Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Nine minutes into the full-moon Trial, the tonic Rev had given me locked my spine before my wolf could rise.

My Alpha mother watched from the platform as they dragged me into twelve links of silver. My stepfather, Garrick, stood beside her, while my blood brother, Corin, already had his pen out, ready to sign my winter provisions over to Rev.

They fed me wolfsbane for eleven years. And tonight, I did not go down without a word.

I pulled the leather notebook out of my coat and slammed it flat onto the stone of the trial platform.

"Six years. Every moon, every lock, every minute, in my own hand." I flipped it open and held it up. "And these eleven pages are your dosing tallies, Rev. Those cross marks are your handwriting, not mine."

Rev put her chin down and did the thing she has done for eleven years. "I never meant to make anyone uncomfortable."

I reached into my other pocket and held it up—sealed glass, a finger of liquid in it. "You carry it yourself. You never let anybody else touch the flask. Tell them why."

The murmur that went round that ring was the first one in eleven years that wasn't for her.

"That's for the pain." Her voice stayed exactly where it always is. "I make it for half the second-years. You can ask any of them."

She turned the flask once in her hand while she said it, showing the room how harmless it was, and I dragged my thumbnail hard along the curve of the glass as it went past me.

A scratch the length of a fingernail, on the left side, under the neck. Nobody saw me do it. I will know that flask again in any room in either territory.

"I have. None of them get theirs on the night."

Rev reached for the notebook, and I stepped back out of range and let her hand close on air in front of sixty wolves, and I want it written down that she is not quick, and that everybody saw it.

Up on the lodge platform my mother had one palm flat on the wooden handrail, cold and set, and did not come down.

Twenty years she has kept my illness off every page in this lodge. Garrick says her version out loud so she doesn't have to. Corin hands over whatever's left.

"There's no exemption on file for her." Garrick again, walking the elders' bench with his hands clasped behind him, the way she does. "Twenty years, not one piece of paper."

He knows why. He watched her take it out of the June file, and four years of his standing rests on never saying so. My knees went at eleven minutes.

"Suppressant," I said. "Please."

"Alpha." Rev's hand came up near her collarbone. "She's asking again."

Again. One word, and a girl on the ground becomes a girl with a habit.

"Everybody in that ring managed it," my mother said, to the pack and not to me. "Same moons, same teaching, same blood."

Then Rev took the tin box off the shelf and asked permission to remove the temptation, and my mother said granted, and the glass went off in the fire pit like a knuckle cracking.

At sixteen minutes they put me in the silver — twelve links, poured into the earth before my grandmother's time.

It doesn't burn. It reaches in and holds the animal down, and you lie there with the whole shift stacked behind your teeth.

"Face her," Rev told the pack, with her eyes wet. "Nobody sits down until she stands up."

Corin sat down first, on the rail, where I could see him.

I lay in the silver with the jar still in my fist and did not let go of it, and three things went round and round while forty-one wolves stood over me.

One.

My father is dying two territories north, and the writ he lodged before the wasting took his hands gives every claim of the Kell line — territory, tithe, the Alpha's seat — to his only daughter of blood.

Two. There is wolfsbane in that jar.

I have known the taste since I was fourteen and I have never once been able to prove it, and the lab in the north has had a sample since Tuesday.

Three. At the Reckoning, when both territories put their wolves in one field, I am going to come up out of twelve links of silver in front of four hundred of them.

At twenty-four minutes I stopped hearing properly, and somebody came out of the line.

Not one of them. The pack sound for a low wolf breaking rank is very short, and you can be exiled for it.

Then hands under my arms, the silver came off, and the air went into me all at once.

"You're not dying in your mother's dirt," said Dez Marrow, a low wolf with one rank and no line, who has been checking my gate every night for nine years, close to my ear.

"They'll exile you."

"Let them count that too." His arm went under my shoulders. "Breathe out first. It comes easier that way."

Behind us Rev put both hands over her mouth so everybody could see how upset she was.

"Note it," she said, through her fingers. "Two of them failed the Trials."

She said it to the benches. Nobody wrote it down.

That is the first time in eleven years a room did not do what Rev told it, and I was flat on my back in the grass when it happened, and I saw it anyway.

When the ring emptied I went back for my coat, and there was a sealed slip of parchment pushed down under the lining of her herb basket, in the part of it nobody has any reason to lift.