What He Threw Away

A pup is crying in the dark, and my hands are full of a killer.

That is the whole of the world for one unbearable breath. The thin high sound threads out of the burning Hall and finds the place in me that has never healed, the place that was a pup once at a cold border with no hand reaching for it, and everything in me lunges toward the doors. My body wants to run. My wolf wants to run. Eighteen years of leaving bread at the treeline so no small thing would ever cry like that in the dark, and now one is, behind those doors, and I am rooted in the mud holding a grey wolf off Old Mabel's throat with the whole of my chest, and if I let go to run, the frozen jaws come down.

I have learned my own body the way Bram reads the woods, across this one long terrible night. The smoke reaches me, and the cry under it, and the answer tears through me in its honest order, the flood of cold dread first, then the reflex of my weight pitching forward off my heels toward the slope, and then, only then, the thing I make myself do instead, which is plant my feet in the mud and not let go.

I cannot carry two things at once. He built me to believe that, and tonight he set it on fire to prove it.

But I am not carrying two things. I gave one of them away. I handed the doors to the alpha who threw me out, and he took them, and that is the only reason the world has not already ended.

The bond tells me he is still alive in there.

It is the strangest mercy I have ever been given, that thread under my breastbone that I have hated since the Choosing, the torn place that aches and will not close. I cannot see Caine. The doorway is a sheet of orange now, shapes moving in it like things underwater, and the smoke has swallowed the dark behind it whole. But the bond is a line run from my chest into that dark, and on the far end of it I can feel him, faint and furious and afire, the way you feel a hand on a rope you cannot see the end of. He is moving. He is fighting. There is a great surge of something down the thread, rage and effort and under it a cold clean purpose I have never once felt off him before, and it answers a question I did not know I was asking, which is whether the wolf who said the old words over me would burn for the ones I love or only say he would.

He is burning for them. I can feel it from here.

"Hold," I tell the grey wolf, though it cannot hear me and there is no Voice in it, just air, just the word my mouth makes when the rest of me is howling something else. Its jaws stay frozen a hand's breadth off Mabel's throat. The cost of holding it has not eased. It is a door I am bracing shut with my spine, and my spine is starting to learn exactly how long it can brace.

On the threshold, Mabel has dragged herself clear of the locked teeth, and she is not looking at the wolf anymore. She is looking at the doors. Her cracked old voice comes thin across the cold ground, and there is no gallows joke in it this time, none at all, and that is how I know how bad it is.

"That's Wren," she says. "The little brindle. Lost her dam at the spring melt." Her white head turns to me, and her rheumy eyes are wet and steady. "She's in the kennel-rooms with the others, love. By the hearth. By the fire."

I know the kennel-rooms. I have swept them. I have laid straw in them and rubbed liniment into old shoulders in them and left bread in them, the discarded ones penned where the alpha's hearth keeps the cold off, the great fire that warms the high seat throwing its heat down the back passage where Ironcrest keeps the wolves it does not count. The straw. The fire. A brand dragged into dry straw by a wolf who has thirty winters of cold tongue in its ears and was told to burn the rest.

Up on the ridge, Varek has not moved. He stands in his stolen firelight and watches me hold, the way a man watches a snare he set years ago finally close, and his patience is gone but the satisfaction is worse, the awful settled gladness of a wolf who has waited three hundred years to be proven right about the shape of the world. He spoke a point against the moon and he is waiting for it to come true.

The point is that I will lose one. That whatever I am, white wolf, Luna, the moon's own Voice, I am still in the end the spent thing he raised, with her hands too full to stop what comes next.

And the worst of it, the thing that settles into me with the dead weight of snow loading a branch past its breaking, is that he might be right, because I can feel the door of my strength starting to bow. Holding one wolf with the narrowed Voice is taking everything. There is nothing left over. Not for the slope, not for the doors, not for the brindle pup by the fire. If I let go of the grey wolf to throw the Voice at the Hall, Mabel dies on the threshold. If I hold the grey wolf, Wren burns. He cut me down the middle and he is going to watch the two halves of me fail at once.

Then the bond yanks.

