Chapter 30
Valen
Iwalk out to the edge of the compound and stop.
This is the stretch of treeline I watched from for months before anybody knew my name. I know every root, which pines drop needles across the path in the fall, which has the split in the bark at chest height from something that came through here long before I did.
Below me the compound is doing what it does at this hour. Lamps in three of the cabin windows. Somebody bringing the last of the horses in. The lodge with all its lights on and most of the pack inside it. My hand is already on that split trunk. I don’t remember putting it there.
I run it through once, in order, in the plainest words I have.
Not a wolf. Never was one. There was never a thing in me that could have shifted, so there was never a night I failed at it.
Made. Not born. Built by the founders to hold a seal shut and to close it again when it opened.
That’s all of it. It takes less time to say than it took her to tell me.
My hands come next. I’ve always been stronger than a man my size.
I put it down to work and the country I came up in.
Hard rock, hard weather, a body made by both.
I stopped getting older somewhere back before anybody around me marked it.
I never started again. That one I put down to luck.
Neither of those is luck. A thing built to hold has to be strong enough to do just that, has to last longer than whatever its holding or it’s no use to anybody.
Both of those went into me on purpose and I have been quietly grateful for them ever since.
The trial comes next, as it always does.
Every boy in my birth pack went out at thirteen.
You stood at a treeline no different from this one and waited.
It came. After that you were one of them.
I stood out there the whole night. Nothing came - no shift, no fur, nothing anywhere in me moving at all.
I remember the cold coming up through my boots.
Counting hours off the stars because there was nothing else out there to count.
Walking back in at dawn with my hands empty and every face in that clearing already knowing.
My shoulders come up the way they came up then, standing out in the dark waiting for a thing that was never going to arrive. There’s nothing left to wait for.
After that pack there were others. More of them than I’ve ever bothered to count, every one of them followed the same pattern.
I’d come in, say straight out that I’m a wolf who can’t shift, because saying it up front was cheaper than letting them find out.
Then I’d watch the distance come down. It was always careful, nobody was ever cruel about it after the first pack.
They just left a little space around me and never closed it up again.
There was always work. That part never failed me anywhere.
A man who’ll take the perimeter every night, in any weather, from the first time he’s asked, gets kept on in any pack in any territory.
My work bought me a place at every fire I ever sat at.
It never bought me a reason to stay at any of them.
Every hour I spent inside my own head working out what was wrong with me, it was wasted on a fault that was never there.
It doesn’t land like that. It gets worse instead of better.
All those explanations I handed over, one pack after another, standing in one more doorway, saying the words out loud so nobody would have to ask.
I gave it anyway, over and over, to people who were only ever going to keep me for what my hands could do.
There’s a part of me that has stood a half step outside every room I was ever let into.
Not against the wall but not with those who were in there either.
I never had a reason for that until tonight.
Having one doesn’t make standing there any easier.
The hunt put me back on that same range a few days ago and made me pay at the border to walk on their own rock.
None of it was ever about me, they never knew a thing about what I actually am.
Not one of them, not the Alpha, not the men who set the price.
They were afraid of a boy who came back off that treeline with nothing.
They built the rest out of that and lived inside it for generations.
That’s all it ever was. Not judgment. Not something they worked out about me. Fear of a thing that didn’t match, held onto by people who never looked at it straight.
I don’t have room left to be angry about any of it tonight.
Thoughts of Callum come up next. Earlier tonight in the training yard, him pulling his shirt off and stepping onto the mat instead of asking me a single question.
It got close to something. Closer than most things get.
It was never going to hold. Not for anything I did wrong.
If a wolf who couldn’t shift made people careful around me, divine will do more than careful.
Ash Hollow will work out what I am sooner or later, and then this goes the way every other place went.
I’ve been on this ground longer than I’ve stayed anywhere since I left the North Range.
I’ve stayed for one reason and I’m not spending tonight thinking about her.
Instead I do the only thing I know how to do with a wound this size.
I push off the trunk and start walking the perimeter.
I’ve walked this line most nights since I got here, whether anybody asked me to or not.
Feet on the path, treeline on my left, compound on my right.
