18. Chapter 17
Valen
Iturn to walk off their ground.
Most of the wolves who came out to watch me get turned down have drifted back toward the settlement. A dozen are still on the edge of the clearing. The Alpha stayed. His hands hang at his sides. The wind coming up out of the ravine moves his shirt.
Nyxiana stays where she is. “Has anyone who wasn’t born to this pack ever set foot on the founding ground?”
Her voice carries far enough that the buildings behind him can hear it. The Alpha takes his time. He looks at the dirt. Then at her. Then past her at the treeline. She waits him out.
“Once,” he says. “Maybe twice, in all the time this pack has stood here. There’s an old rite for it.”
“Name it.”
He looks at me while he lays it out. “The founding ground sits on the other side of the ravine,” he says. “One way onto it. A stone causeway, hundred feet, wide enough for one body.” He waits. “There’s glyph-work cut into it the whole way across.”
He points past the last of the buildings. I look. The ground out there stops. It picks up again on the other side, and a gray line of stone runs between the two.
“The ward in that stone strikes whatever crosses,” he says. “One full blow, up through the body, every time a foot lands. Not just at the start of it. Every step.”
“And your pack crosses it,” she says. “How?”
“My pack crosses in their natural form. The form takes the strikes. Whoever’s inside it walks a hundred feet and steps off the far end without a mark on them.”
“And without the form, the body takes every strike the form was built to absorb,” I say.
I stop there. The Alpha nods once. She turns to me.
She’s close enough that I have to look down to meet her. Her hair is loose. The wind coming up out of the drop pulls a strand of it across her mouth and she leaves it there. Her eyes are violet with silver in them, and they don’t move off mine.
“Is that the only way in?” she says. She doesn’t wait for him to answer. “Because I can cross it faster than it can hit me. Let me walk it for him.”
My hand closes at my side. “Nyxiana. No.”
“No to which?”
“Both.”
She waits.
“The stone doesn’t wear a body down over the length of it,” I say. “It hits at the point of contact. Full force, every time a foot lands. A hundred feet at your speed is a hundred separate strikes delivered faster.”
“Then I take a hundred.”
“That’s the first reason. Here’s the second.
The map answers to my signature. The pieces answer to me.
It has to be me standing on it.” She starts to say something and I keep going.
“And you can’t put us across. The ground answers to whoever pays the rite.
Anything we skip, we skip together, and then it stays shut. ”
She looks at me. Then she turns back to the Alpha. “Say it, then. Does the stone care how fast I move?”
“It answers to contact,” he says. “How fast you move changes nothing about what it does the moment your foot lands.” He shifts his attention to me.
“And the rite answers whoever’s asking for the ground.
You asked. That makes it yours to walk.” He looks back at her.
“You walk it for him, you’ll take every strike in that stone, and he’ll still be standing on this side when you’re done. He won’t have paid anything.”
Gold comes up through the violet in her eyes, thin at the edges, gone almost as fast as it arrives. Nyxiana could put this man through the rock wall behind him. She stands there and takes it.
Nobody has ever offered to pay something like that for me. I don’t know where to put it.
“Name your terms,” I say. “I’ll take them.”
The Alpha turns toward the settlement and raises his voice.
The wind takes most of the words. Doors open along the eastern row.
Two wolves come out of the long building and leave the door swinging behind them.
They come back. More of them than stood here for the refusal.
They spread themselves along the lip of the ravine, leaving gaps between one and the next.
Every one of them can see the stone. They’ve done this before.
Or their parents did, and they learned the spacing from them.
None of them has ever met me. Everyone I knew in this range went gray and died while I stayed the same.
Whatever they know about me, they got it secondhand. They came to watch me fall.
The Alpha walks to the near end of the causeway. He stands with the drop behind him and raises his voice so all of them can hear it.
“The ground opens to the one who crosses on his own two feet. No form. He bears what the form was built to bear, the full length of the stone.” He waits. “He does that, the ground is his.”
None of this is new. Different range, different century, and it goes the same way every time. They find what I can’t do. They build the price out of it. This time they said it out loud, with the whole settlement standing there to hear it.
