Chapter 23 Twenty Three
Chapter 23 Twenty Three
Thorne's POV
She arrived on the third day.
I had been waiting for someone from the council since the morning after Cade came back empty-handed. I had felt that particular kind of waiting when you know a thing is coming but don’t know just what it’s going to look like by the time it arrives. Elder Maren solved that uncertainty by coming through the formal hall doors at midmorning with two junior council wolves in her wake and with the precise unhurried air of a woman who long ago ceased to be in a hurry about anything because she had discovered most things would come to her sooner or later anyway.
Silver-haired. Small in the way that got people to underestimate her again and again until they had found themselves seated across from her long enough to know the smallness was merely the vessel and what it held was something altogether different. And she had been on the Elder Council longer than I had been alive, and wore that tenure like an old weapon some people wear, quietly and without ostentation but apparent when applied.
She sat opposite me in the formal hall and folded her hands on the table and laid it out with what I had always both revered yet found profoundly uneasy about her: her directness.
Fertility rates for the pack had declined another six percent over the past month. Not a gradual seasonal change, not the ebb and flow of a species struggling through a harsh winter. A fall, down to measure and up to make a mark, at the end of a clear track that had been forming for some weeks. Two Omegas had miscarried. The mate of a Beta who had not given birth in the two years since the bond was made, even though both the bond and wolves were young and healthy. It was the kind of restlessness of land that pack land would get when something in the very spiritual core of how its governing structure worked was wrong, not a simple manifest issue but something with more depth, running deeper than pack management could properly reach.
The Moon was quiet.
I had sensed it myself, that void at the place they made up, the very silence in the sacred space where a pack Alpha felt his Goddess’s gaze when he raised prayers towards her. Not a withdrawal exactly. More like a turned back. That which was there and then was just no longer looking upon me.
I told her that the new union with Vespera would fix it. I said it the way I had been saying it to myself for three days, in the tone of a man who needed the thing he was saying to be true and would apply pressure to it and hope that pressure made it solid.
Elder Maren looked at me.
Her expression roamed the narrow space between pity and contempt without quite planting itself into either. It was the face of a woman who had seen a far amount of men put pressure on things that were never going to go hard once again and had grown an unusual type of fucking tolerance for seeing this shit.
The pack’s distress was not about succession, she said.
I said nothing.
She said it was about the connection.
I asked what that meant.
She opened her hands and closed them again in another shape, a sign I’d seen her make before when it was clear that she did not know how much of a thing to give to someone who would struggle to receive it.
A marked Luna, she said, formally taken as one who had received the pack bond by the witness of the Goddess and blessing of the Moon, could not be publicly discarded without price. Not moral consequence, not political consequence, though there was that as well. Spiritual consequence. The bond between a marked Luna and her pack was not a contract that ended the moment one party decided they did not want to abide by its terms any longer. It was a living bond, braided into the pack’s being like roots braided into soil. Cutting it required a ceremony. Required the Goddess's acknowledgment. Needed, in what she called a formal severance rite, experienced with the willing participation of both bonded parties beneath the Moon and with proper observances.
I had done none of those things.
I had announced a new union at a pack soiree, replaced a name in some register and thought the matter settled.
The land knew what I had left open. The wolves felt it. The Moon felt it and had looked away, refusing to keep her mind on a house built atop a wound that had not healed properly to begin with, and she would continue this way until the wound either healed or whatever was bleeding through its interior faded.
The hall was very quiet.
I sat with the information as you do with something that moves around the furniture of what you thought you understood, letting it take its time to find where it was going to settle.
"What is the remedy," I said.
There were two choices in the special economy of a woman who had delivered uncomfortable news so many times over her career that she learned to make it palatable, Elder Maren said.
I discovered Elara and undertook the formal severance rite to her consent. The Goddess would see to it that the separation was done right. The wound at the heart of the pack would heal. The land would stabilize. Then the Moon would turn back to Silvercrest.
Or I dealt with the consequences.
She allowed that to sink in for a moment.
"How long," I said. “If it is not performed.”
She stood.
She ran both hands down the front of her robe and studied me with the same expression she’d been wearing during, that cautious in-between of pity and contempt, and said as long as Elara lived and the wound was fresh, the pack would bleed silently.
And then she walked toward the door.
I heard footsteps in the corridor an instant before the door opened and I already knew from the sound of them who was outside.
Vespera entered the opening just as Elder Maren exited. The two women exchanged a glance that lasted hardly a second, the sort of glance that holds an entire conversation neither person is interested in having out loud, and then Maren was past her and her footfalls receded down the corridor with the same ungiven hurriedness they’d arrived with.
Vespera looked at me.
She was dressed for the day, golden hair done up, the composure she habitually wore as relatively as skin carefully arranged. But something deep underneath it had changed. The calculation that had lived behind her honey-colored eyes was still there but it was changed, the smooth certainty of it developing a texture it hadn’t had before, something I would have called worry come out of a less controlled woman.
She looked genuinely uncertain.
That was something I had not seen from her. Not in all the years of this complicated history between us, not for a single second during the announcement, not when I’m laying into Elara over breakfast, no moment in all these where if it was something she were capable of having happen there’d be some kind of indication.
She looked at my face and she saw something in it that she was not expecting to see and for one naked moment she had no mask for what she saw.
Then the door shut and the hall was empty and very cold.
I stayed in my chair.
I pressed two fingers to my wrist, where the bond lived: stretched and thin and aching with all the distance it was now called upon to cover. Still there. Still connected to what was occurring four miles north of a border I had yet to cross.
Willing participation.
It was what Elder Maren had said. The severance rite would take Elara's unequivocal consent. Which meant it required Elara. Which meant I needed to find her, wherever she had gone off to, and request that she come stand in front of the Goddess with me, and publicly dissolve the thing I had carelessly ended publicly without even a corner of what it deserved.
I marinated in Cade’s words. The way she had looked. The gravity of her voice when she told him she wasn’t property to be reclaimed.
I was considering whether to ask a woman whom I had publicly humiliated in front of her entire pack to do me a favor.
Beyond the window, the grounds of Silvercrest were cold and gray, snow from that storm still on the garden, pine treeline dark against pale sky. No warmth in the light today. Nothing resembling a blessing.
I remained where I was for a long time.