Chapter 20: The Ring

The rite let each of us carry one blade into the ring, and the raked sand was the only ground we got.

Brant walked into the circle in his shirtsleeves with a short silver knife in his right hand.

I walked in with nothing.

My brothers stood at the edge of the sand, shoulder to shoulder, with their arms folded and the youngest still growling.

The clerk raised a white cloth.

"Begin," he said, and dropped it.

Brant didn't move.

He stood in the middle of the ring and looked at the knife in his hand.

Across the hall, his father said something low and sharp.

Brant looked up at me.

"I won't," he said.

Then he threw the knife.

It spun end over end across the sand and stuck in the leg of the Stonefall Alpha's chair, an inch from his boot.

The whole hall gasped.

"I'll fight you," Brant said. "I'll fight you the way I should have fought for you. With nothing."

"You're an idiot," I said.

"Yes."

"Good."

He shifted first.

He went down on the sand in one long pull of bone and sandy fur and came up as a big tawny wolf with his lip drawn back.

I let the wolf come.

It rose in me from the soles of my feet, silver and huge, and I heard the dress tear and didn't care.

Three thousand wolves went quiet.

He charged.

He was fast, because he'd been a strong wolf all his life, and he hit me in the shoulder and spun me half round.

I took it and kept my feet.

I'd learned something at the Greywater school road that I didn't know I'd learned.

I didn't fight to hurt.

I fought to stop.

I got my teeth in the scruff of his neck and threw him across the ring, and he hit the sand and rolled.

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