Chapter 19: The Ring

They drew the circle in sawdust on the boards of the Long Hall, thirty feet across.

Two hundred wolves backed to the walls.

The three Alphas sat on the bench, and Orrin stood at the edge with the black staff in his fist.

Jonas stood among his own, with his hands shoved in his coat pockets.

He had not said a word since Cassia spoke.

His eyes had gone gold and stayed that way.

I took off my coat and handed it to the woman with the shaved head.

"If she cuts me," I said, "you do not step in."

"I know," Jonas said, to nobody, in a voice that cost him.

Cassia walked into the circle in her cream cardigan and folded it over a chair.

Under it she wore a plain grey shirt and trousers, and her forearms were thin.

Some of the Ironwood wolves laughed under their breath.

I did not.

I had seen her carry a pot of stew across a kitchen with one hand and sign for a delivery with the other.

She had never once dropped anything.

"Circle law," Orrin called. "No weapons. No help. The fight ends when one yields or cannot go on."

"I yield to nothing," Cassia said pleasantly.

She came at me.

She was faster than I had thought, much faster, low and quiet on her feet.

She did not fight like a pack wolf.

Someone had trained her, and it had not been Ironwood.

Her first strike took me across the cheek, open-handed, hard enough to turn my head.

I came back with an elbow, and she was not there.

She slipped under it and put two fingers into my ribs, exactly where the Ironwood hunter had broken one at the lodge.

I went down on one knee.

A gasp went round the wall.

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