The Luna They Buried Came Back for the Crown · Rhea Wolfe

Chapter 2: The Snow Field

The snow field is an hour north of the ring, past the birches, in a flat place where nothing has ever grown because nothing ever gets the chance. In summer it's ash and gravel and a little grey water standing in the low spots. In winter it's beautiful. That's the joke of it. Nine months of the year it is the ugliest ground on the mountain and for three months it looks like a made bed.

We keep our proper dead in the pack ground behind the hall, under stones with their names cut in. The snow field is for the other kind. Hollow wolves. Rogue-bitten. The ones who go wrong in the head and have to be put down by their own. Twelve mounds when I was a girl, thirteen by the time I was grown, and one of them at the very edge, set apart, with no marker and grass that came in wrong every spring.

My mother's.

I asked once, when I was ten, why Marta Halloway was out here instead of behind the hall with the grandmothers, and my father said because that's where they put her in a voice that closed the subject for the rest of his life.

I walked past her on my way to my own hole, and I didn't understand yet that the answer had been lying out there in the open the whole time.

* * *

You go the way you came, is the phrase. It means no crest, no boots, no coat the pack will miss. They let me keep my shift and my stockings. Cassia took my coat off my shoulders herself at the edge of the birches, careful, the way you undress someone who's ill, and folded it over her arm.

"It's good wool," she said. "It shouldn't rot out here."

I looked at her for a long time.

"Your hand was on her," I said.

Her face did one small thing and then stopped doing it. "Don't," she said. "Wren. Don't make this last longer than it has to."

Then she stepped back into the line of wolves who had come to witness, because a hollow must be witnessed by twelve, and there were forty. People come. That's the truth about my pack that I carried north with me and never once managed to put down: nobody made them come. It was cold, it was the Long Night, there was hot food waiting in the hall, and forty of them walked an hour into the birches to watch.

* * *

Ollen dug.

The ground under the snow is frozen to a foot and then it's gravel, and he had one shovel and no help, because helping is not allowed. It took him a long time. Nobody spoke. The sound of a blade going into frozen gravel over and over is a sound I still hear when a room is too quiet.

I stood in my stockings and let my feet go numb and watched my brother's back.

"You can stop," I said, once.

"I can't."

"You can. They'll put you in the ground with me and Father will be alone, but you can, so I want you to know I'm not asking."

He hit the gravel again. "Then don't ask."

"Ollen."

"Don't ask me, Wren." His voice came apart in the middle. He didn't turn around. "You're the one who knows the book. Tell me the part where I put the shovel down."

There isn't one. That's what the book is. It's four sentences about rot and one about family, and it has never once in two hundred years had a part where you put the shovel down.

He dug until the cut was long enough and deep enough and then he stood in it, hip-deep, filthy, steaming in the cold, and looked up at me with his mouth already ruined.

"I'll come back at dark," he said. "Two hours. I'll come back and get you out."

"You won't."

"I will—"

"You won't," I said, "because they'll be watching you, and because if you do it and I'm alive they'll put us both back in, and because I'm asking you not to." I got down on my knees at the edge of the cut so I could get closer to him. My kneecaps went into the snow crust and broke through. "Ollen. Look at me. Whatever happens after tonight, you carried the shovel and you did it right and nobody can say the Halloways broke the law. That's the only thing I've got left to give Father. Let me give it."

He put his forehead against my shin and cried like a child, in front of forty people, and I have loved him for that every single day since.

* * *

Rook stood at the treeline.

He never came closer than the birches. Thirty yards of open snow between us and he stood in it the whole time with his hands behind his back and the wind coming off the field into his face, which meant he had my scent the entire hour and I had none of his.

When they lifted me, I twisted around and found him.

"Say the second part," I called.

Forty heads turned.

"Say it, Rook. Say the five words and break the bond and then this is legal and you can go and eat your supper. I'll die released and rejected and I won't hold it against you. Say it."

He didn't move.

"You can't," I said, and I heard it become true while I said it, out loud, in front of the pack, which is where things become true in Ashenmoor. "You can't say it."

Oda Ferren wrote something in the book. I saw her do it. She stood in the cold with the book open on her forearm and her pen scratching, and she looked up once at her Alpha's back with an expression I would think about for a year, and then she closed the book and put it under her arm and said, "Before dark."

* * *

Here is what it is like.

You go in on your back because they lay you on your back. The gravel at the bottom has edges and it goes into your shoulder blades. The sky above you is a strip, and then it's a band, and then it's a ribbon.

The first spadeful is the worst thing that will ever happen to you and it lands on your legs and it weighs nothing at all. That's the obscenity of snow. Your death arrives at about a pound at a time.

It went over my hips and I felt my heart start to run. It went over my belly — over the bean, over the six weeks, over the thing Cassia's thumb had touched — and I got my forearm up across my face without deciding to, and Ollen made a sound above me and kept going, because he is a good brother and a better son of Ashenmoor than I ever was.

Then the cold got in.

It doesn't feel like cold. Everyone who tells you about it says the same thing and nobody believes it until it's happening. It burns for a while at the surface, and your teeth clatter so hard your jaw hurts at the hinges the way it hurt at the Rite, and then somewhere around the point when you stop being able to feel your fingers, it turns into a kind of terrible warmth that comes up out of your bones like water coming up through floorboards. Your body gives up its heat all at once, generously, like a host. It wants you to be comfortable while it does it.

I had a hand's width of space under my forearm. Air came through the snow. Snow is full of air, that's the other thing nobody tells you, that's why the mountain doesn't suffocate the things it takes.

Above me the crust set, and the footsteps went away, forty pairs of them, in twos and threes, back toward the hall and the hot food. The last set stood a long time before it left.

Then it was just my heartbeat, and under my heartbeat, so quiet I thought I was inventing it, a second one, going much too fast.

Hello, I thought. You're supposed to be nothing. She said you were nothing.

I counted. I got to nine hundred and lost the thread and started again. The dark went from grey to blue to black, and then there were stars in the crust over my face, which was ice catching what light there was, and I remember thinking it was a rude thing for the sky to do.

I stopped being cold. That's when I got frightened.

And then, a long way above me — through six feet of settling snow, through the crust, through the whole weight of my pack's law — something walked.

Not hooves. Not the crunch-and-slide of a deer. Something heavy and four-footed, taking its time, quartering back and forth across the field the way you search a room.

It stopped over my chest.

It breathed at the snow. Twice. Long slow pulls, the way you check a wound.

Then it started to dig, and it dug like a thing that had done it before and had learned exactly how fast it was allowed to go, and when the crust broke over my face the air that came in was so cold it cut my throat open, and I got my eyes to work, and there was a man kneeling over the hole with his bare arms in the snow to the shoulder and steam coming off his back.

He looked at me for a moment without any surprise whatsoever.

"Fourth one they've put in this field since the leaves went," he said. "First three, I was too late."

I couldn't make a sound. My tongue had gone thick.

He got an arm under my neck and one under my knees and lifted me straight out of my own grave. And while he was turning to get his bearings he put his face down into my hair and pulled a breath through his teeth — once, the way you check a wound before you decide what it needs.

He went absolutely still.

Then he said, in a voice that had gone somewhere else entirely: "Say your mother's name."