by Maria Vale
Sigeburg watches me unafraid. In this offspring of Silver and Tiberius, of a runt and a Shifter, I see the fierce protectiveness of a real Alpha.
Chapter 27
The pups of the Great North grow up together. Once they are no longer nurslings, they move into the children’s quarters of the Great Hall. The Grans, the elders, live in the Great Hall, too, because it is warmer there and the pups need constant guidance in their responsibilities and what to do and not to do with those pin-sharp teeth and claws.
Then they graduate together into the Juvenile quarters. They had already been there for a year when I first moved in. They did not trust me, and I don’t blame them. I was strange and hard. I spoke the Old Tongue with an accent and English, the language of their every day, not at all.
I came right when all of them were wrestling with the Year of First Shoes. They had spent their early lives running wild in a protected corner that had nothing to do with the real world. They were fantasists, coddled and protected by the full strength of the Great North, the strongest remaining Pack. They could not understand why any of that had to change. Why they had to put on skin. Why they had to put away everything they held most precious.
When I arrived, I was still a child. A child with too much experience. I knew how precarious their existence really was. But I didn’t try to tell them. I couldn’t. I didn’t want the responsibility or the failure.
Then something happened, and the 12th became my responsibility.
The Great Hall is back to normal again. The 6th and the 10th are working on dinner. With the whole Pack here, Evie keeps the food flowing so that the territory isn’t picked clean of prey by hungry wolves.
The 12th is scattered among the tables in pairs and small groups. I have never been away from my echelon for any length of time, and it shows. A number of other wolves have injuries, but nearly half the 12th’s do. Simon has a broken nose, and Willa has a mark on her cheek the shape of a Monopoly hotel. Those two should never be allowed to play unsupervised.
Evie is discussing something with Tara but spares me a tight-lipped look that needs little interpreting before returning to her Beta.
When I hit the wooden table in front of Tonia, our Gamma, with the heavy handle of a bread knife, the Great North goes silent.
“Gamma.” My voice is quiet, but the Pack listens, as I mean for them to. I mean for them all to understand that there are consequences. Some wolves look toward Evie, but with nothing but the slight lowering of her chin toward me, she lets them know that I speak with her approval.
Tonia looks up nervously, her mouth full of spinach dumpling.
“What does westend mean?”
Tonia chews and frowns and looks askance at Lorcan.
An Alpha cannot let wolves doubt for a moment who is in charge. I leap on the table, heedless of food and plates, crouching with her face in my hand. A daub of green spit dribbles from the corner of her mouth. She freezes, her eyes lowered, not daring to look anywhere.
“What, Gamma, does westend mean?”
“Hoom’n,” she chokes out, trying to swallow. She dabs her mouth with the back of her hand. “Human.”
“No. What does it mean?”
“Waster.” Her voice is smaller now. “Destroyer.”
“And what are you?”
“Pack,” she says, her voice almost inaudible, and as sharp as their hearing is, her packmates have to lean in closer. “Wolf.”
“And wolves”—I wipe the spinach spittle from my hand with a napkin—“do not waste. We finish what we start.”
“Finish…?” She looks again to Lorcan for help, but he concentrates instead on pushing the bits of tempeh and green pepper in the coconut curry sauce onto his fork with a piece of bread.
“Some days ago, a prime moose was killed by a wolf. By you and only the choicest parts were eaten. Now, you will finish what you started.”
“But it was… It’s…” Tonia’s face begins to turn the color of yellow birch. Then she grabs her stomach and races for the bathroom.
“When you’re done, Gamma, I will take you to Norþdæl.”
I grab a hazelnut rye roll and head out. Behind me, Victor calls to Lorcan.
Before all but the oldest of these wolves were born, an enormous tree fell in some enormous storm. Rather than moving it, the Pack lopped off the branches for firewood and then carved deep into the heart of it, creating a bench of sorts. It hadn’t been doused with accelerant like the Great Hall, so while embers landed here, they smoldered briefly, then died out, leaving only black spots that join with the green moss and dark blood left by wolves who lean on it for a moment after losing a challenge. Or winning.