Same distance, same turns, same three places where a man could come through if he knew what he was doing.
Same patrol it was yesterday. Nothing about the line has changed. Everything walking it has.
The old answer to a night like this is to be gone by morning.
Pack up, take the useful work you did with you, leave before anybody has to have the conversation about whether you’re staying.
That’s what I’ve done every other time but I can’t do it, won’t do it, and I’m not looking too hard tonight at which of those two is the honest one.
Halfway round the second side, with my hand trailing the bark, it lands.
Staying at the edge, doing the work nobody asks for, never being the person anybody picks.
That might be the thing I was made to do.
A lock doesn’t get brought inside, doesn’t sit at a table.
It stands at the door and holds. That holding goes on whether anybody on the other side of the door ever thinks about it or not.
I’ve spent a lifetime believing that was armor.
I keep walking and Dane finds me before I’ve finished the second lap around the perimeter.
He comes down from the lodge without hurrying, stops a couple of strides off the path with his hands loose at his sides. Nothing about any of it comes out of him. Nothing about her, or the yard, or what my hands look like.
“Dinner’s ready,” he says. He doesn’t leave.
“I’m fine.”
He steps over and puts his shoulder against the next trunk down from mine and faces out at the same trees I’m facing.
We stand there a while but he doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t want anything.
In every pack I’ve ever stood in, a man walking up to me at a perimeter had something he needed carried.
This one came out to stand next to me in the dark.
An owl hoots somewhere behind us in the trees.
Down at the lodge somebody laughs at something and I note that it’s got colder since the sun went down.
I take as much of it as I can, it turns out that isn’t very much at all.
“You should get back,” I say. “I’ve got the rest of this line.”
Dane nods once, pushes off the trunk, goes back toward the lodge, and doesn’t look over his shoulder on the way.
Down by the training yard, orange flares up into the dark, it comes up fast off Evren’s hands, bright enough to throw his shadow out across the yard.
He doesn’t pull it back fast enough, looks at his own palms, around the yard, quickly checking every direction at once.
With dinner just called there’s nobody out to catch it but me.
He swears quietly at himself, shakes his hands out and heads up toward the lodge.
I watch all of it from the treeline. Somebody should go down there, put a hand on that boy’s shoulder and tell him it happens, has been happening more than it used to and that nobody in this compound is going to hold it against him.
I don’t go. The patrol takes me past Nyxiana’s cabin on the long side.
Kaspian is on her porch again, this time with his bag over his shoulder, on his way out for the night.
She’s in the doorway with the lamp behind her and her hair down, one shoulder against the frame, the same way she stood the first hundred nights I watched this place from up here.
I’m far enough away that neither of them marks me going by.
I put my eyes back on the trees without changing my pace. Most of a sentence reaches me anyway.
“Evie’s dreams have gotten sharper this last week,” he says. “Scarlett’s up with her. She’s restless enough that it’s got both of us watching her.”
I put it aside, it doesn’t go. I walk the next quarter mile still thinking about a girl who dreams too hard and a boy who can’t hold his own fire.
There’s nothing I can do for either of them.
Evren couldn’t hold that flare and didn’t know why.
Evie can’t sleep, nobody can tell her why.
Nothing in this compound used to do that.
The cold comes up harder past the middle of the night.
It always turns colder out here right before it turns light.
I’ve got no coat, don’t go back for one.
Somewhere in the fifth or sixth lap my legs have an opinion.
They haven’t done that in years, a night of walking has never been enough to get at this body.
Still, I don’t stop. On the seventh lap the lodge goes dark, window by window.
On the eighth there’s nobody awake in this compound but me, which is how most of my nights here have ended.
The sky over the east ridge turns gray, then goes the color the sky does before there’s any sun, then the gold comes in along the bottom edge.
I don’t go back to my cabin even though my body’s asking for it.
There’s a bed in my cabin across the compound and nobody here would say a single word about me being in it.
Instead I put my back against the split trunk and stay at the treeline until the sun’s the whole way up over the ridge, with warmth in it again.
The compound starts moving below me. Doors. Voices. Somebody at the woodpile. Still, I don’t move, because out here nobody has ever asked me to be anything except what I already am.