by Maria Vale
The echelon’s members look at one another, not sure what the Deemer wants.
“To keep order?” one says.
“Partly, but that is only a part that serves the larger purpose.” No one says anything. “It’s not a trick question. The Alpha just said. She says it at the start of every Iron Moon Table.”
Sarah, the Epsilon, scratches her cheek, lifting three fingers in a diffident raising of the hand. “To protect?”
“Exactly. To protect. Everything about our law is constructed to protect the Pack. And protection is precisely what we are being offered. We have managed to survive so far, but each year brings new threats. More hunters, more threats to the land itself. The world is changing and what… Julian? Was that his name? Tiberius, you know.”
“Lucian,” Tiberius says, his obsidian eyes unyielding. He understands, as I do, that Victor is trying to tie him to the other Shifters. “His name is Lucian.”
“Lucian. So what Lucian said is true. There is no longer room for the wild, and if there is no room for the wild, there is no room for wolves. And if there is no room for wolves, there is no room for us.” Victor waves his hand, dismissing the sudden rumble in the room. “We have to be practical. We have Shifters at our front door, humans at our back.
“Now”—he picks up one of the pups and rubs his cheek against it—“supposing we no longer had to live in fear of the gun or the trap? To live in fear is to be enslaved. What we are being offered, then, is nothing less than freedom. If August Leveraux can do what he promises, then this pup”—he holds up Nils Johnsson, making every muscle in Evie’s body quiver with fury—“will no longer know fear. He will be able to do anything, go anywhere, not worrying that the hour is coming when he will turn into a nuisance species that can be killed with impunity.”
I try to read the faces of wolves to see who is swayed and who is not. Too many are: younger echelons because of an ingrained habit of deference, and even a few of the older Offlanders who have become accustomed to life among the westends and find the monthly return to Homelands an unwelcome complication.
I’ve only wanted to see the Pack safe, to know that whatever else, the thing that happened to Vrangelya will never happen to the Great North. But I wanted to see the Pack safe. The idea that we can only be saved from humans by becoming humans tears at my soul.
When the Deemer sets Nils down, the pup runs awkwardly over to Evie, who is both his mother and his Alpha. Her nose is flared, and the scent rolling off her skin is like charred resin.
“Ælfrida thought that we could use the laws of humans to protect us, but law is not enough to control humans. We need power. And that is something the Shifters have. Now, before…”
Adrian comes in out of breath. He must have run far, I suspect to Silver and Tiberius’s cabin deep in the woods. He hands Silver a small canvas bag. A shoe bag perhaps. Silver seems to weigh the contents in her hand.
“May I continue?” Victor asks tightly.
Silver’s lips curl back from her sharp canines, and she growls at the Deemer. I have little tolerance for humans, but Silver simply doesn’t understand them. She never did manage to pass Introduction to Human Behaviors and has no tolerance for those little humanisms like facetiousness.
Victor shakes his head. “Where was I?”
“Shifters have power,” Tara says in a low, cold rumble.
“Yes, Shifters have power. Before, I might not have trusted them, but now I realize that while they can give us freedom, we can give them something they need as desperately: a future.”
Silver stands, setting the bag on the table next to her plate, her hand on the hilt of her seax.
“What do you want?”
“I just want to be clear,” Silver says, “that when you say ‘we,’ you don’t mean yourself. The future that we are promising is in our females’ bodies.”
“There are many things they want—”
“No, there aren’t. There is only one thing. Tiberius was the last Shifter birth. They want us to help them breed. Whether we like it or not.” Silver makes way for Henry so he can continue distributing the light and dark river stones to the 14th’s table. “I believe at the end, Lucian said that August would ‘prefer’ that this be a mutually acceptable agreement. To me, that does not sound like I have the right to say no.”
“You already have a mate who, conveniently enough, is a Shifter.”
“And you are trying to change the subject, so let me rephrase: to me, that does not sound like a female has the right to say no.”
Whatever is in the bag clinks slightly in her hand.
“What is the word, Deemer, for when a human mounts a human who is not receptive?”
In the silence, a purse snaps open and shut. Every head turns to Leonora, the only wolf who carries a purse on Homelands. She’s a tall female, made even taller by the spiky heels she wears so that wolves will understand the peculiar ways in which humans hobble their own.
Her pup-chewed clutch is under one arm, but in her other hand she holds the hilt of her seax.
“Rape, Quicksilver,” she says, daring the Deemer to deny her expertise in the world of humans. “The word you are looking for is ‘rape.’”
“Thank you, Leonora,” Silver says, turning back to Victor. “So what you propose is to buy our security with the bodies of our females. That is not who we are.
“You said, Deemer, that you did not speak immediately because for three days you had no words. That is who we are. You said we would not be tied to the land, but that, too, is who we are. You said we would not be forced to gather every month. And that is who we are.
“Maybe,” she says, “what you say is true. Maybe the Great North would be safe. But we would no longer be the Great North. Because the land, the Pack, and our own wild is all of who we are.