Sitting on the back of the log, I eat my rye and hazelnut. When they see me, Pack both in skin and wild avert their eyes and run a little faster. I look toward Westdæl, my fingers feeling the scrapes left by generations of pups and gouges left by adults.
The door to the Great Hall shuts behind Victor.
“Is she ready?”
“Alpha,” he says, “while I agree that Tonia Luisasdottir must be punished, I would like to suggest something not quite so—”
“She finishes what she started.”
“She would have called the Pack, if she’d been allowed to hunt prey that is our right on our land.”
The law is clear, but he is subtly shifting the blame to Evie. To John. Silver is right. He is wrohtgeorn. Strife-eager.
I brush the crumbs away from the corner of my mouth.
“She disobeyed the Alpha, which is bad. She killed a prime female who had not been trained to fear us, which is worse. She wasted that death, which, Deemer, is against the law. She. Finishes,” I say slowly and deliberately, “What. She. Started.”
Then I hold up my hand, gathering the moon between my fingers, pretending to squeeze it and make it smaller.
“Alpha?”
Because when the moon reaches its full size, we will all lie on the ground utterly helpless, and I am afraid of what will come between the thighs of our mountains. But it’s not only that.
Varya Wearg, Varya the Indurate, is afraid, not only of who might come, but of who must leave.
The door slams again, and Victor whips away as another heavy tread thunks down the stairs. He hisses something to Lorcan. Something about knowing my “responsibilities.”
I know my responsibilities. They have always been terrifyingly, painfully clear to me. Never more so than now when I want those responsibilities less than ever.
Lorcan whispers something back. I can’t hear the words, but I can hear the tone. It is nervous but meant to be reassuring.
Then my Alpha takes a seat next to me on the back of the bench and breathes in deeply.
I lower my fingers and release the moon, letting my hands fall to my lap. “I need to get back to the perimeter. Will she be ready soon?”
I see his nod from the corner of my eye. He stares off to Endeberg, the Final Mountain, the easternmost mountain of the High Pines.
“Do you remember our Wild Hunt?” he asks.
“Of course.” I bend down to my boots, loosening the laces.
The Wild Hunt. That’s what the Great North calls an echelon’s first unaccompanied hunt. Traditionally held in February, it’s an important test of the juveniles’ organization and ability to work together to find and take down larger prey. During the Wild Hunt, none of the adult wolves will give juveniles a place at their kill, making hunger as well as pride a powerful motivator.
“Nils called me into his office after the moon,” Lorcan says, watching me pick at a knot in my bootlace. “D’you know what he said?” As it is a rhetorical question, I say nothing. “He said, ‘That could have gone better.’”
It could have. That Wild Hunt was wild only in the sense that it was complete pandemonium. Rather than working together, the 12th’s wolves com
peted with one another to be the first to find prey. Or to find the biggest prey. Or to find the most dangerous prey.
All they succeeded in doing was scaring away every warm-blooded thing on Endeberg. It had been reserved, as it always is, for the Wild Hunt, so the juveniles wouldn’t have to compete with more seasoned hunters.
An outsider who’d had enough of responsibility, I had settled quite near the bottom of the hierarchy. I caught a hare to feed my own hunger and was no help whatsoever.
The 12th was dispersed far and wide when it came, the repeated bark followed by the long, sharp howl. A coyote was hunting something too big to take down by itself and calling for its pack.
I knew what that meant, as did every juvenile on the Wild Hunt. Having scared off everything on Endeberg, we were the only prey left.
Lorcan, as the presumptive Alpha, raced around trying to gather more wolves, reasoning that an adult coyote was an almost impossible match for a juvenile wolf, and more coyotes would be answering the call. When more coyotes responded, Lorcan decided to wait until he had the whole echelon.
