Chapter 30: Full Moon

"Yes," I said.

I said it loud enough for the back of the hall, and the hall came apart.

Pia screamed.

The Redfern elders thumped the benches.

Torin put his forehead against mine in front of three hundred wolves and did not care who saw his face.

The full moon came eleven nights later.

They held the ceremony in the flood field between the two houses, in the first bed that Pia and I had dug.

The ash had been raked out and the soil turned.

Moonflax seedlings stood in straight rows, no higher than my ankle.

Both packs came, and they stood together on the grass.

Nobody had told them where to stand, and they mixed.

I wore a plain green dress that Pia had sewn in a week and sworn at for most of it.

Torin wore his flannel.

The oldest Redfern elder, the one with the white braid, tied our wrists with a length of lavender stalk.

"Torin Brask, do you take this wolf as yours?"

"I do. For as long as I breathe."

"Clara Dunning, do you take this wolf as yours?"

"I do," I said. "For the rest of my life, and any life after."

The elder bent and cut the stalk with a garden knife.

I had not known she carried one.

"Then it is done," she said. "Go and be loud somewhere else."

A roar went up from both packs.

Torin picked me up and carried me off the field.

He did not put me down until he had kicked his own front door shut behind us.

He set me against the wall of the front hallway and kissed me.

It was a hard kiss, and long.

His hands went into my hair and held my head tilted back.

I opened my mouth and he took it.

"Wife," he said against my lip.

"Say it again."

"Mate. Wife. Mine."

I pulled his flannel off his shoulders and let it fall.

He got me up the stairs somehow.

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