I told her no once. She doesn’t argue. Her voice goes out across the yard behind me. “Does it take a whole settlement to watch one man walk a hundred feet of stone?”
The Alpha turns toward the causeway. He doesn’t reply.
My eyes stay on the stone. I walk to the near end.
The stone starts where the ground stops.
Glyph-work is cut into it every few feet, deep grooves with the edges worn soft.
It runs out ahead of me, wide enough for one body and no more.
The far end sits a hundred feet off. I look down once.
The ravine drops a long way on both sides and ends in broken rock with dark water standing in it.
Anything that comes off this stone stays where it lands.
The Alpha gets out of the way. The wolves along the edges go quiet. On the left, a young wolf turns his head away from the stone. The one standing next to him takes hold of his arm and turns him back.
I step onto the stone. The blow comes the instant my foot lands.
It starts at my sole and goes up my entire body.
Full force. No warning, no build. I stay on my feet.
Second step. Same again, no softer for coming second.
Every step gets its own blow. Third step.
Same. I keep walking. The air coming up out of the ravine is cold.
It moves across the stone in a steady draft that pulls at my coat and dries the sweat on my neck.
A long way down under me there’s water running.
I can hear it working over rock, low, with no rhythm to it.
The stone under my boots is worn smooth down the middle where a long line of wolves has crossed it.
The glyph-work sits deeper than the wear.
My foot finds the grooves every few feet.
I pick a mark on the far side. There’s a split in the rock above the far end.
I walk toward that. Past the split, the founding ground starts to come clear.
Flat and open. Grass worn down to almost nothing, a stand of trees a long way back.
Large stones set into the ground at this end, low, half swallowed by the grass.
My breathing stays steady. My hands stay open at my sides.
It hits the same places every time. The base of my skull.
A spot under my breastbone that shouldn’t be reachable through a foot at all.
My vision goes gray at the edges for part of a step, then comes back.
It happens again a few steps on. After that it stops.
Then the water drops out of my hearing. So does the wind.
What’s left is my own breathing and the sound my boots make on the stone.
The wolves behind me stop talking to each other. A scream builds in my throat. I keep my mouth shut and keep moving. I could get there faster. Nothing on this stone stops a man from running it. It would only look like a man in a hurry. I walk.
Low in my body, a heat starts. What the causeway does comes into me from outside.
This one starts inside, low under my ribs, and it spreads out slow from there.
It gets a little stronger every time my foot comes down.
I put it with everything else the crossing is doing to me.
The split in the far rock is a crack now, wide and dark.
The old grass past it comes up green at the roots.
There’s moss on the last few feet of the stone where the spray off the water reaches.
The last one lands as hard as the first. My foot comes down on solid ground and nothing hits me.
I stop. Both feet are on the founding ground.
I turn and look back. A hundred feet of stone.
My whole body is still ringing. The Alpha is looking right at me.
He’s angry. Nobody along the edges of the ravine is talking. None of them got what they came for.
Her voice cuts across the quiet. “You gathered a settlement to watch one man fail.” She lets it sit. “You got nothing for it.”
Nobody answers her. She’s standing in the middle of them saying it out loud, and not one of them opens his mouth. Nobody has said a thing like that for me in front of a pack. Not in all the time I’ve been alive. I try to put it away. It won’t go.
The Alpha speaks without coming any closer. “The price is paid. The ground’s open.” He turns back toward the settlement. “Whoever crosses after you crosses on your name.”
He walks off. The line along the ravine breaks up behind him.
She steps onto the stone. Her foot comes down and the stone does nothing at all.
She crosses it at a walk. The wind off the drop is in her hair the whole way.
Her eyes stay on me and not on the stone.
Nyxiana stops beside me. There’s less than a step between us.
Her scent reaches me first. My body turns toward her.
I go still and put my eyes on the ground ahead of us.
Up close the stones have been walked on until the corners rounded. Somebody set them here long before this pack ever started guarding them.
I’m standing where no wolf of this pack has ever stood on two legs.
The heat that started out on the stone hasn’t gone down. It’s still sitting low under my ribs, in the same place it began, and the pain from the crossing sits on top of it without touching it. I take it for the last of what the crossing took out of me.