Page 27 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

What I can’t figure out is why he’s afraid of Valen. He has thirty of his own pack within easy call. We’re the ones who are outnumbered here. I stop circling it and say the rest outright. “This matters. More than whatever you’re carrying against him.”

“Doesn’t change anything.” He doesn’t look at me when he says it.

The wolves gathered at the edge of the clearing start peeling off, no order to it and no word from anyone. Most of them go. A dozen stay where they are and don’t pretend to be doing anything else. A few cast glances at Valen on the way out. A couple look longer than the rest. One is young enough that an older wolf has to pull him back by the arm. I read the same guarded fear in almost every signature that passes us, thinner than the Alpha’s but unmistakably the same fear underneath, a whole pack carrying it without a single one of them able to say what put it there. How many years did Valen carry that same look before he learned to smooth it into nothing?

Valen breathes out, slowly, the only sign he’s done pushing. He doesn’t look surprised by any of it. He knew this was coming before we ever crossed that marker. I take the ground in properly while the confrontation cools around us. No color in any of it, nothing softened for comfort, every structure built for defense first and everything else after. Paths cut between the buildings - packed dirt worn smooth by generations of the exact same footsteps. Every line of it looks like it was raised to outlast the people living inside it, not to hold them.

I try the Alpha once more, quieter this time, one question instead of an argument. “What are you afraid of?”

The fear comes up in his face and he can’t get it back under fast enough. He turns and walks back toward the others. We step back from the edge of the ground, side by side. The wind hasn’t let up.

“It’s closed. For now.”

“Figured.”

“You knew they’d say no.” I keep my voice low, meant only for him.

“I knew what they’d say before we crossed the marker.” His eyes stay on the closed ground ahead of us. “Knowing doesn’t make it easier to hear twice.”

That’s the most he’s given me all morning. I don’t push for more. I look at him properly for the first time since we crossed the marker. He’s taller than any wolf standing in this clearing. Nothing about his face matches theirs, not the Alpha’s, not any of those who filed past us. Different bones. Different build. Nothing in him says he came from this bloodline at all. Steel-gray eyes go distant, fixed somewhere past all of it. Then, right before he turns them on me, something unguarded moves through them. Gone almost as soon as it appeared. I want to ask him what it was like to grow up here, under a roof that was never really his to begin with. I already know he won’t answer if I do.

I let the question go and watch him instead.

Valen turns first, back toward the path down. I don’t move yet.

The Alpha hasn’t gone back to the others. He’s still standing where he stood through all of it, watching to see which one of us leaves first. Nobody has told us whether that ground has ever taken anyone who wasn’t born to this pack. He’s close enough to answer that.

Chapter 17

Valen

Iturn to walk off their ground.

Most of the wolves who came out to watch me get turned down have drifted back toward the settlement. A dozen are still on the edge of the clearing. The Alpha stayed. His hands hang at his sides. The wind coming up out of the ravine moves his shirt.

Nyxiana stays where she is. “Has anyone who wasn’t born to this pack ever set foot on the founding ground?”

Her voice carries far enough that the buildings behind him can hear it. The Alpha takes his time. He looks at the dirt. Then at her. Then past her at the treeline. She waits him out.

“Once,” he says. “Maybe twice, in all the time this pack has stood here. There’s an old rite for it.”

“Name it.”

He looks at me while he lays it out. “The founding ground sits on the other side of the ravine,” he says. “One way onto it. A stone causeway, hundred feet, wide enough for one body.” He waits. “There’s glyph-work cut into it the whole way across.”

He points past the last of the buildings. I look. The ground out there stops. It picks up again on the other side, and a gray line of stone runs between the two.

“The ward in that stone strikes whatever crosses,” he says. “One full blow, up through the body, every time a foot lands. Not just at the start of it. Every step.”

“And your pack crosses it,” she says. “How?”

“My pack crosses in their natural form. The form takes the strikes. Whoever’s inside it walks a hundred feet and steps off the far end without a mark on them.”

“And without the form, the body takes every strike the form was built to absorb,” I say.

I stop there. The Alpha nods once. She turns to me.

She’s close enough that I have to look down to meet her. Her hair is loose. The wind coming up out of the drop pulls a strand of it across her mouth and she leaves it there. Her eyes are violet with silver in them, and they don’t move off mine.