Hollowmoor Comes Courting

There were always more of them. He never came alone.

The words find the oldest cold in me, the arithmetic cold, a sum I thought I had finished standing back up off the page. It has nothing to do with the mud freezing around my planted feet or the wind coming down off the burned Hall. The bond flinches, the torn place wincing the way it does at any blow it did not brace for. I do not. I have been hit too many times tonight to waste anything on flinching, and I make myself hold.

I do not let the cry pull me down into it. I keep the flood banked where I set it, wide and ready, and I lift my face from Varek on his ridge and turn it north, toward the black treeline where the world ends, and I make myself listen the way he taught me to read the old tongue under reason.

It is not eight wolves. It is not the leashed Hollowmoor line that Selene whistled over the border at the start of this one long night, the first of my life as the white wolf. It is not even the lean grey following that left the world at Varek's heels thirty winters back, dust and cold ash and a long-shut room. It is more than all of those things stacked together, ridge after ridge of it, a cry that does not call and does not command, that only answers, the way a tide answers the moon it has been answering since before there were ears to hear it.

Caine's scorched shoulder is against mine, and I feel him counting too, the warrior in him reaching out into that dark and coming back with no number, and I feel the moment the no-number lands in him because the bond carries his stillness to me like a palm at the back of my neck.

"Three hundred years," I say, quiet, half to the wolf at my flank and half to the one on the ridge, because it is not for anyone else. "He has been gathering them for three hundred years."

On the hill, Varek lowers his great grey head from the moon, and the howl dies out of his throat, and he looks down the slope at the ragged climbing line of us, the discarded and the freed and the scorched alpha standing in the wrong place. The satisfaction is still gone off his face. But something else has come into it now, something that was not there when he miscounted, and it takes me a breath to name it because I have never seen it on him.

He is pleased that I understand.

"There," he says, and the patience is back, but it is a deeper patience now, the patience of a wolf who has played the long part of the game and is finally allowed to show the short one. "You hear them. Of course you hear them. They have been waiting on you longer than you have been alive, little spent thing. Every cast-out wolf the packs threw into the rogue-lands to die, every wolf the Choosing named too low to keep, every wolf that bled out at a border because no Voice would call it home. I did not have to make them follow me. I only had to be the one who counted them. You above all should understand the use of a thing the world throws away."

The cold goes all the way through me then, because he is not lying, and worse, he is not wholly wrong, and the rejection scar at my throat sits cold and steady against Caine where it always sits cold when Caine is near, telling me the only thing it can tell me, which is that the lie tonight is not coming from the wolf at my flank.

Varek has built his army out of the discarded.

The same wolves I have left bread for. The same wolves whose pups I carried out of a burning Hall an hour ago. The exact thing I have spent my whole short life believing no one should be left to become, he went out into the dark and gathered, and fed on their throwing-away, and pointed at the one wolf the moon finally chose, and called it his.

I look down at Wren leaning warm against my shin, and I understand for the first time that the wood is full of wolves who never got a Wren to lean on. Who leaned, once, on something, and it was Varek.

"That is the cleverest cruel thing I have ever heard," I tell him, and I mean it, and I do not let my voice get small around it. "You raised a whole rogue-land the way you raised me. On nothing. So that when you came they would be too hungry to ask what you wanted them hungry for."

"I raised them on the truth," Varek says. "That the packs do not want them. That the Goddess marks one wolf in three centuries and lets the rest of us rot. You are about to tell them they are wrong, with your bread and your flood and your one small pup. And when they do not believe you, because they have three hundred years of being right, you will learn what I learned. That the only thing the thrown-away will follow is the wolf who never pretended to love them."

The howl from the north has not stopped. It rolls under his words, ridge after ridge, closer now, and I feel the discarded at my back shift and press in tighter, the pups whimpering, the sick old wolf I spooned broth into sagging against the half-grown one, and the freed grey wolf that fell in behind me a moment ago lifting its head north now, toward the cry, the way a freed thing turns to look at any hand at all when it is afraid.

That is the trap inside the trap. The discarded are mine because they chose me. But fear is a Voice older than any of us, and Varek has three hundred years of fear coming down the ridges to whistle them home.

I gather the banked flood. I do not narrow it. I do not throw it. I let it sit wide and full, ready to pour itself between my people and that cold north tide the way I poured it between the line and the slope, and I take the breath to bare my throat to the moon a fourth time tonight, and that is the moment the wind changes.

It comes down off the eastern ridge instead of the north, across the burned slope, and it carries a scent that is not dust and not cold ash and not the smoke of the Hall, a scent I have smelled only once, hours and a lifetime ago, across the Choosing-fire, polished and cold and certain. Kennel-clean. Hollowmoor.

Caine goes rigid at my flank, and the bond carries it to me before his scorched voice can. "That is not the north. That came up the east road."

And out of the treeline on the eastern ridge, between the burning Hall behind us and the gathering dark of the rogue-lands ahead, walks a line of wolves that does not stumble and is not starved and wears no leash. They come in good order, sleek and well-fed and unhurried, ranked the way a rich pack ranks, and at the head of them, on two legs, in a grey cloak with the frost still on its shoulders, walks Selene Voss.

She is not running north now, the way she ran on the first night. She is not whistling a hidden line out of the dark. She has come up the open road into the middle of a burning, between Varek's three hundred years and my one ragged climbing slope, and she stops at the lip of the eastern ridge where the firelight can reach her, and she lifts her chin, and she smiles at me across the dark the way she measured me across the Choosing-fire, the cold polished way of a wolf raised to win.

"Luna," Selene says.

She says it like a courtesy. She says it like a wolf laying the first card of a hand she has been holding since before I had teeth. And the word lands wrong on me, lands cold and wrong, because the last time I stood between this pack and the moon, Selene Voss was the rival who helped throw me away, and now she is on the ridge with a fed and ordered line at her back, calling me by the rank Varek wants to cut out of me, and the scar at my throat does not warm because she is too far for me to read.

Varek, on his hill, does not look surprised to see her.

He looks, for the first time all night, like a wolf whose other hand has just come down on the board.

"You are out of time, child," he says, soft, almost kind, and he does not mean the north and he does not only mean himself. "On the one side, every wolf the world threw away. On the other, every wolf it kept. And you in the ash between, with a pup on your leg and a thread I am going to cut." He lifts his head. "Hollowmoor did not come to fight me, Rue. They came to court the Luna. The only question left tonight is which of us you let take you home."