The Long Way Down the Mountain

A rejected mate has three choices, and the pack makes sure you learn all of them before you're old enough to need them. You can stay. You can stay in the pack that watched it happen, and let them be kind to you in that careful, awful way, and feel the bond ache every time the alpha passes within a hundred feet of you for the rest of your life. Some do. I don't judge them. It takes a particular kind of strength to live inside a wound. You can fade. That's the word the old wolves use, gentle and terrible. A severed bond can pull a wolf down — slowly, quietly, the color going out of everything — until one winter they simply don't get up. Nobody chooses fading, exactly. It chooses the ones who can't find a reason to fight it. Or you can go. I left Ashfall territory eleven days after my birthday, before dawn, with a pack on my back and my mother's silver earrings sewn into the lining of my coat so I couldn't lose them and couldn't easily sell them either. My mother stood at the treeline to see me off. She didn't try to stop me. That's the kind of love she has — the kind that knows when holding on is just another way of holding down. "Where will you go?" she asked. "Rivermouth, first." The Rivermouth pack ran the lowland trade routes; they were always short of hands. "After that I don't know. Away. North, maybe." "Della." She took my face in both her hands. The fire had burned eleven days ago and her eyes still hadn't forgiven it. "He was wrong. I want you to carry that down the mountain with you, do you understand me? Whatever reason that boy thinks he had — and he had a reason, an alpha doesn't do a thing like that for nothing — it does not make him right. The Goddess does not make mistakes about mates. She made one about him, maybe. Never about you." I didn't believe her. I want to be honest about that, the way I've tried to be honest about all of it. Walking down the mountain that morning I did not believe a single word of comfort anyone had offered me. I believed that I had been weighed, in front of three hundred witnesses, and found wanting, and that the wanting was something true about me that I would carry forever. It took me a long time to stop believing that. But I'll tell you the thing that started it — the small thing, the first crack of light. It was the long way down. The mountain road switches back on itself for nine miles before it reaches the valley, and I walked it slowly because there was no longer any hurry anywhere in my life. And about halfway down, where the road runs along a drop and you can see the whole valley spread out gold and green below, I stopped. I stopped because the bond moved. Severed bonds aren't supposed to move. They're supposed to be over — that's the whole point of the public word, the witnessed rejection, it's meant to be a clean cut. But standing on that road with the valley below me and Ashfall behind me, I felt the torn place under my ribs give a single, distinct, unmistakable pull. Backward. Toward him. I stood very still and felt it, and I understood two things at once, and they have shaped every day of my life since. The first thing was that Kael Ashfall had not severed our bond cleanly. He had not been able to. Whatever he'd said in front of three hundred wolves, some thread of the thing was still strung between us, and it was going to ache its way down this mountain with me whether I liked it or not. The second thing was harder, and colder, and it was the thing that finally — finally — straightened my spine. If the bond wasn't truly dead, then I hadn't been found wanting at all. He had simply been a coward. And I was not going to fade, and I was not going to stay and ache, and I was not going to spend my life believing a coward's verdict on my worth. I picked up my pack. I walked the rest of the long way down the mountain. And somewhere on those last switchbacks, with the bond pulling quietly backward the whole time, I stopped being a girl who had been rejected, and started being something else. I just didn't know yet what.