Chapter Eleven
Sana
The rogues came on the night of the hunt feast, which was not a coincidence, though I couldn't prove it then and grieve to this day that it took me so long to.
The feast was the last great ceremony before the Blood Moon, the whole pack in the meadow under torches, long tables, the harvest piled high, music, Darius presiding over the head table with his clerks finally, blessedly, not writing.
I had seated Odell next to him out of pure malice. She had spent the first hour interrogating his opinions on wool and finding them wanting.
Zaden stood up midway through the third course with his head turned north, and that was all the warning we got.
"Sana," he said, and the way he said my name, just my name, no Luna, put me on my feet before my mind caught up.
Then the howling started, and the north watch horn cut through the music with the three rising notes every Clawfore pup learns before their letters, and the meadow came apart.
Rogues. Twenty of them at least, come through the north pickets, and they were wrong.
I knew it inside the first minute. Rogues are starvers, scatterlings, they hit barns and storehouses and run.
These came in formation, two cutting wedges, and they came through the feast itself with the harvest piled untouched on either side, and they were driving toward the head of the meadow, toward the tables, toward the place where every elder and pup and notable of Clawfore sat gathered in one lit and lovely target.
I shifted in the dress Odell had made me, and I heard her scream at me later about the seams, and my wolf hit the grass running.
I am gold furred and quick and I have my mother's reach, and the first rogue who came for the pup tables lost his footing to my shoulder and didn't get up before three of my wolves had him.
The meadow was chaos, torchlight and screaming, tables going over, Rose bellowing the healers into a knot around the pups, Ivan's lean shape flashing gray through the wreck with six of our young fighters somehow already moving as a unit at his flanks, because Ivan made friends the way other wolves made footprints.
And through the middle of it came Zaden.
I had never seen him fight. Five weeks of candles and patrol schedules and a man who slowed his stride for a pup's short legs, and I had filed away somewhere that the grim was mostly weather. It is not mostly weather.
He came through the broken tables as a black wolf the size of winter, and he went through the rogue line the way a keel goes through water, and the formation that had been a wedge stopped being a formation.
He was not savage. That was the terrible beauty of it.
He was precise, he was economical, he was Alpha in the oldest sense of the word, and every wolf of mine who saw it fought harder for being near it.
We met in the middle, back to back, the way the songs say and life almost never arranges, my gold against his black, the last knot of rogues circling us in the torchlight.
Through the bond I could feel him, truly feel him, the cold ordered furnace of him, and I knew he could feel me, my fear and my fury and the bright savage joy I have never admitted to anyone I take in defending what is mine, and for one impossible minute in the middle of a battle we moved like one animal with two bodies, each turning to guard the other's blind side a half second before the need, and the rogues broke on us like water on stone.
It ended as fast as it began. Rogue fights always do.
They left five down and carried none of their wounded, which again was wrong, rogues carry their wounded, packs leave them, and I stood heaving in the torchlight over a battlefield of broken feast tables and counted my wolves and found, by the Moon's own grace, that we had wounded and no dead.
The pups were whole. The elders were whole.
Odell had defended her table with a carving fork and was being talked down by three grandsons.
Darius had not fought. Darius stood at the head table exactly where he had been, untouched, his guards in a ring around him, and his face was composed into perfect grave concern, and his eyes were moving over the meadow, the wreckage, the wounded, the Luna and the Alpha standing flank to flank in the torchlight, and he was reading it all like one of his ledgers.
"Thank the Moon," he called, warm with relief, hand on his heart. "Thank the Moon you're both safe. What a horror. Rogues, so deep in settled land, in such numbers. Cousins, you fought like a single creature. It brought tears, truly."
He paused, exactly long enough. "One almost can't believe the bond was ever refused."
The clerk beside him was writing.
"Sana." Zaden's voice, low, at my shoulder. He had shifted back, he was bleeding from a long shallow line above the hip, and his eyes were on Darius. "The pickets. Twenty rogues don't pass the north pickets unheard."
"I know," I said.
"Somebody walked them in," he said.
"I know," I said. "Smile, Zaden. He's watching us put it together. Smile and bleed and let him think we think it was rogues."
He smiled. Six weeks of rehearsal and the man produced, on demand, in front of an enemy, over an open wound, the single most convincing loving smile of his career, and took my hand, and kissed my knuckles for the watching meadow, and against my fingers, too low for any ear but mine, he said, "We're past ten days now, Luna.
Past holding lines. After tonight I want the other conversation. "
The hook pulled, line taut, and for once I let it sing.
"After tonight," I said.