The Ancient

My father said no before I finished the sentence.

“Absolutely not.”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

“You were going to ask me to hand over Ironspire so you could compete in the Apex Trial,” he said. “The answer is no.”

“I was going to ask if you wanted more coffee,” I said.

He looked at me.

I looked back.

“The answer is still no,” he said.

I picked up my coffee and looked out the window at the forest and said nothing.

The title had been Nighthollow’s for sixty years.

His grandfather. His father. Him. Three generations, one title, sixty years of the black insignia meaning something specific that every clan in the world recognized when they saw it.

And now twenty years had passed and it was time again.

“You’ve said the position of Apex is giving you trouble,” I said. “Which means you’re not planning to compete. Which means we won’t be represented.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“The east is a mess. You’ve been trying to deal with it for two years and every time you get close something else comes up because that’s what being Apex means. You’re pulled in seventeen directions at once and the eastern clans know it and they’re using it.”

He said nothing.

“Three generations,” I said. “If Nighthollow isn’t on that list—”

“Nighthollow doesn’t necessarily need to be on that list.”

“Why not?”

He looked at his coffee.

I continued.

“We need to be represented. And I know how. Me.”

“No.”

“Why.”

“Because you’re nineteen and—”

“You were younger when you fought.”

“Those were different times and—” he stopped.

I saw it. He’d been about to say something else. Something about me being a woman, probably. I was my parents’ only child but I was not exactly ordinary, and he knew it, and we both knew he knew it.

“The answer is still no,” he said instead.

I looked at him.

He looked at the forest.

“Ironspire,” I said quietly.

“Don’t.”

“You’re its Alpha. You’ve always been its Alpha. Give it to me and I can compete. I’m Nighthollow by blood and Ironspire by rank and the title stays in the family either way.”

“Lyra.”

“I’m not asking you to not be scared,” I said. “I’m asking you to let me go anyway.”

My father’s study was very quiet.

He didn’t answer for a long time.

When he did, his voice was different. Quieter.

“Two months of training,” he said. “Every day. With me. Then we talk again.”

“That’s not a yes.”

“It’s not a no either,” he said. “It’s two months. Take it or leave it.”

I took it.

My mother was in the east wing when I found her.

She looked up from her book when I came in, looked at my face, and put it down.

“He said maybe,” she said.

“He said two months.”

“That’s his yes,” she said. “He just needs time to get there.”

I sat down across from her and looked at her the way I sometimes did when I needed to remember that she had done something like this once — walked into something enormous with nothing but herself, and come out the other side.

She was not a tall woman but she filled a room. Green eyes, blonde hair, the particular stillness of someone who had learned a long time ago that stillness was its own kind of strength.

I looked like her. Everyone said so.

Same face, same green eyes, though mine ran more turquoise in certain lights. The same bone structure, the same way of holding myself that I’d inherited without trying to.

The hair was different. Mine was black, which my father found endlessly amusing and my mother said simply: sometimes things come out different than you expect.

“You’re afraid he’ll change his mind and decide to compete himself,” I said.

She looked at me.

“I told your father,” she said, “that if he competes and dies, I will find him and kill him with my own hands.”

I laughed.

She didn’t entirely.

“But I’m just as afraid for you,” she said. “You’re strong. But the strongest wolves in the world will be at that tournament. It won’t be easy.” She paused. “I believe in you anyway.”

I looked at her for a moment.

“Train hard,” she said. “And when he says yes — and he will — don’t waste it.”

The two months that followed were the hardest of my life.

My father trained me without mercy and without apology, on the understanding that anything less was an insult to both of us.

Before dawn every morning in the forest clearing. Human form first — footwork, positioning, the mechanics of a fight before the wolf got involved. He was faster than he looked and stronger than anyone who hadn’t seen him fight would have guessed, and he didn’t slow down for me.

The first week I came home bruised every day.

The second week less.

By the end of the first month I was holding my own in human form and he’d started pushing me into situations designed to make me shift — stress, surprise, the pressure of a fight going badly — and then making me pull back from it. Hold it. Stay human when every instinct said otherwise.

“Control,” he said, on a morning in the sixth week. “Your wolf is strong. But if she runs every fight you’re predictable.”

“She’s faster than me.”

“She’s faster than everyone. That’s the problem. If you only win in wolf form every opponent will wait for the shift and plan around it.”

“Again,” he said.

We went again.

By the end of the second month something had changed. Not in my wolf — she was what she’d always been. But in me. In the space between us. A fluency I hadn’t had before, the ability to move with her or without her or somewhere between, to choose rather than react.

On the last morning he stopped at the edge of the clearing and looked at me.

“Ironspire is yours,” he said. “Temporarily.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “Win.”

I looked at the forest. At the clearing where I’d been running since I was twelve. At my father standing at the edge of it with his hands in his pockets and his jaw tight and everything about him trying very hard not to show what it cost him to say that.

“I will,” I said.

He nodded once and walked back toward the house.

I stayed in the clearing for a moment longer.

I looked at the forest.

My wolf didn’t wait for him to disappear through the door.

Now, she said. Let’s run.

I left my clothes at the edge of the clearing and shifted.

She came out grey — not the dark grey of storm clouds or the pale grey of ash, but something in between, a colour that caught the light differently depending on the angle. The white star on her forehead was bright in the morning light, the same star my mother carried in black and my father in white, sitting on her forehead like something inherited from both of them and belonging entirely to neither.

She was not a small wolf.

My father’s wolf was the largest I’d ever seen — black and enormous, the kind of size that made other wolves recalculate their options before deciding anything. Mine was close. Not quite his size but close enough that when we ran together people stopped to look, and when I shifted alone in front of wolves who didn’t know me there was always a moment of recalibration in their eyes.

She was also fast. Faster than she had any right to be for her size, faster than any wolf I’d trained with. Fast in a way that my father had looked at for a long time before saying simply: don’t let them see that until you need to.

I hadn’t. Not fully. Not yet.

She moved through the forest now with everything she had, low and fluid between the trees, and I ran with her and let the morning close around us and didn’t think about Apex Trials or Ironspire or any of it.

Just this. Just the forest and the cold air and the grey wolf moving through it like she owned every inch.

She wanted to hunt. I felt it — the particular focus that came over her when she caught a scent worth following, low and sharp and insistent. I let her track it for a while, through the trees and down toward the river, just far enough to feel the want of it without acting on it.

Then I turned her back.

She protested, briefly.

I ignored her, which she was used to.

I shifted back at the edge of the clearing, dressed, and went inside.