Calla's POV
The pack gates looked smaller than I thought they would.
That was the first thing I saw. Four days ago, I had walked out of them in a white dress with my head held high and my chest caving in. I was walking back in dirty boots with a jacket that wasn't mine. The warmth of the forest was still in my chest like a second heartbeat.
The gates looked smaller.
I still walked through them.
The first person who saw me stopped in their tracks. I knew the woman from the east side. She was holding a basket in her hands, but it stayed halfway to the ground where she had forgotten she was holding it. She just looked.
After that, someone else saw me.
Then someone else came.
It spread like things do in a pack. Quickly and quietly, one person at a time, until I got to the center of the pack ground and saw twenty wolves standing in a loose circle, not talking.
I had walked on this same ground my whole life.
It had never felt like this before.
Some of their faces looked shocked. Some were scared. Some were mean and rude and didn't try to hide it. I knew the look of the older man in the back with his arms crossed and his jaw set. The look that said, "You don't belong here, and no matter what I see, I'll keep thinking that."
I had seen that look before in my life.
I looked for the sick people.
Darian pushed through the crowd and ahead of me without being asked. He took me to the building next to the main hall. The room for healing. The door was open.
I went inside.
Three beds. Three people.
Petra, who was old, was by the window with her eyes open but far away. Corrin was in the middle bed, and he was a big man who had become thin and grey. There was a young wolf on the other side whose name I didn't know. He was about sixteen years old and his mother was sitting next to him with his hand in both of hers.
Bess the healer was in the middle of the beds. When I walked in, she looked at me and her face changed quickly. She chose something that was close to hope but not quite there. "You came," she said. "Tell me what you see," I said.
Yes, she did. Fast and clear. The dimming. The wolf slowly pulled away from the body, like a tide going out and not coming back. There were no wounds she could see. She couldn't help anyone who was sick. Nothing but absence. Getting bigger.
I heard everything.
Then I walked over to Petra's bed, sat on the edge of it, and looked at her.
Petra had never been nice to me. When I was a kid, she was one of the loudest people. Girl without wolves. Wasting space in the pack. I remembered being eight years old and hearing her say it in the market. I tried very hard not to show my face.
I took her hand.
I had no idea what I was doing. I want to make that clear. I didn't have a plan. I didn't get any training. The only thing I felt was the warmth in my chest that had been growing since the forest, the memory of silver light at the ends of my fingers, and a very strong feeling that this was wrong and I needed to fix it.
I stopped thinking when I held her hand in both of mine.
The heat moved.
It moved through my chest and arms like heat moves through a pipe. Slow and steady. It kept going when it got to my hands. Into Petra. I could feel it leave me and where it went, like you can feel something in the dark by its shape. I could feel the cold grey space inside her where her wolf had gone quiet, and I could feel the warmth flow into it like water into a crack.
Petra's grip on my hand got stronger.
Her eyes got sharper.
They got their light back. Not all at once. Not fast. Like turning up the brightness on a lamp. But it came back. I saw it come back, and the warmth in my chest kept moving until it reached the edge of where the sickness was. Then it stopped.
She looked at me and said, "Calla." "Yes," I said. "You're glowing," she said. Her voice was rough but real.
I looked at my hands.
Light silver. This time, not faint. Steady and clear, it poured out between our hands and spread up my arms and wrists like moonlight had found a new home.
There was no sound in the room.
I stood up, let go of Petra's hand, and turned around.
There were too many people in the doorway. All of the wolves in the pack ground were pushed close together to get a better look. Darian was in front. I had never seen that look on his face before, and I didn't know what to call it.
Next, I looked at Corrin. Then the boy came. Every time, it took longer. I could feel the warmth in my chest getting thinner, like a fire does when it starts to run out of wood. It wasn't going to last forever. But it stayed. It stayed for a long time.
I was so tired when I got up from the boy's bed that it hurt all the way down to my bones.
The mum was in tears. She was crying and holding her son's face in her hands.
I went back to the door.
There were more people in the crowd. It looked like the whole pack was there now. In the afternoon light outside, they pressed together, quiet, and watched me stand in the healing room doorway with the silver light fading from my hands.
I looked at them.
They stared at me.
No one called me wolfless.
I was looking at the faces, not sure what I was looking for, when I found it.
In the very back of the crowd. Halfway behind the building's corner. Elder Maren.
He wasn't surprised. He wasn't scared. His pale, steady eyes were on me, and there was something hot and old in them that was barely held down.
No shock.
Anger.
The kind of anger that comes from seeing something you tried very hard to stop happen anyway.
He saw me watching.
He didn't turn away. He looked at me for a long time, then turned and walked away slowly. The crowd followed him like water.
I stood there and looked at the spot where he had been.
Then it took place.
It didn't hurt. That surprised me later when I thought about it. I thought it would hurt. But it was more like a sound that stopped. You had been hearing a sound for so long that you forgot it was there. Then, all of a sudden, it was gone, leaving behind a huge silence.
Something between Darian and me just stopped.
A string. My whole life, I've been thin and old and pulled tight. Snapping cleanly. Gone.
I put my hand flat against my chest.
There was a noise behind me that Darian made. Short and to the point. He felt it too.
I should have felt sad. That thread had been there for a long time. It had changed how I moved through the world without me knowing it.
But I didn't feel sad.
What I felt instead came from below. Going up into the space that the broken thread left behind. Very, very awake and very, very old.
It didn't pull toward Darian.
It didn't pull toward the gates, the pack, or anything else in this area.
It pulled toward the trees.
Toward the dark woods at the end of everything.
Toward him.