And, of course, the adults had left this mountain to the juveniles.
Alone.
I don’t remember much, except for the tearing of undergrowth that had been frozen for months and would no longer bend beneath my weight, the slickness of the south face that had once been coated with snow but had melted and refrozen to ice.
I remember the taste of the first coyote as his hind leg shattered in my jaws. Another coyote went down, his eye socket ravaged, and finally, I came to the Alpha coyote, standing a few feet from her prey, a juvenile wolf bleeding from a compound fracture.
Maybe the Alpha was expecting the usual posturing of predator meeting predator, but I wasn’t of the Great North. I was Vrangelya, and we had never had much use for posturing.
Suddenly, I was no longer Varya, the withdrawn and sullen interloper with the strange accent that the 12th knew.
I became again the wolf I had always been, and I had the Alpha’s throat in my jaws before she had finished breathing in my scent.
The rest of the coyotes dispersed, and as coyote blood froze on my muzzle, I threw back my head and howled my real self.
Varya Wearg. Varya the Bloodthirsty. Varya the Outlaw.
And Tonia, with her broken leg, bent low into the snow beside me until the rest of the 12th arrived. Nils knew the whole Great North was wary of me and wouldn’t have forced me on anybody. But it must have been around this time—the time when Nils said “that could’ve gone better”—that Lorcan asked our Alpha to make me his shielder.
“We make a good pair, you know. We always have. Our young will be fearsome.”
I pretend that I don’t understand what he’s saying and pray that Tonia will come soon. When she doesn’t, I struggle to take off the flannel shirt he lent me. Lorcan pulls at the sleeves, careful, as always, not to look at my ravaged breast and torso. If he didn’t need to fasten his teeth to my shoulder, he’d probably ask me to keep it on.
I fold the shirt in a neat rectangle, and then the pants, and bend forward, my cheek to the rough back of the bench. In the depths of the forest is a gap where an oak once stood. A birch stand has taken root there. Tall, pale beacons in the dark, wet wood.
Yours.
Mine.
I twist my hips, pulling away from Lorcan’s thrusts.
“Shielder?” he asks.
I don’t answer, beyond pointing to the tiny pile of my clothes. “You’ll take care of those?” I ignore both him and the unwelcome erection that will have to find a truly receptive female, not just one who bends over because it’s her fucking duty.
The door to the Great Hall opens, and Lorcan hurriedly finishes buttoning up his jeans. Tonia moves slowly down the stairs.
“You don’t think she’ll die, do you?” He tucks the clothes under his arm and hooks his fingers through the laces of the boots. “I mean, if she eats that and dies, what was the point of saving her at the Wild Hunt?”
“She won’t die.”
“How can you know that?”
I shrug. “Because I never did.”
Then I sink deep into my hips and wait for the change that will block it all out.
Chapter 28
Despite what she thinks and Lorcan thinks, I don’t want Tonia to die. So I keep watch over her, making sure she isn’t eaten by a coyote during the change.
It doesn’t take long to find the moose. First, the smell draws me, then the rustle of tiny animals.
Tonia lowers herself, her tail between her legs, her ears pulled down, her head scraping the ground before me, until one eye looks up, begging for understanding.
She is slow, and I am impatient. She tries to pick through the insects, but that just makes the whole process longer, and the insects are hardly the worst part. Snarling, I show my teeth and she eats faster, holding her breath. She isn’t starving, so she gags with every swallowed mouthful and vomits a fair amount back up.
It feels like forever before the rotted carcass is gone and Tonia staggers off gagging and vomiting. Still, the Great North will smell the rot on her muzzle and will think twice before wasting another life.
Past the High Pines and across the rough, sloped terrain of the Gin, I go through hardwoods that haven’t woken yet, and the canopy is an open lacework for the moon on leaf-flecked snow until I reach the rock pond where I’d first learned what an endling was. I lie down on the rock still warm from the sun.
