The Binding

They sent me to my brother's killer with my mother's knife strapped to the inside of my thigh, and the elders called it peace.

I had crossed three days of high country to stand in the great hall of Vornhold, and every step of it I had practiced not flinching. The hall was all blackened timber and old smoke, antlers and faded banners, the smell of woodfire and too many wolves breathing the same air. Three hundred of them lined the walls, his pack on the right in grey and iron, mine on the left, what was left of us, thin and salt-stained and proud. They had dressed me in Saltmere green like a gift. I had dressed myself in the blade.

Bram should have been the one walking me in. My brother had laughed louder than anyone in any room, and he had died face-down in the river mud at the Fording with this pack's teeth in his throat. Eleven months ago. I had washed him myself, in water so cold it stopped my hands, and I had promised him that I would not let his death buy anyone a single easy night.

And here I was, buying one.

The Alpha waited on the dais. I had built him in my head for a year as a monster, all scar and snarl, and the truth was worse. Kane of Vornhold was quiet. Tall, dark, still as a held breath, with a war-leader's economy in the way he refused to move. He watched me come the whole length of that hall and he did not look away, not once, not even when I let him see exactly what was behind my face. A coward would have looked away. I hated that he didn't.

The eldest of the pact-keepers lifted her voice over the fire. The old law, she said. Blood for blood had bled both packs white; the only binding strong enough to hold a peace was a mating-bond between the two lines. Saltmere had offered its fiercest. Vornhold had offered its Alpha. Let the moon witness. Let them speak the word and be bound.

He took my hand. That was all, his palm against mine, dry and warm and rough with old work, and the bond went off like a struck flint behind my ribs.

I felt it travel the whole length of me, a pull so deep and so certain it buckled my knees, my wolf surging up to meet his with a sound I had never made in my life. Mine, something said, in a voice that was not my mind and would not be argued with. Mine. His pupils blew wide and black. I watched it hit him too, watched the still man go rigid as struck stone, and three hundred wolves drew breath at once, because a fated bond is not a thing you can fake, and it is not a thing you can hide.

Of all the cruelties. I had come to kill this man, and the moon had just named him the other half of my soul.

“Refuse it,” someone hissed from the green-clad rows, but I knew the arithmetic better than they did. Refuse the bond at the rite and the truce died there on the floorstones, and Saltmere with it. We could not survive another winter of this war and every wolf in that hall knew it. My people's lives, or my brother's memory. That was the choice they had wrapped in green and called a wedding.

So I looked the man who killed Bram in his gold-dark eyes, and I said the word that bound me to him. The hall roared loud enough to shake soot from the rafters. His hand tightened on mine, just slightly, like he already knew I was lying about something.

He was right. I belonged to him now, by the oldest law there is, sealed inside the walls of my enemy with no road home, the bond singing in my blood like a fever, and my mother's knife still warm against my thigh.