(Speaker: full moon. the wolves, it turns out, have a mortgage. payment due tonight.)
the warning reached meera at the forge in the late afternoon, fourth-hand, from kerra.
"vek told arin at midday," kerra said. "arin went to sivan, sivan's been asleep nine days so he came to me, and i don't have any authority so i came to you."
"told him what."
"that lyra's been at the north wall since dawn facing out, and she hasn't blinked, and when vek said her name she didn't look at him. she breathed at him." kerra's ledger was open in her hands and she hadn't written anything in it. "he said: like checking meat."
meera was already moving.
lyra was over the wall by the time she got there. the north parapet was empty and the sand below it had one set of prints going away and no set coming back.
vek was on the wall walking the line with his wrapped hands, and he did not say i told you — he said nothing at all, which was much worse and much more like him.
four hands and five hours, meera thought. and the first of them was a man in the provisional column, so it went the long way round.
she wrote that down that night. she made herself write it in kerra's ledger, in the second column, where the yard could read it.
vaun went at dusk, with the full moon coming up fat and yellow over the stone fangs — fourteen days out from the new moon that would put skarn's first rider at the gate. two clocks now, meera thought, a fortnight apart, taking turns.
vaun went at dusk.
he was the second shadowpaw off the west road in the fourteenth week, quiet, twenty-two, a good hand with snares and almost no conversation, and he had been sitting by the fire eating nothing when his pupils went wrong.
meera watched it happen from six feet away. it wasn't rage. that was the part nobody who hadn't seen it could ever be told properly — there was no anger in it at all. vaun finished chewing. he put two fingers to the snare-cord at his belt, the way he did forty times a day, checking a knot that was already tight. then his face went smooth, the way a face goes when the person behind it steps back from the window.
then he was on the wall. then he was over it.
"NOBODY FOLLOWS," kael roared, and thirty people froze, which had never once happened when she gave an order.
kael stood in the middle of the yard with his claws out and his ears flat and did not go after them.
that was what told her how bad it was.
"say it," meera said.
they were on the wall. below them the dark, and somewhere in the dark two shadowpaw with no people in them.
"the moonscar." kael's voice was flat. "shadowpaw don't have noses. we have borrowed noses."
"borrowed from what."
"the old pact. lunar spirits, the elders called them — i don't know what they are and neither did they. the deal is old and it is simple. the senses are lent. the rent is a hunt, one a moon, blood on the ground and the meat left where it fell, not eaten." he was looking straight out. "an exile can't hold the rite. no pack, no moonlit ground, no elder to call it. i haven't paid in three years and lyra hasn't paid in six and vaun hasn't paid since his flock threw him out."
"and when the rent goes unpaid."
"it collects." kael's jaw worked. "it takes the loan back with the borrower still attached. what's out there tonight isn't lyra gone mad. it's lyra with the part that was her handed back and the part that was lent walking around in the body."
meera let a long breath out.
"you knew."
"i have known since the night i met you." and there it was — the confession, and he made himself keep his eyes forward while he gave it. "i have said, in this yard, in front of everybody, pack is what you are. i have said it to arin over his sister's body. i believed it while i said it." his claws went in. "and i knew the whole time it was rented, and callable, and that i had let every shadowpaw in these walls think the thing that makes us worth keeping was ours."
"why."
"because a rented alpha is a tenant." he said it like something being cut out of him. "because you took me in for teeth and tracking and pack tactics, and every one of those is on loan, and the day you found that out you'd have been standing where you are now doing the arithmetic you are doing right now."
"i'm not doing arithmetic."
"you are," kael said. "you should be. you'd be a worse alpha if you weren't."
then, after a moment, quieter, because she hadn't asked and he told her anyway:
"you want to know what it's like when it starts going. everything gets further away. you smell a person and it's just — information. a shape, a weight, whether it's food. i've had four days of that in three years and both times i sat in a hole until it passed." his hands were flat on the stone. "the first thing the loan takes back is the part that knows a smell belongs to somebody you like."
which was true, and she hated it, and the cold room came open on its own — inputs: two feral shadowpaw, one settlement, no healer, thirty souls, eleven days of grain — and she felt the door swing and stood there with her hand on it.
not yet, she thought. i need this one warm. i'll pay for it later.
she left it open a crack and did it warm anyway.
the council was seventeen minutes long and every voice in it was different, which she noticed even then.
drayn wanted the gate shut and the walls manned and both of them killed on sight, and said so in one sentence, and then said nothing else for the rest of it.
tor asked what the rite required — dimensions, ground, blood volume, whether stone would hold it — because tor's grief and tor's mercy both arrive as questions about materials.
rion talked too much and too fast and made two jokes, one of which was cruel, and then stopped mid-sentence and said, "sorry. i do this. i'll be on the tower," and went.
sarika asked how many hours until moonrise and how many people could be inside the long room with the door barred, and did not ask anything else, because she had run a place before and knew which questions had answers.
thorn said: "i've hunted with lyra. she carried me two miles once." and shut up.
zira said nothing at all, and then, when meera looked at her: "don't. i've had my dead this season. i'll hold a spear and i won't hold a speech."
sivan — woken, grey, propped against the bench — said the useful thing.
