By the time the lamps along the terraces were trimmed to pinpricks, the village had the stillness of a held breath. The wind came off the cliffs thin and cold, carrying the faraway arithmetic of howls—countable, then not, then suddenly too many to bother. On the lower square the brazier smoked with a bitter reek; the shifter elder's bowl sat on its tripod like a dark moon, and beside it lay the small horn-handled knife, the blade clean and pale.
Wolves ringed the space in a double line—some in fur, some in skin, all with that quiet, taut attention Elara had learned meant ready. Garrett stood with a handful of veterans at the mouth of the stair that led down to the nearest pass. Amber paced the far edge, glancing every so often to the dark beyond the rope rails as if checking the night's temperature. Luke was on the upper path, a dark outline against the cliff, eyes roving. Riven had taken a place behind the elder, not touching the ritual with his shadow but close enough to cut anything that tried to.
Elara moved through the crowd with the feeling of stepping into a circle that had been drawn around her bones while she slept. The survivors gathered where Garrett pointed them: Kara, jaw set and eyes bright; Elise, pale and precise; Clint, trying not to grin and failing badly. Torvee arrived with Jonah and sat him on a low step just inside the ring; she put her hand on his knee and left it there like a promise and a guard.
The fae stood together, the healer a cool fixed point with her steel-haired kin at her side. The humans—what few there were—clustered nearer Elara, faces blanked into bravery.
The elder lifted his hands and the noise in the square fell away without being asked.
"Three drink tonight," he said, as he had said before. "Three open and bind. All of them have been tested. None are fae. Wolves will not drink. Do not touch the bowl unless I hand it to you."
His gaze swept the ring and the ring looked back—wolves, fae, humans, a scattering of children who had been allowed to stay on the steps if they kept still and silent. Jonah did, in the way children keep still only when they are trying very, very hard and want a medal for it. He did not take his eyes off the elder's hands.
"The draught goes in, the cut goes on," the elder went on, as if reciting to the stone itself so it had no right to be surprised later. "Blood calls, blood seals. Pain tells you the door is open, not that you are dying. The spirit will come. When it does, you will know it. Do not chase something else. Yours may not be what you imagined. Almost always it is not."
Clint made a sound that might have been a laugh if his throat had not been dry. Kara flicked him a look that said say one word about bears and I'll throttle you. He closed his mouth and looked like a man who had swallowed his own swagger.
The elder set three small cups on the lip of the bowl. He poured from a stoppered bottle into the dark, and the smoke changed shape—went sharper, greener, like bruised nettles and old rain. He stirred with a spoon of bone. When he brought the spoon out a drop clung to it like night held in a bubble. He raised it to his nose and breathed it in; his eyes slid shut for the beat of a heartbeat, and when he opened them Elara felt the hairs on her arms lift.
"The mountain listens," he said, and the words were not for them.
He ladled the draught into the first cup. "Kara."
Kara stepped into the inner ring, stripped her left glove off with her teeth, and held her hand out without looking away from the elder's face. The horn knife nicked her palm in a fast, neat line. She hissed and didn't flinch. The elder pressed the cup into her cut hand, his fingers strong and dry around her knuckles. "For what you are, not what you want," he said, quiet as ember crackle.
Kara sniffed the rim as if insulted by its cheek and then threw it back like cheap spirits. For a heartbeat nothing moved. Then her throat worked, she gagged once and swallowed it down again by force, and colour ran out of her face as if someone had pulled a plug.
Elara felt the first tug of it—like a thread in the belly being drawn toward a door. Kara's eyes unfocused and refocused and unfocused again. The elder took her bleeding hand and turned it palm-down over the bowl; a smear of red slid in. He spoke under his breath, not words Elara knew, a rhythm more than a sentence.
Kara swayed. Elara reached without meaning to and stopped at the ring's edge; Garrett's hand closed warm around her wrist and kept her where she was. The elder's other hand came up in a slow, steadying curve, not touching Kara and somehow holding her upright without contact. Her lips parted. A sound lifted out of her that wasn't a cry, wasn't speech, wasn't anything with a label Elara had learned; it made her think of bracken when the wind goes under it and the whole hillside whispers at once.
