Chapter 5: Silver Saddle

It felt like being born inside my own skin.

I went down on my hands and knees on the Moon Stone, and the whole valley watched me do it.

My spine bent.

Something under my ribs rolled over.

I heard Hester shouting, "Get back, give her room, all of you."

I heard my father say my name in a voice I didn't know.

Then there was nothing but heat.

It poured through me, white and wild, and it pushed outward in every direction.

My bones lengthened and rearranged.

My hands curled and the nails went black.

I screamed once, and the scream came out as something else.

When it stopped, I was standing on four legs, with the cold stone under pads of fur.

The pines looked sharper.

Every wolf in the ring smelled like a separate color.

I smelled wet bark, and old fear, and Hester's cheap soap, and across the stone, the iron tang of Torin's blood.

I turned my head.

He was still on his knees.

Somebody had come up behind him to hold him by the shoulders, and he was staring at me with his mouth open.

I looked down at my own paws.

They were as big as dinner plates, silver-grey, with a thick black stripe running up each foreleg.

I twisted around.

The stripe ran all the way across my back.

Hester put her hand over her mouth.

"She's the size of a pony," she said.

A hush rolled through the crowd.

Then the oldest Redfern elder, a man who'd been Alpha before Torin's father, took off his hat.

He didn't say anything.

He just stood there with the hat against his chest.

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