"Dry your eyes. You're up soon. Didn't you say you wanted to look flawless when the pack captured the memory-crystals?"
It took a long while before the whimpering on the other end of the sending-stone finally quieted.
Then Kael's voice came through again, clear and edged with impatience.
"Enough. Go make your peace in the mind-link circle, now. Our Mating Ceremony is nearly upon us and here you are throwing a fit. It's the night the moon binds us, and I have no patience left to coddle you."
Then, remembering what I'd just said, he let out a scoff.
"Besides, if the bond really doesn't happen, could you actually stand to walk away?"
Ten seasons at his side. He didn't believe I'd ever leave.
I ended the link, shifted toward the side, and pushed the carriage window down.
I let the wind pour in, tearing apart the ceremony braids and moonflower dressing that had taken three full hours to finish.
The driver of the obsidian carriage, who had heard every word, opened his mouth, hesitated, then closed it again.
In the end he couldn't hold it back.
"Miss, what kind of male did you go and find? A wolf like that can still claim himself a mate?"
"When I claimed my Luna, I'd have set her above the whole pack if I could. Carried her over the den-threshold on my own back."
Carried?
A faint bitterness spread through my chest, and deep inside me my wolf stirred, uneasy, pacing.
Kael had carried me once too.
That season of the great storm, snow half a wolf deep swallowed the whole of the Royal Academy grounds. Even the training runs were called off.
My fever burned so hot the healers feared for me. My denmate kept swapping out cold cloths, one after another, each one frozen stiff, until she was nearly in tears from panic.
It was Kael who forced his way past everyone guarding the she-wolves' quarters and carried me on his back all the way to the Healing Hall, three miles across the frozen territory.
Drifting in and out, I felt him shivering with cold, stumbling again and again through the snow.
Yet I was warm, impossibly warm. Not even the wind reached me.
Because he'd stripped off his own fur-lined cloak and draped it over me, and by the end he was drained and frost-bitten, his scent gone sharp with cold cedar and stale rain.
Back then his heart was so real that even a sky full of wind and snow could see it.
The driver clicked his tongue after he heard it.
"So how did he turn into this?"
I shook my head in silence.
I didn't know either.
Maybe he'd changed the moment Seraphine came back to the territory.
The first time he lost his composure over Seraphine, he smashed the paired clay cups we'd shaped with our own hands at the hearth.
The first time, on a rain-soaked night, he left me stranded at the pack hall past the moon's height and turned back to go fetch Seraphine.
The first time I lay under the healer's knife, he was riding the high wind-runs with Seraphine at the festival grove.
From the moment Seraphine declared herself set against any bond, it was as if Kael had found his excuse, showering her with open, shameless favor.
Countless first times, countless times I gave way, all piling up, until without my noticing it had become this.
When I left the mind-link circle, Kael dropped a single mark of question beside my name in the thread.
And then nothing more.
In his eyes this was just me staging a little protest, baring my teeth over nothing.
It wouldn't be long before I came crawling back, meek, gaze lowered, ready to tilt my head in deference and admit I was wrong.
But this time, I was truly worn out. So worn that my wolf had gone quiet inside me, curled small, unwilling even to howl.
Under the front-runners' discreet, startled stares, I gathered up the heavy skirt of my ceremony gown and went back to my room.
I stripped away the moonflower dressing. I peeled off the ceremony gown.
Collapsed onto the bed, staring up at the guesthouse's snow-white ceiling, I still felt dazed.
How had it come to this so suddenly?
Just last night, on this very bed, I'd been too thrilled, too full of hope to sleep, the mark at my neck warm with foolish waiting.
When I opened my crystal communicator, Seraphine had just posted to the howl-network.
【In case certain people get sensitive again, let me share a crystal-vision first so the whole territory knows the truth. This was purely a run-through of the ceremony. Kael and I never crossed any line, all right!】
Attached was the vision of the ceremony procession beneath the moon.
I called it up, like I was punishing myself.
Watching Seraphine in a ceremony gown, gliding gracefully toward Kael through a ring of applauding packmates.
Swearing before the ceremony-keeper, under the Moon Goddess, that they'd never part, that only death would sever them.
Then the passing of the claiming-tokens, fingers laced together.
The longer I watched, the more a bitter laugh slipped out of me, and something in my chest cracked with each frame.
Everything but the claiming-bite. They'd done it all.