Light—not light, not exactly; more like a knowing—sketched itself up out of the bowl's smoke and around Kara's knees. It moved quick, deft, sly as flame under dry grass. A muzzle shaped itself in the not-light, and ears, and the soft, bushy ripple of a tail. The fox walked out of nothing and circled Kara's ankles once, twice, looking up at her with eyes too bright. Then it went into her palm where the blood had opened a door, shockingly gentle for how sharp it had looked. Kara gasped. The not-light went out.
A beat. Two. Kara swallowed. She blinked, and when she looked up Elara saw something new in the line of her mouth. Not softer—sharper and sure, like a knife that had been properly whetted at last.
The ring breathed. The elder gave her a small nod. "Welcome." He wiped the blade on a cloth. "Elise."
Elise had watched without blinking. Now she stepped forward, hands already clean, sleeves rolled and tied; she had braided her hair tight so it wouldn't fall in her face and annoy her. The blade kissed her palm. She did not wince, but her lashes fluttered once. She took the cup in both hands, breathed in the bitter like it was a test she intended to pass by humiliating, and drank. It hit her harder than she'd let herself imagine; her body folded at the waist and she pulled herself straight again as if by operating an invisible hoist inside her ribs.
The elder tipped her palm over the bowl. The smoke made small shapes then—the suggestion of whiskers, of pads, of a tail that was all statement and no fuss. The cat's outline was nothing like the fox's quick play; it was grace condensed to a set of choices that looked like laziness until they were knives. It rubbed once around Elise's calves and then, with the proprietary arrogance of its kind, stepped into her hand and disappeared as if walking through water without making a ripple.
Elise's laugh startled itself out of her—small, breathy, surprised at its own existence. "Of course," she said, and shook her head at herself, and somewhere in the watching wolves a few smiles showed teeth.
The elder filled the third cup. "Clint."
Clint rolled his shoulders like a man walking into surf. "Right," he muttered to himself, and stepped forward with a care that belied the size of him. The cut made him swear—he grinned as if he'd meant to do that and was making change. He took the cup and tipped it, and the draught tried to come back up. He held it in by main force and then the force failed and he had to breathe; he managed not to vomit it over the elder's feet by an act of will that made the muscles in his neck stand out like ropes.
"Steady," Garrett said under his breath, nothing like mockery anywhere in it.
Clint's palm tilted. His blood slid into the bowl. The smoke didn't sketch so much as thicken; it got denser and looked stubborn, like weather that had decided on itself. The creature that shouldered itself into shape at his feet was low and broad, with a wedge of a head and a set to the shoulders that said oh do try me. The honey badger lifted its snout, looked the size of the world in its own mind, and shoved straight into Clint's cut as if the door were too small for the amount of refusal it intended to carry. He staggered, made a sound like a laugh and a curse had bumped into each other, and then stood breathing as if he had been running uphill for a long time.
"Well," Kara said, too relieved not to grin, "that's going to be a nightmare to feed."
"Feed this," Clint said vaguely, and then swayed and caught himself and stood up straighter because witnesses existed.
Elara let breath out she didn't remember holding. The ring loosened. Hands unclenched. The elder reached for the cloth to wipe the blade again—
—and Jonah moved.
It wasn't a child's dash. It was the kind of movement that happens when a thought has been living in a body for hours and finally finds a door. Torvee's hand pressed reflexively on his knee and closed on air. Jonah slid under the elder's elbow, small as a memory, and seized what was left in the ladle with both hands.
"Jonah!" Torvee's voice broke like a branch. The healer snapped something sharp and fae in the same breath. The elder's hand came down on empty space.
Jonah drank.
For a single, tricking second the square made no sound at all. Then Jonah folded as if something had punched his breath out through his spine. Torvee went for him and Amber caught her with both arms round the ribs and pinned her in kindness. Elara moved without moving—Garrett had her wrist again, that rough gentleness that felt like a command she'd actually obey. The elder didn't shout. He caught Jonah's head as it knocked the stone, held it steady, and tipped his tiny cut hand—when had the blade kissed him? she hadn't seen it—so that blood fell like three red beads into the bowl.
"Don't let him—" Torvee said to no one and everyone, and then stopped making words because shock had stolen the grammar of her mouth.
