Calla's POV
They clothed me in white like I was being buried.
I didn't say that to anyone. I stood and stood before the smashed window of my little room on the edge of the pack grounds and thought very subsecypitiously as Maris nailed moonflowers into the strand of my hair with laboratory, piteous fingers. White dress. White flowers. Pale throat bare to the night. It was necessary to the Moon Ceremony, all the unexhibited females of marriageable age in the company of the Alpha, the pack, and the sky.
The sky, the sky at any rate cared not about me. The pack did not.
You are beautiful, Maris, you are beautiful, my love, she said.
I looked at her in the reflection with a mirror. They didn't match her voice.
You need not come, I said to her. Without a witness it would be disgraceful enough.
"Calla--"
"I know what tonight is." I kept my voice even. I had been waiting even twenty-one years. "I have no wolf. I have no shift. The rit of mates and wolves is both and mine is neither. I know what Darian will say to me.
I was still holding the hands of Maris in my hair. She didn't argue. The best of all was this; she did not argue.
The ceremony ground is in the midst of the Vale territory, a big clearing, enclosed by elder trees with black bark, which are even older than the pack itself. Torches are silver-white on Moon Night, and not orange. I never knew why. I asked and was told that it was the color of the goddess. I asked what goddess and he replied you should not ask dumb questions.
I was standing behind eleven other girls who were all as bright as jasmine mercury who was that inner light, that animal warmth behind the eyes that there was something that lived in the eyes. Even nervous, they blazed. I was twenty-one years of age and had never fired a single day in my life.
Wolfless. That was the word they used. It was the kindest of them.
Alpha Caius Vale stood on the stand that was elevated in his ritual blacks, wide and cold as a winter-mountain. Beside him stood his son.
Darian.
I was used to Darian since we were children - since he brought me the nice spot near the fire, and engaged in fights with people who bullied me. I had been dragging long years along a silent and obstinate object that I never named and making it impossible to lose.
He did not even look at me when I got into the line. I told myself that was nothing.
The Alpha called up one after another the girls. Darian moved slowly out of the platform one after the other, and, approaching each of the exhibited females, made the Claiming Words or withdrew. Each acceptance responded to the acceptance. Each rejection was worked out under the luxurious fiction of incompatibility.
Then my name.
"Calla Ashveil."
My feet were no longer well set on the ground. I continued to walk- my head held high, as was the case with my mother when I was six, and then she vanished. Head up, Calla. Let them see you looking back.
I stood still in front of the platform. Darian came down the steps.
At a distance his countenance was an enigma which I could read. Not cruelty. Something worse still--a resolution that was arrived at, and sealed and as hard as pressed ground.
He stopped three feet from me.
The pack was silent. Even the torches seemed to have been silent.
"Calla Ashveil," he said. Not to me. To the crowd. It was the cry of an Alpha of tomorrow and it reached any corner of the clearing without trouble. "I do not accept."
There it was.
I had prepared for this. I was telling myself that I was ready. I had practised a frozen face and a straight back and dry eyes, and I had thought, indeed I had thought, that practising would be all.
It was not enough.
Because then he kept talking.
And I cannot identify myself with a girl who fails to carry a wolf he said, and I still speak, still to the crowd, still in that carrying Alpha voice. The Ashveil girl is not a wolf, neither in the beginning and at the end of her life. She is not a suitable mate. She is not fit to be a member of the pack. She is--"
"Darian."
I said it quietly. I surprised both of us.
He stopped. There was a smile in passing through his face. Something human. But his father was searching the platform, and whatever it was, Darian Vale covered it up just as he apparently covered up all memories of the boy, who had befriended me by the fire.
There is no home she has here, he reasoned. I hereby denounce claim of Ashveil.
The pack didn't roar this time. They murmured. And there is something in the buzz of a crowd, when you are the one addressed, there is a sort of a texture, it goes under the skin and gets stuck. I thought it was going like a splinter.
I didn't run. I want to be clear about that. I walked. I strode leisurely and silently off the ceremony ground and beyond the outer ring of trees and beyond the markers of the boundary with their red painted stones, and I was only when I reached the tree line of the Forbidden Forest, the place all pack children were told would kill them, swallow them, give them back but their regrets, that I ceased walking.
Death was not the way one could see it in the forest.
It had an appearance of waiting.
The black-bark trees were huge on both sides of the dirt road which was not really a dirt road but was, after all, a path, and the smell of the air was cool water and something under it, something very ancient and very pure, something inside a word no one had said in a long time. The torchlight of the ceremony ground became obscured behind me. The moonlight, and in this case, was sourceless silver-white, everywhere and nowhere.
I walked until my legs failed to support me and then in a sitting-posture, I sat down at the feet of the biggest tree I had ever seen; and its root was so broad that three people could not hold hands around it, and the bark was as starless as the sky.
I sat there for a long time.
I was not crying. I would like to be specific about that as well.
I was sitting, contemplating how it was at least more comfortable than the place that was supposed to be my home, in a forest that was known to kill people, when I heard the sound.
Not a footstep. Too deliberate for that. A footfall, controlled, measured, the type of motion that something very large made, which was deciding, very cautiously, not to startle me.
I should have run.
I looked up instead.
He was on the brink of the moon-light, and it was a threatening-looking man, tall and dressed in dark, and his face had been a handsome one and now was harder and older than it had been a handsome one, and his eyes were as blue as sky before it lightning, and his hair hung sloping across his forehead as though he had never had anyone to cut it in his beard. He was staring at me as people stare at things that they lost faith in.
Like relief. Like terror. As though to have been held since it has hardened into prayer.
I stared at him.
He gazed long and inexplicably at me.
and he, not saying a word, fell on his knees.
The Shadow King, exile, monster, myth, was kneling in the root-dark earth of the Forbidden Forest in the white moonlight, before a wolfless girl in a white dress, and bowed his head.
This had not been expected of me.
I have been seeking you, three decades, said he, very softly.
She was dismissed on the ground of possessing nothing.
He was kneeling because she was everything.