19. Chapter 18
Nyxiana
The pack has spread itself along the lip of the ravine. Every wolf on that edge can see the stone. Nobody stands behind anybody else. Nobody has to lean. Or they’re just a bunch of ghouls waiting for somebody to die.
I take the place at the near end where I can watch the causeway and the crowd at the same time. Valen stands a step to my left. He hasn’t said anything since the Alpha put the terms out over the yard. His heat reaches me where I’m standing.
The glyph-work reads live under my senses from where I stand, steady, waiting on contact.
Valen has no form to put between himself and that stone.
Every wolf standing on this ravine knows it.
This is hard country. Rock spines and thin grass and drops that come without warning.
The settlement sits back from the ravine, a hundred yards of open ground between the nearest building and the drop.
The ground is packed from generations of feet.
They called the whole settlement back for this. For some reason, they want to humiliate him. Refusing him wasn’t enough.
I gave him my name and my standing this morning. It bought me nothing. The Alpha will give me something eventually - they always do.
Valen walks to the near end and steps onto the stone.
The strike lands the instant his foot comes down.
I watch it come up out of the rock and into all of him at once.
His whole body takes it, gives an inch, then he’s upright again.
A body hit that hard buckles. The knee goes, the head snaps back, or the sound comes out of the man loud enough to carry.
His knee bends and locks. His head stays where it is.
If any sound comes out of him, the wind takes it before it reaches me. I’ve never watched anyone do that.
His mouth stays shut. The muscle in his cheek stands out hard enough that I can see it from where I am.
His pale gray eyes stay focused on the far end of the causeway.
Nothing else in his face moves. The wind pulls at his hair.
His hands hang open at his sides. He’s one step in.
The whole hundred feet is still in front of him.
If he comes off that stone I can be there before he lands.
The ward will take me the whole way out and back.
I settled that with myself before he ever stepped on.
He takes the second step. The stone hits him just as hard.
My weight comes forward off my heels. I set them back down.
If I go out there, the payment stops being his.
These people won’t honor anything else. I hate it.
I turn my attention to the Alpha. On the surface he’s pleased, he’s watching his own terms do their work. But underneath that, he’s braced. It’s the same thing I caught at the refusal - fear.
Contempt doesn’t brace, it’s loose. It can afford to be, because a man who holds somebody in contempt has already decided that person can’t reach him.
Nothing in this man is loose. He hasn’t moved since Valen stepped onto the stone.
The Alpha of this pack is afraid of Valen, on his own ground, afraid of one man who can’t shift.
That makes no sense.
I stop reading the Alpha and start on the crowd. They’re at the edge of the ravine, murmuring, leaning into each other. A woman near the back says something to the man beside her without taking her eyes off the causeway. He answers without looking away either.
Third step. Fourth. He’s ten feet out over the drop and his pace hasn’t changed.
They came here for a failure. They’re not getting one.
The murmuring dies. It doesn’t taper off.
It stops all at once, everywhere along the edge.
I turn away from the causeway and put all my attention on the pack instead, face after face, working left to right while the stone keeps hitting him behind me.
Hands have gone still. Nobody is looking at anybody.
The woman near the back has her arms crossed over her chest and her chin down.
The man beside her has stopped leaning in to hear her.
Halfway along the line an old wolf stands with both hands closed into fists, his mouth moving, nothing coming out of it.
Every wolf on this edge has it. The young ones have it as badly as the old ones.
There are wolves down at the far end who never laid eyes on this man before today, and it’s in them too.
Not one of them learned to be afraid of him from meeting him.
The oldest wolf on this ravine has seventy years in him at the outside.
Every wolf who actually knew Valen went into the ground a long time ago.
He walked back in this morning with a face in its twenties.
They went gray and he didn’t. They buried each other, he didn’t.
A pack buries its own, they had nowhere to put a man who wouldn’t die.
They don’t hold him beneath them. They never did.
This is where his stillness came from. He built it standing in a place that was afraid of him and never said so.
Half the wolves on this edge are waiting for the ward to force the shift out of him and prove him ordinary. The other half are waiting for him to go over the side. Either outcome would let them stop being afraid.
I look back at Valen. He’s past the middle now.
There’s nothing under him on either side, nothing behind him but the drop.
The far side stands higher than this one.
There’s a split in the rock above the end of the causeway, he hasn’t taken his eyes off it.
Cold comes up, out of the drop, it keeps coming, carrying the sound of water moving over rock a long way down.
He thinks this is contempt and he isn’t slowing down. I try to turn my attention back to the crowd but my eyes go back to him. He steps off the far end onto solid ground and stops. My breath leaves me all at once.
The Alpha’s mouth opens. He takes half a step back from the lip of the ravine before he catches himself, by then the wolves nearest him have already seen him do it.
Nobody on this edge is looking at the causeway anymore.
They’re looking at their Alpha. He says what he came to say to the far side of the ravine, and none of it is to me.
Then he walks away. Behind him the line comes apart, slowly at first, then most of it at once, wolves peeling off toward the buildings without a word to each other. A dozen stay where they are.
I could say it right now, out loud, with every one of them still close enough to hear.
They would have to stand there and be told what they are.
Some of them would never get over it. I wouldn’t lose an hour of sleep.
It would also tell Valen what he is, in front of the people who did this to him, from me, three minutes after that stone finished with him. I won’t do it here. I keep it.
I read the span before I trust it. The glyph-work has gone quiet under my senses, spent for the whole hundred feet.
I put one foot on it. Nothing happens. I cross at a walk with my eyes on him instead of the drop.
Up close he’s worse than he let any of them see.
There’s sweat at his hairline and along his throat.
The color has gone out of his face leaving it gray under the tan.
He’s holding his left arm closer to his body than his right.
His breathing is too even, three counts in, three counts out.
He looks at me. That’s all I get. Whatever is underneath stays closed to me, the same as it has always been.
I want to touch him, to take the last step, put my hands on him, hold onto him.
My feet stay where they are and we walk onto the founding ground together.
It reads old under my senses. Not the grass, not the flat stones set into the near edge, there’s an older layer underneath all of it, deep down, with the rest of the ground laid over the top.
I can’t tell what’s down there from up here.
“How are you doing?”
“It’s done.” He looks out across the ground. “Where do we start?” he asks as he stands there knowing that is ground his own kind have only ever crossed on four legs. Not one of them will say his name out loud again without dropping their voice first.
He still thinks they held him beneath them. I turn it over once. Knowing what I know now, would I keep it from him again? I know in my heart the answer is yes.