The smoke did not hesitate. It came up from the bowl the way water comes up in a spring that has been waiting for a boot to heel a loose stone aside. It twined, delicate, sure, a thin, beautiful coil that made Elara's heart hurt with how right it looked. A head rose from the curl, small and shaped like thought; the body followed like a line being drawn on dark paper by a steady hand. The snake lifted itself a child's handspan and turned its bright not-eyes on Jonah as if checking the spelling of his name. Then it went to the cut in his palm and he jerked and cried out, and Torvee made that sound again that wolves make when you try to cut their leash.
The not-light went out. The elder's hands were under Jonah's skull and elbow; he laid the boy down as if he had been born into them. Jonah shook once, twice, a third time and then went very still in that good way that meant breath had found him again. His lashes moved. He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue and made a little face because some taste had not been improved by ritual.
Amber let Torvee go. Torvee dropped to the stone and gathered Jonah into the sort of hold that was half arms, half body making a wall in the shape of herself. The boy burrowed into her like a small animal who has just remembered the burrow it belongs in exists. Torvee's shoulders shook and she was furious with herself for it and had no time to care.
The square had begun to murmur again when it happened—thin as envy at first, then thicker. One of the fae men—broad-shouldered, mouth made for laughing at the wrong time—stepped out from his knot and guffawed, a sound like a man elbowing a bar. "Is this the great power?" he called, cheerful with danger. "A snake for a boy and a rat for a strong back? If a child can drink this, why not I? Why should human blood have the monopoly on tricks?"
"Don't," the healer said, not loud, and the word took the top layer off the square's sound like a peel.
The fae's grin widened to show the roll of his arrogance. "Old woman, you frighten children with tales." He shouldered past the nearest wolf. Luke's hand came up and closed on air; he would not rattle a fae in front of his pack if he could avoid it. The man reached for the ladle. The elder moved to block and the man's elbow knocked his wrist aside—not a blow, a single, stupid, eager push that showed the exact shape of his understanding.
He dipped, he drank, he flung his head back in triumph like a man who has stolen a kiss in public and wants the laughter to carry.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
Then his eyes went very wide. The veins in his temples went black, then his throat, then the backs of his hands—black like old blood left to clag in a bowl for a week. He made a sound that was not a sound anyone in the square ever wanted to hear again, and his body went forward and to the side at the same time as if it could not remember where the floor lived. He hit the stone and scrabbled there, fingers clutching at nothing, nails leaving a little white chalk in scratches. Then he stopped moving.
Silence fell like snowfall—thick, deadening, refusing to let any other noise through. Somewhere a child on the steps began to cry in that helpless, lowing way children cry when a room's grown-ups have just broken the rules of how the world should work. Her mother lifted her at once and tucked the sob in the shelter of a coat and carried it away.
The elder went down on one knee by the fallen fae and put two fingers to the side of his neck. He left them there long enough for the whole square to understand the shape of the time that was passing. Then he lifted his head and looked at the watching faces, and the grief in him was so clean it made Elara feel ashamed of how messy hers always was.
"This," he said, and that was all. It was enough.
The healer crossed herself in a way that had nothing to do with any church. The steel-haired fae elder put her palm briefly over her heart and then let it fall and did not look away.
"No more," Riven said, not loudly. It still carried.
No one argued. The lesson had been cut into the stone and into the soft animal of their fear. The elder stood. He wiped the blade and his hands on the cloth with the neat motions of a man who will make every movement matter when his peace has been knocked to bits.
He looked up and found Kara, Elise, Clint, Torvee, Jonah, Elara, the wolves, the fae, the humans, the whole square with those steady, ordinary eyes of his. "We go on," he said. "That is what people do. The dead make us better, if we let them. The living must decide if they will be."
He set the knife down. He poured the last of the draught back into the bottle with a care that made Elara want to breathe more quietly in case she shook his hand. He stoppered it. He put his broad palm briefly on the rim of the bowl, as if telling it what it had done and asking it to be kind next time.
"Those who've drunk," he said, turning back to the three new shifters with the solid kindness of a man checking the fit of a door, "you're done for tonight. No heroics. You'll sleep and shake and sweat and wake knowing where your skin ends and doesn't. Don't fight it. Fighting just wastes it."
