Luna POV
The world was stone and dust and dark.
Luna could not see. She could not hear anything except a high ringing sound where the explosion had been. She was face down in rubble with something heavy across her back and her hands were pressed flat against the ground and she thought very clearly, very calmly, the way her brain went calm when things got bad enough move. You have to move right now.
She moved.
She pushed against the weight on her back. Her arms shook. The stone cut into her palms and she felt the skin open and felt the blood and did not stop pushing. The weight shifted. She pushed harder. Something rolled away and cold air hit her and she got her knees under her and lifted herself out of the debris like something being born.
Her hands were bleeding freely. She looked at them for exactly one second.
Then she looked for Calder.
"Calder." Her voice came out wrecked dust in her throat, ringing still in her ears. She was already moving through the rubble, pulling pieces away, throwing them. "Calder, make a sound. Any sound. Right now."
A cough. Low and wet and the best sound she had ever heard in her life.
She found him under a beam a heavy wooden crosspiece that had come down from the grain store's upper frame when the wall collapsed. It was across his legs. His eyes were open and he was trying to push it off himself with hands that could not get traction.
She grabbed the beam.
Later she would think about this moment and not be able to explain it. The beam was old hardwood, water-soaked and dense, and it weighed more than she did. She knew that. She had known that kind of weight her whole life she had moved furniture and supply crates and feed bags in this pack since she was old enough to be given work. She knew what her body could lift.
She lifted it anyway.
Her vision went white at the edges. Her legs were shaking and her bleeding hands slipped and she reset her grip and lifted and the beam came up and she threw it sideways and it landed in the rubble with a crash that sent dust billowing.
She grabbed Calder under both arms.
"I've got you. I've got you, come on"
"My legs," he said.
"Can you feel them?"
"Yes. They hurt."
"Good. Hurt is fine. Hurt means they work. Come on."
She got him up. He got his feet under him unsteady, leaning hard on her, but standing. She wrapped his arm over her shoulders and they moved. Through the gap where the wall used to be, out into the cold open air, away from the grain store and the soldiers and the smoke that was thickening as the fire spread.
She did not know where Crest had gone. She did not look for him.
She found a clear patch of ground beyond the store's shadow dark, away from the fires, close to the tree line. She got Calder down onto the grass and checked him as fast as she could with her shaking, bleeding hands. His wound was worse. The beam had not helped it. But he was conscious and breathing and looking at her.
"You lifted that beam," he said.
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Luna. You lifted that beam."
"Calder." She met his eyes. "I don't want to talk about it right now. I want to get you to the south tunnel entrance. I want to get you out of this pack's territory and find a neutral healer and then" Her voice did something she did not intend. She stopped and pressed her lips together and started again. "And then we figure out the next part."
He was quiet for a moment. The sounds of the raid were further away now the Ashen Claw soldiers were moving deeper into the pack, not toward the tree line. They had a window. Small, but real.
"I don't think I can make the tunnel," Calder said.
"You can."
"Luna." He said her name the way he had always said it when he needed her to hear something she did not want to hear. Gentle and direct and entirely honest. "Look at me."
She looked. She saw what he was telling her and she looked away.
"Look at me," he said again.
She looked back. She kept looking this time even though everything in her wanted to run from what she saw in his face the grey settling under his skin, the effort it was costing him just to stay focused, the way his body had stopped fighting and started resting, which was not the same thing at all.
"No," she said. Quietly. Just the word.
He lifted both hands and held her face. His hands were cold. They were shaking. He held on anyway.
"You were always the strongest one," he said. "Not me. Everyone thought it was me because I was loud about it. But it was always you. You just did it quietly."
"Stop it."
"Whatever comes next" He paused. Breathed. "Whatever he does, wherever you end up you remember that. You are not what they said you were. You never were."
"Calder." Her voice broke completely this time. She let it. "Calder, please. Please don't. I need you to stay. I need you to"
"I know." His thumbs moved against her face. "I know you do. I'm sorry, little wolf."
Little wolf. He had called her that since she was small. Since before she knew she didn't have one before the pack told her what she was and was not. He had called her that every day of her life and made it sound like something to be proud of.
She put her hands over his.
She felt the moment it happened. She felt it the way you feel weather change something in the air, something in the quality of the silence. His hands got heavier. His eyes stayed open but the focus went out of them, slowly, like a light with a failing switch.
She did not scream.
She stayed very still. She held his hands against her face and she did not scream and she did not move. She sat with him in the dark near the tree line while the fire finished eating the east ward and the sounds of the raid slowly quieted into the specific silence that comes after destruction.
She did not know how long she sat there. Long enough for the cold to go all the way through her. Long enough for the fires to burn lower.
When her father's men found her, she did not hear them coming. She was somewhere else already somewhere small and very quiet, behind everything, where the grief had not reached yet because she had not let it in.
There were two of them. Not Crest. Different men. They said nothing to her. They did not look at Calder. They took her by the arms and pulled her upright and she stood without resistance because standing required nothing from the place she was in.
One of them pulled her wrists in front of her. She felt the rope go around them. She felt the knot pulled tight.
She looked down at the rope on her bleeding hands.
She looked up at the man who had tied it. He did not meet her eyes.
She thought: my father sent men with rope.
He had not sent rope for a rescue. You did not bring rope to rescue someone.
He had known, when he drove away in that transport, exactly what kind of men he was going to send back.
She filed that away. She put it somewhere inside herself that was not the place where Calder was somewhere harder, somewhere that did not feel yet and might not feel for a long time.
The men walked her forward. She walked.
She did not fight them. She did not speak. She did not look back at Calder on the ground because she had already said goodbye in the only way that had ever mattered between them quietly, with her hands over his, in the dark.
Whatever came next, she was going to be ready for it.
She did not know yet what ready would cost her.