“Yes, the Iron Moon is a dangerous time, but it is a sacred time and, like all things worth having, involves risk. Without it, we will be like Shifters. We will live on the fringes of the human world, separate and alone. The question is not do we want to be safe. The question is do we want to be us.”
Chapter 37
Quicksilver stops and pats the bench next to her mate. “Adrian? You should eat something. Corn bread? Apple sauce?” She starts piling the plate with food.
“What—” Victor starts to say, but one look at Evie’s face stops him.
Like all juveniles, Adrian’s hunger is more imperative than his table manners. As soon as Silver puts the loaded plate in front of him, he bends over and starts shoveling food into his mouth as quickly as hand or spoon will put it there. He notices nothing else. He doesn’t notice when she upends the little canvas bag. He doesn’t notice when she shakes the silver thing out. He growls slightly when she wraps it around his neck. Only when she snaps it tight does he sit up and look around. He tries to bend over, but even from where I’m standing, I can see the skin at his neck yield to the metal spikes of the prong collar. If he sits utterly still and straight, the spikes don’t dig farther in, just touch the surface of his skin.
He starts to scratch frantically at the thing, so frantically that Silver can’t get it off until Tiberius holds Adrian’s hands in one enormous fist. Silver unlocks and holds the prong collar behind her. Then she sniffs the juvenile’s neck, checking for blood.
Evie taps the table. “Adrian, come,” she says in a gentle voice. The juvenile runs to his Alpha. She holds him still and marks him slowly, letting him stay close, his face next to hers, until his breathing finally calms. She whispers something to him, and within moments, his clothes are on the floor and he is too, twisting at his waist to trigger his change.
“This”—Silver holds up a chrome chain with spikes around the inner face—“is how August Leveraux trained his son. This was what he used to drag him back to Homelands in the winter.” She places it around her neck and stiffens. “I’ve tried it before. So
that I could know what the wolf I love lived through every moon. You should try it,” she says, taking it from around her neck and holding it toward Victor. “See what it feels like.”
Victor refuses to look at the spiked thing and keeps his eyes focused on Silver. “This is nothing but theater.”
“I am a wolf, and wolves do not have use for theater.” Silver’s voice drops to a menace. “Theater is fake. This is real. This is what they did to Tiberius for four years, and he was only half Pack.”
“There are humans just to the north of us.” Victor’s voice rises up the register, sounding shrill in my ears. “What do you propose we do about them? Arm ourselves? Oh, wait, we can’t. Or at least not always, because we must be wolves.”
“Yes, we are wolves, but at least we are wolves. What August Leveraux is proposing, what you are proposing, will kill our wild. And then what are we?”
“Alive. We are alive, Theta mate.” Victor draws out her place in the hierarchy to emphasize her weakness and lack of rank.
“I’ll tell you what we are. We are wolves broken to the will of others. And wolves broken to the will of others are dogs.”
There is a momentary silence as the d-word hangs in the air, and then all hell breaks loose. It was a cheap shot, maybe, one guaranteed to rile up the Pack.
Too many wolves get to their feet, which usually means the fighting is about to start. Evie bangs the pommel of her seax against the table and shouts for the Alphas to control their echelons.
After a second thump, the noise fades. After a third, it all but disappears. “Marco?” Evie says. “The Thing.”
One noise continues, a tremulous sound in the corner, where Henry and Victor stand with Arthur, who is arguing in a desperate voice.
Silver bumps into me as I stride toward my nidling.
“It’s not right!” Arthur whispers when I get close enough to hear.
“Arthur?”
“I am taking care of this.” Victor starts to angle his back to me. He stops only when he slams into the hard corner of my elbow. Holding his arm, he looks first to me, then to Evie, to see if she saw. Saw that someone hit her Deemer.
“I will not see your back, Victor.”
The runt twists her mouth to the side and scratches at her nose.
“I have no stones, Alpha.” Arthur shows me his empty hands. “I need stones to be able to—”
“The nidling has no say in this,” Victor snaps.
“Since when?” asks Silver.
“The Thing is only for adult members of the Pack. A Pack is hierarchy, and he has no position within it. A nidling is not a place; it is the lack of a place. It—”
“I was there,” Silver interrupts, “this fall when the Pack was deciding whether to allow Tiberius in. Allow me back. You didn’t object then.”
It’s true. But something has changed. It’s not the law; it’s Arthur. He stands straighter now, his hands fisted by his sides. He has developed a backbone, and during the Iron Moon, he turned it on Victor.
I don’t know how long Evie has been standing behind me.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you smile before, Shielder.”
“No, Alpha.”
“It’s an odd time for it.”
“Yes, Alpha.”
“I disagree with you, Deemer, but I can’t afford to have this decision side-tracked by Arthur’s status. I need to know where the Pack stands before August Leveraux calls.”
Arthur’s jaw tightens, his lips curl back slightly, and I can smell the anger on him as he glares at Victor. Then he turns on his heels and strides toward the kitchen where the pups and juveniles are already gathered, waiting until the voting is over.
I can’t help but feel as he strides away that the Deemer has misjudged seriously.
