On the night I turned eighteen, the boy I had loved since I was nine stood up in front of two hundred wolves and threw me away.
But first my mother pinned my hem.
"Hold still," she said, with three pins in her mouth. "If you twist, the vines go crooked."
The dress had been a tablecloth a week ago. White linen, gone the colour of milky tea, with green vines stitched around the border by a grandmother I never met. In one corner the same green thread made a small mark, three loops knotted through each other, the one my mother scratched into everything she owned. My mother had cut it on the kitchen floor at night, when she thought I was asleep. I had heard the scissors through the wall. I had heard her stop, more than once, and sit there in the quiet.
"Everyone will know what it is," I said.
"Everyone will know you look like a girl worth marrying." She took the pins out of her mouth and stood back. Ilse Holloway was small and sharp-chinned, with grey coming in at her temples like frost on a fence. "There. Turn."
I turned. In the spotted mirror over the sink I looked like someone else's daughter. Someone with money.
"He won't care about the dress," I said.
My mother's face did something complicated. "No," she said. "I don't suppose he will."
The Moot Circle sat on the high meadow above Larch Hollow, eleven grey stones in a ring, waist high, older than anybody's grandmother's grandmother. The whole pack came up for a mating moon. Two hundred people in their good coats, kids on shoulders, the elders on the bench of split cedar with blankets over their knees. Torches every few yards. Pine smoke and woodsmoke and the cold, metal smell of a clear October night.
I walked in with my mother on one side and nobody on the other.
Four other girls and one boy were coming of age that moon. They had fathers, aunts, cousins in clumps around them. I had Ilse, and Ilse had me, and the pack had always been polite about that in a way that felt like a draught under a door. My father, my mother told me the one time I asked, was a man from over the river. Then she went out to the woodpile and split logs until dark.
"Chin up," my mother murmured.
"It is up."
"Higher. Like you own the stones."
Across the ring, Cade Ashby stood with his father.
I'd like to say I didn't look. I looked. Everyone looked. Cade at eighteen was the kind of golden that made the old women cluck: wheat-coloured hair he never cut on time, shoulders his father had been proud of since he was fourteen, a jaw that set hard when he was trying not to laugh. He was going to be Alpha after Royce. Everybody knew it the way they knew the river ran south.
And everybody knew he had taught me to swim off the boathouse dock when I was nine and terrified. They knew he'd walked me home from the harvest dance last year, the long way, by the orchard. They did not know he'd kissed me under the apple trees, once, quickly, as if he'd been dared, and then looked at me like he'd broken something.
He wasn't looking at me now. He was looking at the moon.
"Moonrise," said Elder Mabry, and her voice carried the way old voices do in cold air.
It came up over the ridge like it had been called. Fat and white, too big, laying silver down the length of the meadow until every stone threw a long blue shadow.
The bonds came with it.
I had been told about it all my life. A thread, people said. A warmth. Like being tugged by the sleeve. Nobody told me it would feel like a hook going in under my ribs on the left side and pulling, hard, toward one place.
Across the circle, Cade put a hand flat against his chest.
The pack made a sound. A low, glad murmur, like a room full of people seeing snow start. Someone laughed. Somebody's mother said "Oh!" and clapped.
Gold. I could see it, faintly, the way you see heat over a road. A line from me to him, through the cold air, bright as a struck match.
I took a step. I couldn't help it.
Cade's father put a hand on his shoulder.
That was all. Royce Ashby, broad and grey-bearded, with the heavy patience of a man who has never once had to raise his voice, laid his hand on his son's shoulder and left it there. I saw Cade's knuckles go white against his shirt.
"Cade," I said. Quietly. Just his name.
He looked at me, then. Really looked. His eyes were wet. I remember thinking that was strange, that he looked like someone at a funeral.
He stepped into the centre of the ring.
"I, Cade Royce Ashby," he said, "son of the Alpha of Larch Hollow, reject this bond."
The meadow went silent.
"I reject Wren Ilse Holloway. Before the moon and the stones and the pack. I want no part of her."
The thread snapped.
I have tried for years to describe that. Here is the closest I can get: it was like missing a step in the dark, except the step was inside me, and I kept falling after my feet had hit the ground. I didn't scream. I don't think I could have. My knees went, and my mother's arm was there under my elbow, iron-hard, holding me upright by the tablecloth sleeve.
Two hundred people were looking at me.
I watched Cade walk out of the circle. He didn't run. He didn't look back. His father's hand stayed on his shoulder the whole way, guiding him, the way you'd guide a horse past something that frightens it.
"Breathe," my mother said, low and fierce. "Breathe, Wren. Look at me."
I couldn't look at her. I was looking at the elders' bench, because Old Crewe the healer had stood up from it, and she wasn't looking at me either.
She was looking at my mother.
And my mother, still holding me up, said something under her breath I was never meant to hear.
"Not yet. He wasn't supposed to do it yet."