The unranked were not forbidden to attend a Claiming. They were simply given work that ended after it started.
Eira had been scrubbing the flags of the lower kitchen since four in the morning, and she was still scrubbing them at dusk, because Hesta had found three more things for her to do each time she stood up. That was not cruelty. Hesta was seventy and had a bad hip and had once, when Eira was nine, given her a whole pear — not a piece of one, a whole one — and told her to take it outside and eat it where nobody could see her. It remains the largest thing anybody has ever given Eira in her life, and she has never told a soul about it. It was simply how Blackthorn worked. An unranked girl has no place at a Claiming, and a girl with no place is given work instead, and nobody who gives it to her thinks about it for a second afterwards.
She heard the horns start.
Six hundred wolves in the upper courtyard, in the cold, under a moon three days off full. The pups would be up on the wall with their legs hanging over. Somebody would be selling hot wine out of the back of a cart and somebody else would be pretending not to have bought any.
Eira put her forehead against the cool of the kitchen wall and let herself be eighteen for a moment.
Because it was her Claiming too. Technically. Her name was on the roll because the law said every wolf born under Blackthorn's moon was on the roll at eighteen, and the law had never got around to writing an exception for a girl who had never shifted.
Not once. Not at nine or twelve or fifteen. Not at any of the four Turnings, where they had stood her in a ring of torches with everybody watching until her skin went blue and nothing happened.
They had stopped calling her by name after the fourth one. The unranked. Which was not a name; it was a description, like the gate or the well.
"Girl." Hesta, in the doorway, out of breath. "Go up."
"I've the flags —"
"Leave the flags." The old woman's face was doing something Eira had never seen it do. "They called for you."