Tribute to the Ash Alpha

The yarrow had gone to mush in the mortar again.

Maren tipped the pestle against the rim and scraped the green paste into a clay pot, breathing through her mouth because the healer’s tent stank of lye and boiled linen and the sour tang of the fever tea Bram insisted on brewing every Harvest Moon, as though half the pack would come down sick from dancing.

Outside, drums had started on the hill. The canvas walls shivered with each beat.

“You’re still here.”

Bram stood in the tent flap with his walking stick hooked over one arm, his white beard combed for once, a fern sprig pinned to his collar. He limped in, favoring the left knee, and looked at the row of pots she’d filled since supper.

“Someone has to make the burn salve,” she said. “Last year Tobin fell in the fire pit.”

“Last year Tobin was drunk. This year he’s married and his wife will hold his collar.” Bram took the pestle out of her hand and set it down with a click. “Go.”

“Nobody’s waiting for me up there.”

“The Naming waits for everyone over eighteen. Alpha’s law, not mine.” His ink-stained thumb brushed a smear of yarrow off her knuckle, and his voice dropped. “Stand at the back if you want. Stand where Osric sees you standing, and come straight down after. I’ll keep the kettle on.”

She untied her apron, folded it twice, and laid it over the stool, then folded it a third time because the corner wouldn’t sit flat.

Bram watched her do it and said nothing.

The path up the hill was churned to mud by a hundred pairs of boots. Maren held her skirt above her ankles and climbed toward the fire.

Its glow turned the birches orange, sparks lifting into a sky gone the deep violet of a bruise. The Harvest Moon sat huge and low over the river valley, three nights short of full, so close she could see the gray seas on its face.

Seven years since she’d last looked at a moon like that and had anything in her answer.

The whole of Redfern stood around the Naming fire, families in their good wool, children on shoulders, the unmated in a loose ring nearest the flames, scrubbed and braided and smelling of the cedar oil every mother in the valley rubbed into their necks for luck.

Maren slipped between two elders and stopped at the edge of the crowd, where the firelight thinned out and the cold came up through the soles of her boots.

Heads turned. Not many. Enough.

A woman she’d stitched up in the spring drew her little boy closer against her hip. Two girls near the front leaned together, one whispering behind her hand.

Maren knew the shape of that whisper. She’d heard it since she was sixteen, since the night of the blood moon when her body had broken and remade itself into something with silver-white fur and no scent at all, and the pack had stood in a circle like this one and stared.

Blighted. Moon-cursed. The ward who smells of nothing.

She tucked her hands into her sleeves and counted the drums.

Alpha Osric stood on the speaking stone with his broad shoulders squared against the fire, the fern on his signet ring catching the light every time he lifted his hand. Beside him stood his son.

Callum had washed his hair. The wheat-blond of it shone, and he was laughing at something the Beta had said, his head tipped back, that chipped front tooth showing.

Lyra Hale stood one step below him, honey curls pinned up, dimples deepening as she watched him laugh. Everyone watched Callum laugh. The whole valley had been watching him do it for twenty-five years.

Maren had too. From the back of the healer’s tent, from the edge of the training yard, from across the long table at midwinter. Not once had he looked back long enough to notice.

“The Moon is high,” Osric called, and the drums stopped. “Let her name what’s hers.”

The unmated began to walk.

That was all a Naming was, in the end. Walking the ring of the fire until the wind turned and carried a scent you’d never smelled before and would never stop smelling.

Maren had seen it happen a dozen times from the back of the crowd. A girl stopping mid-step. A boy’s head snapping around. Two strangers who’d grown up a field apart, suddenly breathing like they’d run up the hill.

Tobin’s younger brother found a girl from the eastern farms in the first circuit, and the crowd roared, and someone threw a cup of cider into the fire so it hissed and spat. Maren clapped with everyone else. Her palms stung with it.

Callum stepped down from the stone.

The crowd shifted to give the heir room, and he walked the ring with his hands loose at his sides, nodding at the faces he passed. Lyra trailed after him at an arm’s length, her chin lifted. The whole valley expected it. The Beta’s daughter and the Alpha’s son. Their fathers had been toasting it for three winters.

He passed the eastern edge. The southern edge.

The wind came around off the river.

Something moved in Maren’s chest.

