an hour past midnight, and I should have gone home. But instead my feet took me where they always took me when the world went wrong.
The healing den sat low against the hillside at the edge of the village, lamplit and warm, and old Freya was awake when I came through the door, because Freya was always awake.
She was small and gray and she had been patching this pack back together since my grandfather's day, and she looked at my face and didn't ask a single question, which was why I loved her.
"He's not asleep," she said. "He was waiting for you. He said you'd come. That boy would bet on the sun forgetting to rise if the odds were good."
Will was sitting up in his cot in the back room with his arms already crossed, seven years old and furious about it, the way he was furious about everything that kept him in that bed.
He was pale and too thin and his hair stuck up in every direction, and the sickness that had been hollowing out Nightsteel pups since my father's war had been hollowing him out for two years.
The wasting. No healer could name its cause and only one thing on this earth slowed it down, and that thing bubbled out of the ground in a spring on the Springline, on land we did not hold.
"You're late," Will said.
"I was at the Council," I said.
"Was it boring?" he asked.
"Catastrophically," I said.
"Did you bring it?" he asked.
I took the flask from inside my coat. Moonstone water, two weeks' worth, bought through smugglers at a price that was quietly bleeding the pack treasury dry.
Will drank his measure making a face like I had fed him a frog, because it tasted like cold metal, and then he settled back into his pillows with color already coming up faintly in his cheeks, and that little flush of pink was worth every coin and every lie.
"Freya says you have to get me more by the new moon," he said. "Jay needs it too, and the twins. Jay threw up twice yesterday. He pretended he didn't but I heard him."
"I'll get more," I said.
"You always say that," he said.
"Have I ever not gotten it?" I asked.
He considered me with the brutal honesty of the very young and the very sick.
"No," he said. "But you look worried when you say it now. You didn't used to look worried."
I sat on the edge of his cot and ruffled his impossible hair, and I did not tell him that the smugglers' route was getting tighter, that Clawfore patrols had nearly caught the last run, that the only permanent answer was the spring itself and the spring sat on land held by a pack that hated us.
I did not tell him that the Council was about to dissolve that pack, and that if I simply did nothing, simply stood aside and let a girl fail, the Springline would come to Nightsteel and no pup of mine would ever go without the water again.
And I did not tell him that the Moon had tied my soul to that girl three hours ago, and that I had cut the knot in front of the world, and that some animal part of me had been bleeding ever since.
"Go to sleep," I said.
"You're doing the worried face right now," Will said.
"That's my regular face," I said.
"That's true," he said, yawning. "Your face is mostly worried with some angry. Ivan says you were born scowling and the midwife apologized to your mother."
"Ivan talks too much," I said, and I stayed until he was asleep, and then I sat alone in the dark of the healing den with my elbows on my knees, listening to four sick pups breathe, while somewhere across the border my mate hated me, and my wolf grieved like something dying, and I told myself for the first of a thousand times that I had done the right thing.
I have never been a good liar. Not even to myself.