Chapter Seventeen
Sana
The meadow went silent so fast it rang.
"No," I said.
"The signatory volunteers," Darius said, swift, before Alric could speak, before I could breathe, nailing it to the record. "The Council witnesses the consent freely given."
"He doesn't consent, he doesn't understand what he's consenting to," I said, and I had Zaden's arm, I was pulling him around to face me, and seven hundred wolves and the full Council watched their Luna come apart in public for the first time in her life and I could not have cared less.
"Zaden, listen to me. The test isn't pain, pain you'd eat for breakfast, I've seen you.
The test is the renunciation. You have to mean the words enough for the bond to believe you're trying, that's how it bites, it makes you reject me again, with your whole wolf, in front of everyone, and then it tears along whatever's really there.
You, of everyone alive. You spent your whole life building walls against this exact bond and the rite is going to take you to the one place in yourself where the rejection was real and make you live in it while the bond breaks you on it.
There has to be another way. We'll find the gap, there's always a gap, I find gaps, it's what I do, give me an hour. "
"There's no gap," he said. "He built it gapless. It's good work."
He said it almost with admiration, the connoisseur's flatness he used for weighing things, and then his hands came up and framed my face, and the flatness fell away entire, and the underneath looked at the underneath with the Blood Moon coming down red on both of us.
"Sana. Nine weeks ago I rejected you in front of one hall because I was afraid of what the bond would make me.
Tonight I get to stand in front of both our packs and every power in this valley and show them exactly what it made me.
He thinks it's a trap. He's never been loved, so he thinks the test is the worst thing in his arsenal.
He's wrong. It's a stage, and it's the only one in the world big enough for the apology I owe you, and I am taking it. "
"It could kill you," I said. "Odell said wolves have died of it."
"Wolves with weak bonds have died of it," he said. "So the question is just the question it's always been, since the rock at the border, since the candle. Is it real?"
He pressed his forehead to mine, and through the bond his fear came to me honestly. He didn't hide it, an Alpha's fear the size of an Alpha, and wrapped around the fear, vast and calm and certain, the other thing, the thing the test was for.
"I'm not afraid of the answer," he said. "I'm the only wolf here who's already been living in it. Hold the line, Luna. I'll be quick."
He kissed me, in front of everyone, soft as the first one on the steps, and walked to the ceremony stone, and put out his hands for the rite.
I will tell you what the Severance Test is, because Odell says someone must, in case the Council ever again pretends not to remember.
The pair is parted, forty paces, the width of the fire between them.
The volunteer kneels at the stone. The presiding elder, and it was Odell who stood forward, fierce and gray and weeping freely, because the rite demands the oldest witness and she would not let it be anyone who loved him less, speaks the renunciation line by line, and the volunteer repeats it, and the bond is named, and refused, and refused, and refused, until it answers.
"I renounce the bond," Odell said, and her voice broke on it.
"I renounce the bond," Zaden said, and his didn't.
The third line took his breath. I felt it through the hook, a wrongness like ice in the blood, the bond waking to what was being said to it.
The fifth line took him to one knee from both. The meadow had gone past silence into something with weight.
I stood my forty paces with Rose's arm locked through mine and Ivan stone faced and gray at my other side, and I felt every line land in my own ribs, the line between us pulled thinner and thinner and brighter and brighter, and Zaden Nightsteel knelt in the firelight under the red moon and renounced me in a steady voice while his body shook and the blood came at the eighth line, from the nose, dark in the firelight, and the bond did not tear like paper.
It held. It held the way ground holds, the way mountains hold.
It held and it screamed, and every wolf in that meadow with a mate of their own cried out at once, because past a certain pitch a true bond's agony carries, it is felt down every thread of pack, and seven hundred wolves felt what was strung between their Alpha and their Luna, felt its size, felt it hold and hold and hold while the rite tried to cut it with his own borrowed voice, and there was no actor on this earth, and now every soul present knew it, who could have staged the thing they were feeling in their own chests.
"Enough," Alric was roaring. "The Council is answered, enough."
"The rite is not complete," Darius said, and his voice had lost its sorrow, quick and thin now, a man watching his arithmetic fail. "Interrupted, it proves nothing, the texts are explicit, it must run to the breaking."
I stopped hearing him, because at the ninth line Zaden went down.
Not to a knee. Down, into the grass, the bond howling through me with a sound like tearing sky, and his wolf's voice and his man's voice cried out together in the firelight, and something in the line between us began, at last, under the weight of nine refusals, to give.
And I broke the rite.
I crossed the forty paces. The ones who were there will tell you that no one saw the Luna of Clawfore move, that she was simply at the stone, that the fire bent away from her. What I remember is simpler.
I remember that there was a law, and a stage, and a kneeling man paying my pack's whole debt with his body because he had decided his love was the collateral, and I remember deciding, with a clarity I have never felt before or since, that they could have the pack.
They could have the pack. They could have the title, the territory, the treaty, the deadline, the dissolution, every weight I had carried since my father died, they could have all of it, because none of it, not one stone or signature of it, was worth one more line of that rite.
I went down into the grass and took his face in my hands and poured myself open down the bond, no discipline, no lamp, no armor, everything, the whole of me into the whole of him, and I said, into the rite's ringing silence, loud enough for the law and the moon, "I refuse the renunciation.
The bond is mine. He is mine. Tear it out of both of us or put it down. "
The bond came back up like the sun.
I cannot describe what it was, not properly, not even now. Odell says the old texts call it the answering, and that no Concordat pack was ever founded without one, and that the Council buried the rite less for its cruelty than for what it proves when it fails.
I only know that the line between us went from a thread to a river, that Zaden's eyes opened with the red moon in them, that somewhere very far away seven hundred wolves were on their feet making a sound I had never heard two packs make together, and that the first thing my mate said, flat on his back in the grass, bleeding, half dead, with our entire political position in unsalvageable ruins, was, "Told you it was real. Darius, write that down."