Chapter 21: The White Wolf

Lavinia stopped in the middle of the torchlight and let her coat fall.

Beneath it she wore a plain white shift, and she was shaking.

"Begin," Honora said, from the dais.

Lavinia knelt in the grass.

She put her palms on the earth and bowed her head.

Nothing happened.

The whole field waited, six hundred wolves with their breath held, and nothing happened.

Lavinia's shoulders rose and fell.

She closed her eyes and strained until the cords stood out in her neck.

A thin sound came out of her, the same one I had heard on the field in the dark.

"Please," she whispered.

No fur came, and no claws.

The torches popped in the wind.

"It is the new moon," Honora said, a little too fast.

"The wolf is shy. It has always been shy. Let her try again."

Lavinia tried again.

She tried until sweat ran down her face, and her nails tore on the frozen ground, and her breath came in sobs.

A gray-haired Alpha near the front muttered something low, and the man beside him answered.

I heard it all the way from where I stood.

Nine years, they were saying. Nine years, and not once.

Lavinia lifted her head.

Her eyes found mine through the torches, and there was no pretending left in them at all.

She did not say a word, and she did not have to.

Everyone had seen.

"The challenger," said the oldest elder, in a voice like a cracked bell. "The challenger will now show her wolf."

Honora's mouth tightened.

For the first time since I had known her, she had not planned this part.

I walked out into the circle, with my wrists burning at the ends of my arms.

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