"the pact is a contract," they said. "you are surrounded by contracts. you have a machine three miles east that exists to enforce one. ask the obvious question, alpha."
meera stopped.
"...whether somebody else can pay it."
"whether the rite cares who calls it," sivan said. "a debt does not usually mind whose hand puts the coin down."
the machine's answer took eleven seconds and cost her a labour-day.
"query received. request: presence at a shadowpaw lunar rite, function: beater, driving game toward the north scree." the eye-ring cycled. "assessment: the orchard's perimeter includes the north scree. sustained large-predator activity in the scree constitutes an orchard risk. pest suppression falls within standing order." a tick. "this unit will participate. logged as orchard maintenance. one labour-day, chargeable to the fulcrum."
"of course chargeable," meera said.
"the ledger does not make exceptions for emergency conditions. no clause exists."
"kerra's going to be insufferable about that."
"unparsed," the machine said, and went back to watching its trees.
they held the rite an hour before moonrise on the open stone above the fourth channel — grove ground, inside the orchard's own boundary, three miles east of the walls, which was the only reason the machine could be there at all. tor said the stone was flat enough and old enough to remember being asked. kerra said, more usefully, that it was channel four's catchment and therefore the machine's business by contract.
it was not a ceremony. kael was very clear about that, twice, in front of everyone: there were no words to get right, no way to do it beautifully. the pact wanted one thing done properly.
he was there under escort, technically — grove ground, his name still on the machine's list, six clean labour-days of ten worked off. arin walked him in and stood where an escort stands and looked embarrassed about it the entire time, and kael let him, and the machine logged it.
so: eleven of them who had walked out from the walls, strung in a line across the scree with their backs to the orchard, and the machine at the far end with its buckled leg, driving everything with a heartbeat down the slope onto eleven people who had nothing better than bows.
they killed four dune jackals and a young frost bear that should not have been that far south.
and they left the meat where it fell. all of it. eleven days of grain in the store and thirty people on tiers and they laid down more meat than the settlement had eaten in a month and did not touch it.
meera stood there in the cold with her hands empty and understood, properly, for the first time, what a rite was: a cost you pay in the currency you can least afford, on purpose, so that the thing you are asking believes you.
sarika, beside her, was crying without making any noise about it.
"say it," meera said.
"i counted it," sarika said. "i can't not count it. that's four days of full rations lying on rocks." she wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "and if we'd eaten one bite of it we'd have failed and i know that too. i just want somebody else to know both things are in my head at once."
"they're in mine."
"good," sarika said. "then i'll stop saying it."
lyra came back at moonrise.
she came up the scree with the loose, wrong, easy walk of a thing that has been running all night without tiring, and stopped at the blood, and stood over it a long time.
she smelled it before she reached it — they all watched her find the blood on the air from thirty feet out, head up, working, the borrowed thing doing exactly what it was lent for. and then something behind her eyes came back on, and she saw where she was standing, and what she was standing over.
then she went down onto her knees, hard, and made a sound meera never wrote down anywhere and never described to anybody.
meera crossed the scree and crouched next to her and did not touch her.
"bas," she said. "bas, lyra. it's done. it's paid."
after a while lyra was crying, and after that she was just an old shadowpaw woman kneeling in the dark on cold stone with her hands in the dirt.
vaun did not come back.
they found him three days later, four miles north, where the loan had run him until the body stopped. arin and thorn brought him home wrapped in a cloak, and grat carved his name in a brick, and the count went from thirty to twenty-nine, and kerra put a butterfly beside his name in the provisional column because that was the column he had died in.
that was the part meera couldn't put down. the whole night — the meat, the rite, the machine's invoice, lyra's hands in the dirt — and the thing that stayed was a boy who had been in these walls fourteen weeks and eaten at that fire and had a column.
kael was on the wall at dawn, where he'd been since the rite.
"the rent's paid," he said. "for a moon. lyra's got herself back and she'll keep it if we hold the rite every full moon and i mean every one, in front of everybody, and it will cost us food every single time."
"we'll hold it."
"you should hear the whole invoice first." he still hadn't looked at her. "there are four shadowpaw in these walls. me, lyra, arin, tarak. tarak's seven and the pact doesn't call children, but it will."
"how long."
"nine years. maybe ten." kael's hands were flat on the stone. "so that's a thing you know now that you can't stop knowing, and it's mine for not saying it sooner."
meera thought about the boy's name in the brick and the meat on the rocks and the nine years, and did the arithmetic, and let him watch her do it — because he'd been right that she would, and because letting him see it was the only honest thing she had.
"here's my half," she said. "you were a tenant who thought he had to be a landlord to be kept. i'd have kept you if you'd walked in here with no nose and no teeth and told me on the first night, and i'm not going to be able to prove that to you, ever, and you're going to carry that." she put her hand flat next to his. "so we'll both be carrying something. that's the arrangement."
kael laughed once. it was a terrible sound and it was real.
"the arrangement," he said. "you keep making those."
"they're cheaper than promises."
below them, out on the scree, the ravens had found the meat, and were taking the settlement's four days of rations apart in the grey light, exactly as the pact required.