Chapter 4: Full Moon Wedding

We were married three nights later on the Dunmere hill, under a moon so full it threw shadows.

The whole pack stood in the long grass with torches.

I wore my mother's white dress, and over it Linnet's grey cloak, because I wanted her to see me in it.

Torin waited at the top of the hill with the pack elder.

He had put on a plain black coat. He had shaved, and the scar through his eyebrow showed pale in the firelight.

When I came up the path he looked at the cloak for a moment longer than he looked at me.

"That's Coldwater grey," he said quietly.

"A wedding gift. From Redmere."

"It suits you."

He said it flatly, and I could not tell if it was a compliment.

The elder bound our wrists with a strip of white cloth and asked the old questions.

Did we come freely? Would we share a fire, a table and a name?

"Freely," Torin said.

"Freely," I said, and the lie felt strange in my mouth, because half of it was true.

Behind the elder, in the second row, my father stood with his arms crossed.

Linnet and Lucian were near the front, hand in hand, smiling for the pack.

Ronan stood a little apart.

When I looked at him he lifted two fingers from his chest, the old Redmere sign for a safe road.

I looked away fast.

"By the old law," the elder said, "the mark."

Torin turned me gently by the shoulders.

I had known this part was coming.

Wolves seal a marriage with a bite on the left shoulder, high, where the neck begins, and the mark heals into a pale crescent that never fades.

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