11. Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
S oren
Miller is late.
Two minutes, which she will dispute.
I use them. The ground's still wet from the rain and the north end doesn't drain, so we'll work the near half. Voss has left the mats out and I stack them, because leaving them out in this is how you replace mats.
Then I stand and wait and watch her come across the field.
She's carrying a coffee, a notebook with about four things folded into it that don't belong in a notebook, and a jacket she has not managed to zip. One glove. I don't know where the other one is. I doubt she does.
Twenty yards out, a first-year drops a folder and half of it goes across the path.
Miller stops. Puts her coffee down. Crouches and helps him gather it, and says something that makes him laugh, and hands it back squared, and picks her coffee up again.
The whole thing costs her about forty seconds. Which is part of why she's late.
That is the entire problem with her, in one crossing of a field. Her life is chaos. Her principles are not.
She comes up to me and says, "I'm not late."
"You are."
"By how much?"
"Two minutes."
"That's not late, that's European punctuality rounding."
I look at her.
She takes a mouthful of coffee and looks back and doesn't blink, and there's color up in her face from the cold and her hair's coming out of whatever she did to it this morning, and I have spent thirteen months making sure that I do not stand here and catalogue any of that.
I'm not doing especially well at it today.
She's beautiful. This is not new information. It's simply information I usually have the discipline not to examine.
I take the coffee out of her hand and set it on the equipment box.
"Hey—"
"You'll be shifting."
"I've barely—"
"You'll be shifting," I say, "and then it'll get cold."
I was raised to understand that control is not a mood. It's a practice.
You control your body first, because a wolf who can't govern his own weight is a danger to everyone standing near him.
Then your shift, because a shift you don't own, owns you.
Then your face, because in the world my family lives in, an expression is information, and information is currency, and you do not hand people currency.
Then your obligations, which you meet whether or not you feel like it.
Then everything else.
My father says a Soren is measured by what he does not do. He says it approvingly. He's not wrong, exactly. It's simply not the whole sentence, and I've been standing in the missing half of it since Jessica Miller arrived at this academy and started dismantling my life.
I knew what she was within a month.
Not the direwolf. Nobody knew that. I mean the other thing — the pull, the low warm drag under the ribs when she came within a certain distance, which I recognized on the second occasion, because I was raised in a House that teaches its heirs mate lore before it teaches them to ride.
Most wolves never find one. That's the number. My grandmother used to say it the way other people say lightning.
And I found mine at my academy. She was gorgeous arguing with Faris about inherited authority in her first history class.
I did what I was trained to do.
I assessed. I noted the political dimensions, which were considerable even then and are now approximately catastrophic. I decided to say nothing until I understood the situation.
I have understood the situation since about November of last year.
I have still said nothing.
Voss comes over from the shed with his board.
"Miller. Where are you?"
"Six for six in the last two weeks."
"On what?"
Jessica's jaw goes. "On things that need doing."
"Say it properly."
"I can shift when there's a job," she says. "Every time. Placement, drills, the thing with the ropes. If someone needs something moved or found or dragged up a bank, it works." She shoves her hands in her pockets. "And if I'm standing in a field being asked to shift, nothing happens."
"So what you have," Voss says, "is a shift with conditions attached."
"I have a shift."
"You have a reflex with better manners." He makes a note. "Today: no task. Nothing chasing you. Nobody hurt. You shift because you've decided to, or you don't shift."
"That's the same exercise we did in October."
"That's the same exercise you'll be doing in June if you don't crack it," Voss says, and turns to me. "She got closest with you."
"That's because he's irritating, " Jessica says.
"Use what works," Voss says, and walks away.
She fails four times.
I let her do all four without saying anything, because the failure has clues and I want to be certain of the issue before I describe it to her.
It's this: she braces. She sets her feet, she squares up, and she takes a breath like a woman about to lift something.
Then she concentrates. And about three seconds in, her chin comes up a fraction and her eyes move — and that's the moment.
That's where she starts checking. Is it happening? Was that heat? Is that anything?
And the instant she checks, it's gone.
She could do it. It's right there. She is standing in a field two inches from her own wolf and she keeps stopping to ask whether she's arrived.