Clint nodded vigorously and then steadied as if the nod had floated him a little off his feet. Kara's mouth twitched. "If I have to chase chickens in my dreams," she said, "I'm blaming you."
"Chickens will be the least of your troubles," Elise murmured, and then slid her eyes to Elara and added, "She's joking. Mostly."
"Mostly," Kara agreed, which was generous of her.
Torvee had her forehead against Jonah's hair. The boy was very awake now—too awake—eyes huge in a small white face. "It burned," he whispered, not complaining, simply reporting a weather event.
"I know," Torvee whispered back. "You're here." She lifted her head and found the elder. The look she gave him had nails and thanks in it at once. "He's human," she said, because she had to say it out loud to beat the fear down; the healer nodded once, confirmation and blessing.
Elara had not realised she was shaking until Garrett's hand discovered it and made a shelf of itself again for her to steady on. She pressed her palm to his. He gave it back: weight, warmth, still here.
Above them on the upper path, a wolf stood up and stretched and stared north. The movement went through the watching pack like a thought. Amber lifted her head and her mouth went flat. "Listen," she said.
They all did. For a moment there was only the square's own noise, quiet and exhausted in the way good work is. Then, thin and high and far, a sound came down the gorge—a single feral's call sliding along the ice of the air. Another answered. Another. They didn't knit into a pack-song. They tangled like nettles into a nettle-mass and then lifted, and the night took on that quality it has when a river has turned in flood somewhere you can't see and the bank under your boots knows it first.
Garrett's head turned. "Hold lines," he said, the words already halfway to orders. "Double watch on the upper gorge. Wire on the bend now, not at dawn. Luke, take the southeast spur and sit in the echo notch. If the noise sharpens, we wake everyone with a mouth and a weapon."
"Aye," Luke said from the cliff, already moving.
Riven had not shifted, but the air round him had. He looked at Elara only long enough for her to feel it, and then at the elder. "We're done here."
"We're done," the elder said, and gathered the bowl and knife like a man gathering a child out of a storm—the same care, the same refusal to be hurried.
People began to slip away—not running, not loitering, the way people go when the next thing has already put its hand on their shoulder. Wolves in fur ghosted the terraces. Men and women tightened belts, slung bows, checked magazines. A child carried a lantern to a hook and hung it steady. Someone shut a door gently so the latch would not clack and announce fear to the night.
Elara crouched in front of Kara and Elise and Clint and pressed both hands briefly to the air between them because touch would have been wrong and not touching would have been worse. "Sleep," she said. "If you dream of running, turn left at the second tree."
Kara snorted. "What if there are no trees?"
"Then you're in Clint's dream," Elise said, "and you should wake at once for hygiene reasons."
"Oi," Clint said faintly, but he was smiling. He looked down at his hands like they belonged to a man he was looking forward to meeting properly in the morning.
Torvee stood with Jonah in her arms because holding him had become a way to keep her own heart in her chest. "We're going inside," she said, and the sentence sounded like something lifted two-handed out of a fire. Elara touched Jonah's ankle as if it were a saint's relic and watched them go with a mixture of pride and fear that would have lifted her clear of the square if it had been given rope.
The healer came to Elara's shoulder and stood with her a moment, both of them watching lines of wolves peel off into the night. "The boy's snake will swim," she said, apropos of nothing and everything. "Remember that. Water likes him. Don't let him play near it until he knows how not to drown in wanting it."
"I'll remember," Elara said, and did.
Garrett squeezed her wrist once and let go. "Eat something," he told her. "Then try sleep. You're worse than useless if you fall over at the first shout."
"Yes, Beta," she said, and the yes didn't stick in her throat the way the word Luna always did. Maybe because Beta here meant father and hinge and weight-bearer, and there were worse things to answer to in a world that had forgotten what doors were for.
The square emptied by degrees. The elder's door closed. The bowl's smoke made one last thin ribbon and went out. Above, the moon wore its fat bright face without sleep. The not-quite-song of ferals braided itself tighter out beyond the passes, feeling for the edges, as Amber had said. The village breathed in; the village breathed out; the village drew its shoulders up under its coat.
Elara stood alone at the centre of the circle the ritual had made