Chapter 24 Twenty Four

Chapter 24 Twenty Four

Elara's POV
Dawn in the settlement came sharp and gray, and without apology.

I’d been awake already when the light began, restless in that particular way of someone whose body has concluded that sleep was over well before the mind had fully consented. I got dressed in the dark and pulled the boots Draven had ordered from me, heavy and tight with a tread in the sole to work uneven ground; stepped out into cold morning air while the settlement was still that half-quiet hour between night proper and full day.

It was a flat, clear space at the north end of the settlement where training took place, with the mountain’s stone face breaking above the treeline behind it while years of feet had packed hard ground. It was not large. It lacked the formal apparatus of the training complexes at Silvercrest, the precise set up of targets and obstacles designed to teach a certain precise technique in a given order.

It was just ground.

Draven was already there.

Four of his elder wolves with him, scattered in the space like nothlieyem waiting without haste for something it didn’t need to talk about ahead of time. Brix was one of them, the scar through her eyebrow absorbing the first gray light as she turned to size up my arrival with a single slow appraising scan that began at my boots and ended at my face.

Then she turned away and went about her business, and that was the end of it.

No ceremony. The air was not moved, to account for my presence. Just four wolves with their king on a training ground at dawn, and then five wolves with their king, plus one ex-Luna who’d come in the proper footwear.

Draven looked at me once.

Then we began.

It was unlike anything I had trained for as Luna of Silvercrest. That had been cautious, as things are cautious when a person being trained is primarily decorative, choreographed moves designed to enable a Luna to say she was trained without giving her anything that might come out in bruises at black-tie dinner. Methods, versus the underlying opponents who played along with the lesson. An instructor who made the corrections easy to swallow, apologized for the contact and viewed the whole exercise as some cross between education and performance.

Draven trained as though everything was real.

Because it was, I realized in the first 10 minutes, to him.

I went down the first time before I had completely grasped how, the whole sequence playing out too quickly for my conscious mind to keep up. I was standing and then I wasn’t, the firm earth coming up with a force that didn’t leave any doubt as to what had happened.

He stood above me.

“You dropped your left shoulder before the pivot,” he said. "It announced the direction. Do it again."

I did it again.

The second time I hit the ground and the third time I hit the ground, by the fourth time I had ceased to be shocked by impact but listened to it, what information it brought about what the hell was wrong with me and at which point in a sequence that mistake had resided.

He did not apologize. He didn’t dial down the corrections, or moderate his intensity to help me avoid finding out just how far I had yet to go. He would tell me what was broken in a clean economy and leave me to rise up and apply it, and there was something in that waiting that was neither impatient nor indifferent but something more demanding than either, the expectation of a person who had faith that I could do the thing being asked.

I hadn’t been someone who had to deliver for a long time.

Somewhere in the second hour I felt a shift.

It was not a decision. It snuck under the level of decision, into that portion of a wolf that is led by instinct not instruction. I stopped contemplating what I was doing and simply did it, my wolf powering the operations of feeding information to my reflexes which would have been too slow by orders of magnitude for my conscious mind to be able to process, shoulder angles or shifts in weight distribution before they take place, qualities of stillness between striking movements.
I moved differently.

Brix rushed me from the left with the compact efficiency that was her particular style, and I read it a half second before she committed and shifted my weight and got under her guard and had my forearm across her throat before either one of us had fully processed what went down.

We both went still.

Brix looked at me.

Then she turned to Draven, both brows arched, the scarred one accomplishing this with a character the other lacked.
He said nothing.

But he was turned at a slight angle to me, focusing on something off near the edge of the training ground, and I saw a little change in his expression in the half second before he finished turning toward me, something that passed through it and was gone before even being able to name it.

We stopped when the morning had truly arrived and the settlement around us rose into its daily sounds, voices and the scent of cook fires and a distant regular beat from the smithy hammer that seemed to guide the pace of life here like a drum keeps step in a procession.

I was filthy. The dense earth had added some several strata of itself to my clothes and my hands and one side of my face, and my body was performing all due diligence on every impact that it had taken, putting the results in the form of warmth in the muscles that would crystallize into something further localized by tomorrow.

I felt more like myself than I had in three years.

Draven handed me a canteen.

I drank and gave it back and waited because the quality of his attention had the shape of a man with something to say, whom all these years later I can see was weighing up what to put there first.

“You give away your right shoulder before you hit,” he said. "A small movement. In the barely visible but there.” He held my gaze directly. “It will kill you against a Feral.

"I will fix it," I said.

He looked at me for a moment.

“You lasted longer than any new wolf I have brought in at that level,” he said.

It was not intended as a compliment. It felt to me to have none of the warm inflation of a compliment, none of the performative generosity. It was the way he said most things, with the flatness of a fact he had considered and confirmed as true and so saw no particular reason to keep to himself.

It still landed warm in my chest.

I walked back through the settlement toward the stone house with morning now taking flight into all that was sky above me and earth around me moving along with its day around us and my wolf walking easefully and alive to the surface of everything.

Selene was on the step.

Two mugs of tea, one thrust toward me before I had even completed my journey across the postage-stamp-sized yard and an expression on her face that was anything but casual. The expression of a woman under a continuous, careful scrutiny who did not appear to be trying at all hard to hide the fact that she was under it
I accepted the cup and sat beside her on the step.

The tea was hot and bitter and just right.

The bond to Thorne visited me in the way it did sometimes during quiet moments, when nothing pressing demanded my attention and there was enough room for it to be felt. It flared once, soft and aching in the particular across distance about something that had stretched past its comfortable self but still held. Then it fell quiet once more, sinking into the low background hum that had governed it since the second day of walking north.

I sat there with the warmth of the cup between my hands, and the morning air on my face, and Selene next to me performed her careful observation with the focused patience of someone who planned to remain as long as it took.

I didn’t tell her that it was newly easier to ignore.

I had seen it happen, the way the flares came with less frequency and were milder when they did and how the ache began to have more distance in it and less urgency, a feeling I could sit in an experience like this one now and feel it retreat but then return my attention to the tea and this morning without there being any sense of that receding having something I needed to manage.

I did not yet know if that was healing.

I wasn’t sure it was something to take pride in.

I sat on the step and drank my tea and allowed the question to exist without demanding an answer and watched the settlement go through its morning, and that, at least, seemed like something.