It wasn’t her heart. It was lower and older than that, a weight rolling over in the dark the way a sleeping animal turns toward warmth, and for one moment she didn’t recognize it, because she hadn’t felt it since the blood moon.

Her wolf. Seven years silent, and now it was pressing up under her ribs, straining toward the fire, toward the smell of woodsmoke and green apples and leather oil that the wind was carrying straight into her lungs.

She knew that smell. She’d stood behind it in the supper line for a decade.

Callum stopped walking.

He stood very still on the far side of the ring, his back to her, and she watched his shoulders lift and stay lifted, a breath taken in and not let go. Then he turned. His hazel eyes went across the fire, across the unmated, across the elders and the mothers with their little ones, and found her where she stood in the thin light at the edge.

His lips parted. Nothing came out.

The bond hit her the way river ice gives under a foot, all at once, no warning, the cold of it shooting straight up through her body and then turning to something warm and terrible. Maren’s knees locked to keep from buckling. Her wolf threw itself against the inside of her skin.

Every nerve she had pulled toward him, a hook set behind her sternum and the line drawn taut across the fire.

Mine, something in her said. Not in words. Deeper than words.

The drums were silent. The fire cracked.

Callum looked at her for three breaths. On the third, his gaze slid sideways and up to the speaking stone.

To his father.

Maren didn’t look at Osric. She couldn’t make her eyes leave Callum’s face. But she saw the change in it: the wonder draining out of his mouth and leaving it thin, his jaw going tight, his chin coming down. When he looked back at her, he was the heir again. Polished. Sorry, in the way a man is sorry about rain.

The crowd had started to understand. She heard it travel, a murmur moving outward from the ring the way a ripple moves from a dropped stone. The whisper from the front. The mother pulling her son tighter.

Someone near Maren’s elbow stepped away from her, and then someone else did, until she stood in a small clear space of her own with the mud cold under her boots.

Lyra had gone white.

Callum crossed the ring. Not quickly. The crowd parted, and he walked through the gap with his hands still loose at his sides, and stopped in front of her near enough that she could see the fire’s reflection doubled in his eyes.

Green apples. Leather oil. Her wolf whined, a thin high sound inside her that no one else could hear, and pushed toward him so hard she swayed.

“Callum,” she said. She didn’t know what came after it.

He didn’t let her find out.

“I, Callum Redfern,” he said, loud enough for the hill to hear, “son of Osric, heir of Redfern, reject you, Maren Vale, as my mate.”

The words went into her like nails into green wood.

Pain followed a heartbeat later. It started at the hook behind her sternum and tore outward, the line between them snapping and whipping back through her chest, and her wolf screamed. She heard it. She was almost sure the whole hill heard it.

Her hand went to her breastbone and pressed, fingers spread, as though she could hold the torn place shut, and her mouth filled with the taste of copper where she’d bitten the inside of her cheek.

She didn’t fall. She’d decided that between one breath and the next. She would not fall in this mud in front of these people.

“Before the Moon and the pack,” Callum went on. His voice cracked on pack, and he cleared his throat and finished it. “I choose Lyra Hale.”

He turned his back on her and held out his hand.

Lyra took it. Her dimples came back slowly, color returning to her cheeks, and as Callum led her toward the fire, she glanced over her shoulder at Maren and let her gaze travel down, from Maren’s braid to her mud-caked hem, before she turned away and laughed under her breath.

The drums started again, uncertain. A few people cheered for the heir and his chosen. Most of them were looking at Maren.

She stood in her cleared space with her hand flat against her chest and her pulse knocking against her palm, and counted. Ten drumbeats. Eleven. Her wolf had gone quiet again, curled tight around the wound, shaking. Twelve.

On the speaking stone, Osric raised his ringed hand, and the drums faltered and stopped.

“Ward,” he said.

The hill turned to look at her again.

Osric’s voice was warm. It was always warm. He’d used that voice when she was five years old and standing in his hall in a dead woman’s shawl, telling her she would be safe now, that Redfern took care of its own. He used it now, gentle and sorrowful, his beard silver in the firelight.

“The Corvane tribute is due at the border stone in three days,” he said. “Their Alpha has asked for a woman of my household.”

Maren’s hand slid down from her chest.

“Then she goes north.”