Marco bends his legs and hefts the heavy box, beginning the slow procession through the ranks of wolves. The first stones dropped ring hollow on the wood base, though soon enough the sound changes to a muted click. A few—they are all supporting Victor—try to display their vote, but that is not the way things are done, and Tara, who is following the proceedings wild, bites the shins of the first two who do. It is only temporarily debilitating but quite painful, and everyone else chooses to be discreet.
Some wolves I know will vote with Silver: Elijah, Tara, Evie, Eudemos, Tristan.
Leonora.
But the weaker wolves, those who are afraid, clearly have chosen safety. Especially the males. After all, they won’t have to deal with either the pronged collar or the lying-in. The consequences belong to someone else. The benefits belong to them.
Some of these look toward Victor, their hands still in the Thing, as though they are hoping for approval. Oddly, I can’t tell about Lorcan. He looks at no one and nothing but his fisted hands until the moment the Thing is in front of him, and then he just stares out the window.
But the strongest wolves all wear the same grim expression of fierce determination in the face of almost certain doom.
This is who we are. We are wolves, and wolves fight to the death.
“Alpha?”
“Hmm?”
“Your stone?” The rest of the Pack looks to where I stand as always. In the back. Where the sight lines are good. “The Pack has voted. You are the last.”
I look at the two stones in my hand. The white one for Victor and the proposal that we can break free of this cycle of weakness and we will have safety.
The black one for Silver, for the proposal that our wild is sacred and makes us what we are.
As soon as I drop my stone, Marco returns to the head table, which has been completely cleared. Victor and Silver, the for-speaker and against-speaker, stand on either side. By tradition, they are naked. I suppose at some point a wolf must have tried to drop something into a pocket or secrete something into a sleeve, so this was the simplest expedient for excluding foul play. It hardly matters. Every Alpha gathers around the table, watching as each stone is extracted. At first, it seems that Victor has carried the decision, but as the counting continues, his expression rises and falls with the piles of stones.
At the very end, he seems to have lost by one stone. He demands a recount, which is done, but every wolf knows, because every wolf has been watching carefully.
We will stay as we are. Strong and vulnerable and together and wild.
When Henry comes around with the empty bag to collect the unused stones, most wolves push their hands in so that no one will see the stone they didn’t cast and know the one they did.
I don’t care who sees the pale stone that would have won the thing for Victor. If I’m not strong enough to face my Pack, I am certainly not strong enough to face what is to come.
Chapter 38
“You? You voted against the Deemer?” Lorcan says as Henry pulls the cloth bag tight. “I was sure you would vote for peace.”
“I didn’t vote for ‘peace’ because Silver is right. The sacrifices needed for that peace would be borne by our pups and by the suffering of our females. Sacrifice is the duty of an Alpha, and no real Alpha could possibly support something that requires more sacrifice from others than from themselves.”
“You don’t trust Victor,” he says, “because you weren’t born here. You don’t know him like I do. The Deemer only wants what is best for the Pack. That’s all he has at heart. That’s all he’s ever—”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Seen what?”
“His heart. You’ve seen Victor’s heart.”
“Shielder,” he says in a vaguely irritated tone. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“Then you don’t know. Any more than you know my heart. I know I wasn’t born here, but I would pit my love for this place and this Pack against anyone’s.”
“I know,” Lorcan says, the little angry fire already dying in his eyes. He pu
shes his hair back into the sprout at the back of his head and wraps the rubber band around it. “You’ve been gone. The 12th was already nervous and combative before all this. Now things are just going to get worse. They need you back here, and they need to see us united.” He scratches his forehead. “I think we should just go ahead and do it.”
“What?” Please no, please no, please—
“It’ll calm the 12th,” he says, sighing again, “if we are mated.”
My blood beats against my ears, camouflaging all other noise. I can’t hear what is said to Arthur; I just see him cringe. I don’t hear Tiberius’s angry voice, just see him catch the falling Silver and turn on Poul, his canines out and glistening. I can’t hear Evie, just see her holding two wolves apart. I can’t hear Victor, just see him furtively whisper to Esme.
It’s all so familiar. A different time, a different place, but the outcome will be the same.
The ground loses its solidity and undulates beneath my feet. I float from one member of my echelon to the other, pointing to the table where we had been sitting. I don’t say anything, but maybe there is enough in my eyes to encourage them to obey. At first one by one, then in a stampeding herd.
I circle the table. “There will be no whispering. If you have the courage of your convictions, you will speak to all of us. If you don’t, you will say nothing.”
Lorcan sits back down, looking smugly at other Alphas who are having trouble keeping the peace. Between Evie’s discipline and Lorcan’s smugness, the other Alphas get their echelons settled. We eat in silence.
“I left some things in Westdæl,” I tell Lorcan at the end. “When I get back…then we can tell the Alpha and the 12th. Find a date. After blackfly season.”
“When you get back then.” He looks distracted for a moment, then he says it. “Varya,” he says.
Every nerve in my body, every muscle, every sinew, every beat of my heart screams out NO!
I am not yours.
You are not mine.
But nobody hears the deafening “NO” except me.