It is not a feeling. It is a pull, hard and sudden and bodily, the torn thread under my breastbone hauling toward the doors so violently that I stagger in the mud, and for one wild instant I think the Hall has fallen, that the far end of the rope has gone slack, that Caine is. But it has not gone slack. It has gone taut. He is not dying down that thread. He is calling. Not with Voice. No Voice has ever touched me, mine is the one neck in this wood it slides off, and no shout of his would live in that roar. So he calls the only way left to a wolf with a burning hall between him and his mate: he throws everything he is at the bond and trusts the torn place to carry it.

And it carries. Goddess help me, the rejected bond, the one he spat the old words across, the one that should have scarred shut and gone silent, it carries him to me as clear as if his mouth were at my ear.

The pups. He is at the doors. The fire is between him and the pups and he cannot reach them, two wolves against the back ranks and a wall of flame in a stone passage, and he is at the doors and he cannot get through and he is asking. Not telling. The alpha who commanded a whole pack with a hand on the back of their necks is asking me, down the one thread he tried to cut, the one question that matters.

Can you reach them, when I cannot.

I understand, then, the shape of the thing he gave me when he took the doors. He did not take them so I would not have to. He took them so that I would have one hand free for the impossible thing, and he would be my eyes and my legs in the dark on the far end of a bond he has no right to use. He cannot carry the pups out through the fire. But he can stand in the smoke at the threshold of the kennel-rooms and be a fixed point, a known thing, a hand in the dark, and hold the door of the bond open from his side so that I can pour the moon through it.

I have only ever thrown the Voice at what I could see. The line in the mud. The pack on the ridge. The grey wolf I am holding now, in my sight, a hand's breadth off Mabel. I do not know if it will go where I cannot see, down a torn thread, into a dark I am not standing in. I do not know if it will reach the kennel-rooms or only burn out in the smoke between us. The old wound starts its old whisper, that I am a tool that breaks in the hand, that you cannot pour water through a rope.

But Caine is holding the door of the bond open from inside the fire, his bared throat in the smoke, asking, and Mabel is watching me with her wet steady eyes, and Wren is crying in the dark by the hearth, and I am so tired of the shape of the world Varek built that I could tear it open with my teeth.

So I do not let go of the grey wolf. I do not run for the doors. I keep one half of me braced against the killing jaws in the mud, and I take the other half, every scrap of the moon I have left, and instead of throwing it at anything I can see, I pour it down the torn thread under my breastbone, into the burning dark, toward the only fixed point in the Hall, the wolf who rejected me and is now holding the door of our wound open so I can save the things he once said I was too low to be worth.

I bare my throat to the moon a third time. I shut my eyes against the firelight. I find the far end of the rope, the cold clean point of him in the smoke, and I drive the white-wolf Voice down it, narrowed past a blade now, narrowed to a thread, the moon's own sound carried not on the air but on a bond that was never truly cut, and I aim it past Caine, through him, into the kennel-rooms behind the fire where the discarded ones are penned, and I tell them the only thing there is room for, the thing I have wanted to say to every small thrown-away creature at every cold border my whole life.

Come to me.

For one held breath there is nothing. The smoke. The cry. The cost of the grey wolf tearing at my braced spine. Varek's settled gladness up on the ridge. Nothing.

Then, down the thread, through Caine, I feel them move.

Not the pups. Caine. I feel the bond go white-hot and then steady, feel him take the sound I poured into him and turn, feel him do the thing no command of mine reached him to do, because I did not command him. The sound was an open door, not a leash. He chose it. He took the moon I poured down the rope and he carried it the last terrible stretch I could not reach, into the fire, toward the crying, and the bond floods with the white blank roar of a wolf walking into flame on purpose, and I lose him.

The thread goes dark.

Not slack. Dark. The way a window goes dark when something steps in front of the light. I hold the grey wolf off Mabel's throat with one half of me and I hold the dead-dark thread with the other and I cannot feel him at all, cannot feel whether he is standing or down, whether the pups are in his jaws or the fire is, and Varek, up on the ridge, in his stolen light, finally turns his great grey head and looks down the slope and straight at me, and for the first time all night he speaks to me, only me, low and almost tender, the wolf who has owned my name since before I had one.

"There," he says. "Now you have given him to the fire too. The alpha, the old woman, the brindle pup, and the whole of yourself, spent in one night, on a thread I will cut in the morning." His Voice drops, gentle as the hand that left me in the ash. "Come up the hill, little spent thing. There is nothing left down there to hold."