The courtyard made a sound she had never heard before and hopes never to hear again.
Rejection is law. Rejection is a formal thing, spoken, witnessed, and it does what it does — it cuts the bond, and it takes the wolf out of the rejected, because a wolf that has been refused cannot be trusted to live beside the one who refused it. Everybody knew that. It was in the songs. It had happened four times in Blackthorn in living memory and two of those had walked into the sea afterwards.
It was, everyone agreed, a mercy.
The bond tore.
Eira went down on the flagstones. Not gracefully; her knees hit first and then her hands, and the cold of the stone came up her arms, and inside her chest something enormous was being pulled out through a hole too small for it.
She heard herself make a noise.
She heard Hesta scream her name from the stair arch, which meant Hesta had followed her up, which meant Hesta was going to be punished for it.
And then the pulling reached the bottom of her — the place where a wolf should have been, and where, for eighteen years, there had been nothing at all.
It found the nothing.
And the nothing turned over.
Afterwards, the accounts did not agree.
Ninety-one wolves said the torches went out. Others said the torches burned but stopped giving light, which is a different thing and worse. The recorder, an honest man, wrote in the roll that at the moment of rejection every silver ornament in the upper courtyard — the alpha's chain, the visitors' brooches, four hundred years of Blackthorn's plate laid out on the long tables — went black. Not tarnished. Black, and soft, and running slightly, like fat in a pan.
Everyone agreed about the sound: that there wasn't one.
Everyone agreed that Garrick Vale, alpha of Blackthorn, went down onto one knee on his own dais, and that he did not do it on purpose.
Eira knelt on the stones with her hands flat in front of her and her hair hanging down and felt something come up out of the floor of herself, unhurried, curious, ancient, awake — and it was not a wolf, and it was hers, and it liked her.
She lifted her head.
Six hundred wolves were on their knees in the dark of their own courtyard, and not one of them could get up.
Cassian Vale was on his knees too, with his mother's hand still on his sleeve, and he was staring at her the way you stare at the sea coming over a wall.
"What are you?" he said.
I don't know, Eira thought, standing in the wreck of the only home she had ever had, with six hundred wolves on their knees in front of her and her heart going like a hammer. But it likes me. Nobody has ever liked me before.
And Eira, of no house, unranked, eighteen years old and four minutes rejected, discovered that she had no idea — and that whatever it was, it had just noticed him.
She got up.
Nobody else did.
She walked out through the gate of the pack that had raised her and fed her and never once said her name, over stone that cracked under her bare feet in a line from the dais to the arch, and behind her the whole of Blackthorn stayed down in the dark until she was through the trees.