After the fourth one she says a word I won't repeat and kicks the mat.
"You're grading it," I say.
"What?"
"You start it and then you stop to see how it's going. Every time. You get about three seconds in and then you step outside to have a look at yourself."
She stares at me.
"That's incredibly useful," she says. "Thank you."
"You're welcome."
She glares. There's a small vicious pleasure in that which I do not examine.
"Right," she says. "So what do I do about it?"
Good. That's the thing about her. She'll be furious with you for ninety seconds and then ask the correct question.
"Tell me what it feels like."
"What what feels like?"
"The shift. Not the wolf. The part before the wolf." I fold my arms. "The very first thing you notice."
She thinks about it, and it takes her a moment, and I watch her turn her attention inward.
"Heat," she says. "Under the skin. Like a door opening on a hot room. And—" she puts her hand up behind her own neck "—here. It goes tight. Right at the base of the skull. That's always first. Then the world gets closer."
"Where does the heat start?"
"What?"
"Not where you feel it. Where it begins."
She opens her mouth. Closes it.
Then puts her palm flat against her sternum.
"There," she says, and looks slightly surprised at herself.
"Then that's the exercise," I say. "Forget the wolf. Forget the finish. Find that , and then choose it."
She looks down at her own hand.
"That's actually helpful."
"Yes."
"Don't be smug, it doesn't suit you."
It does, but I let her have it.
I shift for her, because describing a thing you can demonstrate is a waste of both our time.
Wolf, and back, twice — a second each way, no windup, no preparation. There's nothing impressive in it. I've been doing it since I was nine and my father made me do it four hundred times in a courtyard until it stopped being an event.
Jessica watches with an expression I would describe as personally offended.
"Show-off," she says.
"Yes."
"That's not even — you didn't do anything. You just changed. Like a channel."
"The speed isn't the point." I roll my shoulders. "I could take a minute over it if I wanted. Slower isn't worse. The point is that I know exactly where it starts, so I can put my hand on it whenever I want it."
"And you learned that by—"
"Repetition. Four hundred times in a courtyard."
"Four hundred."
"Approximately."
"That's horrifying."
"That's my father," I say.
She goes quiet at that in a way I wasn't intending, and I move us on.
"Again. Hand where you put it."
She tries twice more with her palm against her sternum and gets nowhere, and the second time I can see she's lost the thread entirely — she's back to bracing, back to grading, back to standing in a field being asked to perform.
"Stop."
"I've nearly—"
"You haven't. Turn around."
"Why?"
"Because you're watching my face for approval and it's making it worse."
She turns around, which surprises me, and stands facing out toward the trees.
"Close your eyes if it helps."
"It doesn't."
"Then don't." I step up behind her. "I'm going to put my hand on your back. Tell me if you don't want that."
There's a small pause.
"It's fine," she says.
I put my hand flat between her shoulder blades.
And the bond comes up like something struck.
It's not gentle. It never has been. It runs up my arm and lands somewhere under my sternum, hot and specific, and every muscle in my body wants her and I have thirteen months of practice ignoring it.
She's very warm through the jacket. I can feel her breathing under my palm. Her hair's coming loose at the nape of her neck and there is a great deal about the back of her neck that I am not going to think about while I am standing here as her instructor.
I have never once let this show. Not a flicker.
I have sat across a dining hall from this woman for a year and given nothing away, and the discipline it takes is not something I've ever described to anyone, and the reason it works is that Jessica Miller has never had the first idea what she does to me.
She goes rigid.
Her head turns. Not far. Just enough that I can see the edge of her eye.
And she knows.
That's what's on her face. Not confusion. Not what was that. Recognition — clean and immediate.
She's learned it from somewhere in the last few weeks. She didn't have it in September.
There it is.
Neither of us says anything.
I keep my hand exactly where it is, and my voice exactly where it is, and I say, "Under my hand. That's your back. Now find the front."
Jessica faces the trees again.
"Right," she says, and her voice is nearly normal. "Yes. Fine."
I take my hand away. Not because I want to.
Torres would not have taken his hand away.