I Was Never Their First Choice novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lot
Solveig hears her friends celebrate an exemption that leaves only her name in the bowl, and she volunteers in front of the pack. Her mother's packed bag has a tag dated two weeks ago.
The lot was going to be drawn at moonrise, in front of the whole pack.
Every year the cold northern fortress took one wolf from us for four years of trial service.
This year it was my sister or me.
I came to the pack hall an hour early, because I had made up my mind to volunteer, and I wanted to say it before the bowl came out.
The side door was open a crack.
I heard Elias laugh.
I had known that laugh since I was six years old.
"All five of us got in," Perrin said. "Sealed letters came this morning."
"The Academy list counts as service," Elias said. "Anyone on it is out of the lot."
"So there's only one name left in the bowl," Perrin said.
Nobody answered him.
Then my sister spoke, very quietly. "Does she know?"
"She'll hear it when the envoy reads the list," Elias said. "She won't make a scene. Solveig never does."
"She was going to volunteer anyway," Perrin said. "We've all known that since spring."
"Then we let her," Elias said.
Somebody poured a drink.
I stood in the corridor with my hand flat on the cold wall.
All five of them had applied together, and not one of them had asked me to put my name down.
I listened to the chairs scraping back.
Five.
Then I walked around to the main doors and went in with everyone else.
The hall filled until people stood along the walls.
My father, the Alpha, sat on the dais with my mother beside him.
Asta sat in the front row between Elias and Perrin, in her soft blue cloak, and did not look at me.
The envoy from the North stood at a table below the dais.
She was a tall woman in a grey cloak with frost still in her hair.
She had a ledger open in front of her, and a bowl of folded slips.
She opened it to the last page, glanced at the final line, and turned the page before I could read it.
"The Academy has sent its list," she said. "Five Silverbrook cadets, accepted this season."
She read the names.
Asta Sandiford.
Elias Granger.
Perrin Worsley.
The two bakery twins.
A murmur went through the hall.
"The pack's service is counted," my father said, with his eyes on the roof beams. "The five are exempt. That leaves one name in the bowl."
"Whose?" someone called from the back.
"Solveig's," my mother said.
She said it into her lap.
Everyone turned to look at me.
Elias had gone white.
"Solveig," he said, half rising. "Let me explain."
"I heard you," I said.
The hall went still.
"An hour ago, through the side door. You said I wouldn't make a scene."
Perrin laughed once, short and nervous. "It's the Academy, Had. You'd have hated it."
"You never asked me," I said.
Elias opened his mouth and nothing came out.
Asta's hands were shaking in her lap.
"It was the only way to keep her out of the bowl," my mother said.
"I know," I said. "I was going to volunteer for her anyway."
I looked at my sister, and she finally looked back.
She was crying.
I wanted to go to her.
I didn't.
So I walked to the envoy's table and laid my hand flat on her ledger.
"I volunteer," I said. "No bowl. Write my name."
The envoy looked at me for a long moment.
"Name for the book," she said.
"Solveig Sandiford."
She wrote it on the page after the line I had not been allowed to read.
The ink on that line was already dry.
"The Hold will be glad of you," she said.
Nobody in the hall had said that to me in nineteen years.
My father stood.
"Solveig, you don't have to do this tonight," he said.
"You wrote the rule," I said. "I'm following it."
I walked out through the middle of the hall.
Nobody stopped me.
My mother caught me at the door, out of breath, with a travel bag in her arms.
"I thought it would be easier if you didn't have to pack," she said.
I took it from her.
The strap had a cloth tag on it, the kind my father used for supply wagons.
It carried my name in his handwriting.
The date was two weeks ago.
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