One Girl, A Pack Of Beasts novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Breaking the Bonds
Willa pays her mates off with a bag of beast cores and cuts their bonds in front of the tribe, refuses to serve the chief's daughter, and walks into the snow, where the exile Kell calls her by her secret name.
"Willa Corrick, I'll ask you one last time," Brannon said. "Are you going to break the bonds or not?"
I was cutting venison for the stew pot.
I didn't hurry.
I finished the last strip, wiped the bone knife on a rag, and set it down on the table.
Then I reached under my apron and put a leather bag beside it.
It hit the wood with a heavy, clicking thud.
Four men stared at it.
Brannon, my wolf, with his arms folded across his chest. The lion by the hearth. The bear in the doorway, too big for it.
And Tobiah, my hawk, the youngest, nineteen and pale as milk.
"What is that?" Brannon said.
"Forty beast cores."
I untied the string and let a few roll out. They glowed blue in the firelight.
"Breaking a bond burns," I said. "You'll run a fever for a week. Ten cores each will heal it in a night."
The lion whistled low.
Forty cores was a winter's food for a whole longhouse.
Brannon's eyes narrowed. "Where did you get forty cores?"
"My father's savings."
It was the same answer I'd given them for three years.
None of them had ever asked twice.
Brannon didn't now. He picked up a core and turned it in his fingers.
"Hester said you'd cry," he said.
"Hester says a lot of things."
"She says your tea is making us sick."
He knocked the clay pot off the hearthstone with the back of his hand.
It cracked on the floor. Brown tea ran across the boards toward my feet.
I had brewed that tea every week for three years. Crushed cores and pine needles, bitter as bark, so they'd keep their strength through the cold months.
They called it my nag tea.
"I've been weak for a month," Brannon said. "So has he." He jerked his chin at the bear. "Hester's tonic is the only thing that helps."
"Then marry Hester's tonic."
Tobiah made a sound that was almost a laugh.
Brannon turned on him, and he swallowed it.
"We're done being your mates," Brannon said. "We're done eating gristle in a cold house with a woman nobody wants to look at. Cut us loose, and do it tonight."
I nodded.
"I will. On two conditions."
He laughed. "You don't get conditions."
"Then I don't get a knife."
I folded my hands on the table.
The bear shifted in the doorway. He'd always been the one who hated a fight.
"What conditions?" the lion asked.
"It's done at the fire, in front of the tribe," I said. "And you say out loud that I broke it. Not you."
Brannon's mouth twisted.
"Fine. If you want everyone to watch you crawl, that's your business."
He swept the cores back into the bag and tossed it over his shoulder.
The fire ring was full before the moon was over the palisade.
Word always ran fast in the Ridge tribe.
Two hundred faces glowed orange in the light. Children sat on their fathers' shoulders to see.
The chief stood on the speaking stone in his bearskin.
His daughter stood beside him.
Hester Brightwell wore a white fox cape and blue ribbons braided into her golden hair. She held a little cup in both hands.
She gave me a small, sorry smile.
"Oh, Willa," she said, loud enough to carry. "I never wanted it to come to this."
I pushed up my left sleeve.
Four small dark marks sat in a row on the inside of my wrist. One for each mate.
I had worn them since I was twenty, when the chief gave me four men I'd barely spoken to and called it a kindness to a hunter's orphan.
"Say it," I told Brannon.
He looked around at the crowd and lifted his chin.
"Willa Corrick breaks the bonds of her own will."
I drew the bone knife across the first mark.
It stung like a wasp.
Brannon grunted and slapped a hand over his throat. Under his fingers, his mark went gray.
The lion's mark next. He hissed.
The bear's. He closed his eyes and didn't make a sound.
A murmur went around the ring.
I turned to the last mark.
Tobiah caught my wrist.
His fingers were shaking.
"Don't," he said. "Please, Willa. Not mine."
"Toby, you don't have to stay with me."
"I know I don't." His voice cracked. "I want to."
Brannon snorted. "Let the bird keep her. They can starve together."
I looked at Tobiah's freckled, frightened face.
I lowered the knife.
The chief cleared his throat.
"A woman with one mate cannot hold a den," he announced. "Corrick's longhouse goes to the pack that needs it."
Hester's fingers tightened on her cup.
So that was the price.
My father's house, where he had taught me to whittle and track and throw.
"And since she has no house," the chief went on, "she will serve in my daughter's. Hester has kindly offered."
"I have," Hester said softly. "You can do the washing, Willa. I don't mind."
A few people laughed.
Brannon laughed loudest.
I put the bone knife back in my belt.
"No," I said.
The laughter stopped.
The chief frowned down at me. "That is a judgment of the fire."
"Then the fire can do Hester's washing."
I walked out of the ring.
Nobody stopped me. They were too surprised.
At the gate the guard stared at me with his mouth open. "It's snowing. It's night. You'll freeze."
"Then I'll freeze."
I walked out into the dark.
The snow came down thick and soft. Behind me the palisade shrank to a line of torches.
I didn't cry.
I had cried enough in that longhouse, quietly, so they wouldn't hear.
A mile down the trail, where the pines closed over the path, I stopped.
Something lay across the snow in front of me.
It was black and glossy and as thick as a man's waist.
It was the length of a river boat.
The snake lifted its head out of the drift. Its eyes were pale gold.
Then the snow shifted, and a tall man in a black fur cloak was sitting where the head had been, looking up at me.
He'd never seen my face before.
He didn't seem surprised by it.
"Gray Knife," Kell said. "You're late."
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