Chapter Six
Zaden
I moved into Clawfore on a gray morning with one bag, one Beta, and the expression Ivan described to the welcoming committee as "ceremonial."
They housed us in the Luna's residence, a timber longhouse on the hill above the village, and the whole pack turned out to watch me arrive, four hundred wolves lining the path with faces ranging from curiosity to open loathing.
An old woman on a porch glared at me over her knitting with such force that I nodded to her out of pure respect.
A pup threw a pinecone at Ivan and missed, and Ivan caught the second one out of the air and threw it back, and by the bottom of the hill he had six pups trailing him and was teaching them something I would later have to ban.
Sana met me at the door in front of everyone, glowing, and kissed my cheek, and I stood there like a post.
"You could be wood," she murmured against my ear, smiling for the crowd. "You could be an actual fence post and it would be more convincing. Put your hand on my waist."
"The contract," I said through my teeth.
"The contract is watching from that window," she said. "Second floor of the council house. Elder Nylah. She's been writing to Jademoor for a month. Hand. Waist. Now. "
I put my hand on her waist. The bond sang up my arm like a plucked string and her breath did the small catching thing it did, and the crowd saw their Luna tucked under her mate's hand, and somebody cheered, and somebody else didn't, and we went inside and broke apart like the same ends of two magnets.
That evening began the rehearsals, and the rehearsals were the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and I had been in three wars.
"Again," she said. We were in the longhouse's main room with the shutters closed.
She sat across the table with a candle between us, businesslike, a general drilling a particularly hopeless recruit.
"I'm going to say something charming, and you're going to look at me the way mates look at each other.
Not the way you look at the smugglers when they raise prices. "
"How do I look at the smugglers?" I asked.
"Like that," she said. "Exactly like that. That's the one. Never make that face at me in public."
She folded her hands. "Try this. When I speak, watch my mouth, then my eyes.
People in love look at mouths. It's embarrassing, but it's true, and observers know it.
And when I touch your arm, don't tense. You tense like a trap going off.
Touch is supposed to land on a mate like rain, not like an arrow. "
"How do you know all this?" I asked.
"I watch people," she said. "It's most of my job. Everyone thinks being beloved is a temperament, but it's a discipline. You learn what faces mean and you give people the face they need."
She said it lightly, the way she said everything, and underneath it I heard the other thing, the lonely thing, and I had the sudden unwelcome thought that nobody had ever bothered to learn her faces back.
"Your turn, then," I said. "If we're rehearsing. Show me the real one."
Her chin came up.
"The real what?" she asked.
"You have a face you give people," I said, "and you have whatever was in my hall when you stopped smiling and offered me the treaty.
I've been thinking about it for nine days.
Everyone in your pack looks at you like you're made of light, and not one of them looked worried about you, and you buried a father and a brother this year and got publicly rejected by a fated bond, and not one of them looks worried.
That isn't temperament either. That's discipline.
So show me the real one, Luna. If I'm going to lie to the Council with my face, I'd like to know what I'm lying about. "
The candle burned between us. For a moment, one unguarded moment, she looked at me the way she had looked in my hall, steel and grief and exhaustion all the way down, and my wolf went quiet and attentive in a way he never did, and something in my chest turned over like ground breaking.
Then the lamp came back on. Bright, warm, impenetrable.
"That's a second date conversation," she said, "and this is a business arrangement. Watch my mouth, then my eyes. Again."
We rehearsed until midnight. I was terrible.
She was patient and merciless, and when I finally got one right, one single soft look held for three full seconds, she sat back with the satisfaction of a woman who had taught a rock to swim, and I went to my separate room down the hall and lay awake in enemy territory, listening to her footsteps through the wall, while my wolf pointed out, at length and in detail, that the hook under my ribs had not hurt all evening.
I told him it meant nothing.
He has never once believed me.