Chapter 26: Who Kneels

One by one, the pack knelt.

The grey-bearded elder had gone first, and the Beta followed him down, then the guards who had taken off their hats.

After that it ran around the ring.

Wolves lowered their heads to the pine needles, and people went to their knees beside them.

Two hundred of them, and every face was turned to me.

I stood in a body I did not know how to use, and I did not have the right expression for any of it.

Orin walked out from the altar and put both hands in the fur of my neck.

"You're really big," he told me, and his voice was thick from crying.

"Mom, you're so big."

I licked his ear.

He shrieked and laughed, and it was the first time I had ever heard him laugh like a six-year-old.

Behind us the moon slid down behind the westernmost stone.

I felt the shift go out of me, all at once and everywhere.

Then I was a woman in the cold, sitting on the altar's edge with my arms around my knees.

A coat came down over my shoulders.

It was Torin's, and the Beta was holding it out with his eyes politely on the sky.

Torin himself had pushed up onto one elbow.

Hazel sat against his side with her glasses crooked, and he had an arm around her.

His other hand was held out to me, palm up.

It was warm.

"Ingrid," he said.

"I'm fine."

"I know. I could tell."

He smiled.

I had seen him smile at me in a boathouse once, and at the lodge across a breakfast table, and I had not seen this.

It had nothing behind it at all.

My glasses lay on the stone where they had fallen, whole.

I picked them up and put them on.

I could see perfectly well without them, and I put them on anyway.

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