The Valley-Mouth

They have a rope on my throat and the whole pack came out to watch them use it.

They line the rocks on both sides of the gap where Blackthorn's land ends and the deep woods begin. Every wolf I have ever known. The ones who shared meat with me. The ones who slept ridge to ridge through the bad winters and were glad of my heat. Old Sela with her grandchildren's hands in hers. The pups who used to climb me like a hill. They stand in the cold and watch the elders drag me to the line, and not one of them looks at my face, because if you look at the face of the thing you are throwing away you have to admit it had a face, and a name, and gave you its heat in the bad winters.

Bite the nearest throat, the wolf says. She has been saying it since they put the rope on me. Bite it and run.

I do not bite. Not yet. The woman is still in charge, barely, and the woman is doing the thing she does, which is counting. Four elders. Two warriors on the rope. Old Maon at the front with his white muzzle and his certainty. The line of stones I am about to be dragged past. After that, no count. After that there is no law and no number and no name, only the trees that eat the people the pack does not want.

I have known since I was a pup that exile is a death sentence with extra steps. I just never thought I would be the steps.

"Lark of Blackthorn," Maon says, and his voice carries the way old men's voices learn to carry when they have spent a life being obeyed. "You are no longer of Blackthorn."

The cold goes through me at the words, and it is not the wind.

It is the bond.

They do not tell you this part. The law leaves it out of the songs. When a bond breaks, it does not break clean. It is not a rope cut. It is a tooth pulled out of the root of you, and the hole where it was floods and floods and does not stop. I have felt it building for three days, since they took Dorran into the elder-house and would not let me follow, since the word came down the rocks like dirty water. The bond is unsound. The bond is broken. Each time someone said it I felt another root tear. Now Maon says I am no longer of Blackthorn and the last root goes and the flood comes up under my breastbone and I would fall if the rope let me.

This is the part the law swears by. A wolf cannot live without her bond. To break a true bond is to die of it. They have told me this my whole life the way they tell me the sun comes up. So I stand there at the line with the thread cut and dangling inside me and I think, with the small cold piece of the woman that never stops working, all right. Then I am dying now. Let me see it, then. Let me see the thing kill me.

I look for Dorran.

He is up on the high rock with the warriors, where the heir stands. Soon-to-be-alpha. Three days from his confirmation, the confirmation the elders told him a low-ranked hearth-wolf mate would cost him. He is not in his fur. He stands on two legs in his good coat with his hands at his sides, and he is looking at the trees behind me, the deep woods, the place I am going, as if the answer to all of this is written on the bark and not in front of him with a rope around her neck.

Look at me. I do not say it. I will not give the watching rocks the sound of it. But I push it down the dead thread with everything I have left, the thread that is supposed to be cut and is somehow still there enough to push down. Look at me. You felt it too, the pull, the heat under the breastbone, the certainty they told us was the moon. Say one word. Say my name in front of them and they cannot do this.

He does not look at me.

That is the thing I will carry. Not the rope, not the cold, not Maon's voice. The silence. He chose the high rock and the good coat and the confirmation, and the price of all three was the small thing of not turning his head, and he paid it without a flinch. He could have spent one word. A word would have cost him a valley. He counted me against a valley and the arithmetic took him less than a breath. The mate the law swore the moon had written for me, the only wolf my body believed it could not live without, studied the bark of a tree so he would not have to watch what his silence did.

Bite, says the wolf. Bite him last. Save him for last.

"She kept her wolf low and her bloodline lower," says Elder Sela, for the watching rocks, because every throwing-away needs a reason said out loud so the pack can sleep. "The Sorting named her hearth. The bond was a misreading. The moon does not waste strength on the strengthless. Blackthorn does not waste meat on the unmated."

It is a lie and I knew it was a lie at my own Sorting and I know it now, but my Sorting was five years ago and I was twenty and frightened and they stood me in the circle under the full moon and judged the strength of my wolf at the one moment they had already decided the answer. Hearth. Low. A hearth-wolf does not outrank an unconfirmed alpha. A hearth-wolf can be married to him quietly and set aside quietly. They sorted me to fit the shape of their plan, and when the plan changed, the same low rank that made me safe made me disposable.

I look at Sela and I show her my teeth. Just a little. The woman files her teeth down to a smile when she needs to lie to elders, but I am past lying to elders now, so I let her see the real ones.

Sela steps back.

I keep that. Even now. Even with the thread torn out and the flood under my ribs and the wolf screaming for a throat, the woman keeps it: the elder who sorted me weak just stepped back from my teeth.

"Maon," says Elder Garrow, the true believer, the one who is afraid of the deep woods, his nostrils working at the treeline scent. "Be quick. The light is going."

Maon raises his hand. The warriors set their feet.

"The deep woods take what Blackthorn casts out," Maon says. The old formula. "The moon turns her face. Go and be no one."

And then he says the rest, the part that is not formula, the part he adds looking straight at me with a look on his old face I have no name for. He says, low, just for me, under the wind so the rocks do not hear:

"And do not crawl back here telling them the bond did not kill you. Do you understand me, girl. Whatever you feel in the next weeks, however you feel it, you tell no one. A broken bond is death. That is the law. Die quiet in the trees and do not put ideas in their heads."

I do not understand it. Not then. I am twenty-five years old with a torn root flooding my chest and a rope on my throat, and an old man is whispering at me about ideas, and it makes no sense at all, and I have no room left in me to make it make sense.

But the woman takes the words in whole, the way she takes everything she cannot chew, and buries them where the cold cannot get at them.

The warriors pull. The rope bites. My feet go over the line of stones, past the last marker of Blackthorn's scent, into the place that has no scent of pack at all, only cold and cedar and the iron smell of the things that have died here before me. They drag me three lengths of a body into the trees, far enough that the rocks cannot see, and one of them, Corwin, who I once pulled out of the river when we were both small, will not meet my eye as he loosens the rope. He drops it in the snow. He does not say sorry. None of them say sorry. Sorry is a thing you say to someone you might see again.

They turn and go back to the light, all of them, the whole pack flowing back up the rocks into Blackthorn, into warmth and meat and law and each other, and the gap closes behind them, and I am alone at the edge of the deep woods with a torn thread in my chest that is supposed to be killing me.

I kneel in the snow because my legs are done.

Get up, says the wolf.

I cannot.

Get up. They will tell the pups a story about how you lay down and died like the law said. Get up so the story is wrong.

The flood under my ribs is the worst pain I have ever felt and I have been bitten to the bone twice. It is not a wound in a place. It is a wound in the part of me that is supposed to belong to someone, the part the bond filled, and the bond is gone and the part is screaming and the law says the screaming ends in death and the death is meant to be soon.

I count my own heartbeats to have something to do that is not dying. I get to forty. I get to a hundred. The light goes the way Garrow feared, blue then grey then gone, and the cold comes down like a second exile, and somewhere off in the dark a thing that is not a wolf makes a sound, and still I am counting, and still the heart under the torn thread is beating, refusing the law.

I get to a thousand.

I am still alive.

The law says I cannot be. The law has said it my whole life, in the songs, in the Sorting circle, in Maon's own mouth not an hour ago. A broken bond is death. I am kneeling in the snow at the edge of the place that eats the cast-out, with the sacred thread torn clean out of me, and the death they promised is nowhere. It has not come. It is not coming. And somewhere very far down, under the pain, under the wolf, under the woman, a single cold thought lifts its head and looks around in the dark and does not lie back down.

The law is wrong about me.

And right behind it, colder, the one I will follow out of these woods and all the way back to that high rock:

Maon knew it would be. That is why an old man bent close at the line and spent his last words to me making certain I never told.