I feel sullied. My obligatory couplings usually leave me impatient and irritable, but not like this. I push back into my hips, and when the change comes, I slide into the icy water, feeling the play of the moon’s gravity against my naked spine until my lungs are near bursting. I scrub hard at my teeth, my mouth, my hair, and hardest of all between my thighs and at the join of my neck. I break through the black surface and suck long, deep breaths before diving under again.
When I come up for breath, I hook my arm over the ledge and pull myself above the surface, water draining into my eyes.
“Do you love him?”
I push my hair back with my wrist.
“Love who?”
Above me on the overhang of schist that glints in the moonlight, Eyulf sits naked save for a few last windblown hairs of his undercoat.
“The one who did that.” He beats one finger at the join of his neck and shoulder, mirroring where the layered marks of Lorcan’s teeth will always be, no matter how hard I scrub.
“No.”
Bracing one hand against the rock, he leans forward, his hand wrapping tight around my wrist, and helps me clamber out. The cold water puddles around me, and he moves away.
“It is very hard for us to get pregnant.” I twist my hair tight, squeezing water into a stream from the black rope. “So strong wolves try to breed stronger wolves. It’s meaningless. A duty; nothing else.”
Even as I say it, I feel how weak it all is. I have never felt anything for Lorcan except vague exasperation, and yet I let him touch me because it is my responsibility. I let him inside my body because it is my duty.
His white hair falls in a heavy wave over the tough sinew of his shoulders. “It’s not meaningless to me,” he says.
I look out of the corner of my eye at Eyulf. Yours, he said. Mine. And I feel it. I feel that belonging like a thread, thin as a single strand of his white hair, but crazy strong, pulling at me. Insistent.
“I made him stop. I’ve always let him before, but this time, I made him stop.”
Eyulf turns his head now, his cheek resting on his knee, looking at me.
“Why?”
There are a lot of disjointed images that shouldn’t be in my mind but are. The delicate yellow of the Arctic poppy, the awkward boy with the gunshot wound, my scars magically transformed on a page into something fiercely beautiful. His frightened eyes in his conto
rting body, and my hand running like water across his skin. The girl in The Last Place on Earth with her mouth on him.
I can feel something unraveling inside me.
“Because I didn’t want him. I never have. But it didn’t matter before, and suddenly it did. The not wanting,”
He picks up something, a blade of grass, a strand of hair, I don’t know. He wraps it around his finger.
“You know what they call me? When they think I can’t hear?”
He shakes his head, unwrapping and wrapping the strand on his finger as though it was the most engrossing thing in the world.
“Varya the Indurate.” My hand finds the bone that knits up my ribs and covers my heart. “They say I am hard. Empty.” I press deeper into my sternum. “But I feel like there are cracks in me. I don’t want them, but they’re here. Things are leaking out. I am leaking out.”
The wind kicks up, and my skin is buffeted with damp hair and the stone-and-electric smell of cold, and my mind is filled with the whipping of pale hair and the dark slashes above those haunted, beautiful eyes.
He reaches for me, moving his hand to my face, his long fingers caressing my cheek all the way to the crook of my neck in slow, liquid shocks. Shivers run the entire length of my Arctic body, and he asks if I’m cold.
“Never,” I say. “I am never cold.”
“No,” he says, moving closer, his arm touching my arm, his knee leaning against mine. “I don’t think you could ever be.”
His tongue darts out, making his lips glimmer in the moonlight.
I’ve never known what expression Lorcan wore during our obligatory matings. The only thing I’m very sure of is it has never been this. The black of Eyulf’s eyes, deep and wide, and in the thin circles of blue and green.
I touch my own lips. They’ve always been cool, even against my fingers. He takes my hand away and, holding my fingers tight in his hand, leans over and doesn’t quite touch his lips to mine. His mouth is open just enough to draw the damp of mingled breath.