Reborn Luna: This Time I Reject You First

They walked me out to the cliff path in the rain, and I went, because seven years had taught me to go where I was sent.

Roan carried the lantern. He always carried the lantern. Celeste walked behind me with her hand flat between my shoulder blades, warm through my wet dress, the way she had steered me since we were girls and she was the one who knew where things were kept.

I was twenty-five years old. I had a bruise on my hip from the kitchen door and flour dried under my nails and no shoes worth the name, and I was still, at that hour, grateful to be walked anywhere by the two of them.

"Careful along here," Roan said. "It's slippery."

He was right. It was.

I have thought about that since. He warned me about the footing. Four steps later he stopped walking and Celeste did not.

The push was not dramatic. Nobody tells you that. It was a small practical shove, the kind you use to move a chair out of a doorway.

The lantern never moved at all. It stayed up there, steady in his hand, getting smaller.

I hit the first shelf of rock and something in my back went quiet.

Neither of them looked down. I want that written plainly, because I have had a long time to wish it were otherwise and it never once was. Neither of them looked down.

What I saw instead, at the end, was the ridge across the gully. A rider up there in the rain. Grey cloak, grey horse, the colours of the North, too far off to be anything but a shape.

He had stopped. He was not moving. Both hands on the saddle bow and his head down, and even at that distance, through all that water, I could feel it coming off him.

Grief.

I did not know the man. I was dying and a stranger on a ridge was grieving over me, and my last clear thought was that it was a waste, because he was too far away and he was much too late.

Then I woke up.

The loft over the Hart kitchen smelled of bread and cold ash, and the straw in my pillow was straw I remembered, and my hands were the hands I had at eighteen.

Not soft. I never had soft hands. But whole. Ten fingers that all bent the way they were built to bend, and no white seam across the left palm where a pot handle would break in four years and take the skin with it.

I lay there a long time without moving.

Downstairs, Annis Hart was telling somebody that the good cloth had come from Larran market and had cost more than it had cost.

Celeste laughed. Right below me, through the boards. Twenty-four years old, that laugh, and I had heard it at the top of a cliff path seven years from now.

It was a Saturday. I knew it before I knew anything else, the way I know which hand is my right, without checking and without wanting to. Saturday, the fourth of barley month. My eighteenth birthday. The morning of the mating rite.

In about five hours I was going to be rejected in front of four hundred people.

I got up. I went to the window. The sky over the east field was doing the thing where it looks scrubbed and blue and harmless, and I stood there and read it properly, the way you read a face, until I found the grey line low down over the treeline that meant weather by evening.

Then I let myself believe the morning.

I did not weep. I did not go down and put my arms around Annis Hart and ask what year it was. I sat on the edge of that bed with my heart going like a bird in a sack, and I counted.

Seven years of it. Every name. Every debt. The winter the Cassel bridge went out and Whitlock sold grain north at three times its worth. The three months Roan spent explaining to the pack that he was doing a kindness. The exact words of the excuse, which I could speak in his own voice.

And underneath all of it, one small hard fact I kept turning over like a stone in my mouth.

They had to walk me to the cliff.

Whatever those two became, they were never strong enough to do it in the house, in the light. They needed me to walk out there on my own legs.

That was worth knowing.

The kitchen was full of women and steam.

Annis had the dress over the back of a chair, pale grey, borrowed, taken in at the waist by a woman whose son I would nurse through a fever in three years. Elgar Hart sat by the door with his boots off, being pleasant at everybody who passed.

Celeste was at the table with her sleeves pushed up, plaiting rosemary into a wreath. She looked up and her whole face opened.

"There she is," she said. "Sit down. You're grey."

I sat. She put the wreath aside and took both my hands, and I let her, because if I had pulled away in that kitchen at that hour, everything after would have been harder.

Her thumb went over my knuckles. She had a ring on.

Thin iron band, dark garnet, too small for her, so she wore it pushed onto the smallest finger. There was a mark cut into the inside of it. I had seen that mark perhaps nine times in my life, always by accident, always in bad light, and I was never once allowed to hold the thing long enough to learn it.

It came with me. That was all anybody ever said about it. It came with the basket.

"You're wearing my ring," I said.

The kitchen went on around us. Steam, knives, somebody laughing at the hearth.

But Elgar Hart stopped with his cup halfway to his mouth, and Annis, over at the dress, put a pin in twice in the same place.

Both of them. At the same moment.

Celeste turned her hand over and looked at it as though it had climbed on by itself. "It isn't anyone's, Maeve. It's a bit of old iron."

"It came with the basket."

"It came with the basket," she agreed, easily. "So did you."

Seven years of my first life I let that go. Let it go and let it go, and then they walked me out in the rain.

I looked at Elgar's cup, still stopped in the air. I looked at Annis's pin.

Then I let it go again, on purpose this time, which is an entirely different thing, and I stood up and went to be dressed.

The rite ground is a flat half acre of packed earth behind the Whitlock hall with the pack stone set in the middle of it, waist high, grey, older than the pack that owns it. Four hundred people came. Farm packs turn out for a wedding.

Garrick Whitlock ran the rite, because his son was standing in it. Sixty years old and dry as a stick, and he carried the ceremonial blade across both palms like something he was giving back rather than something he was lending.

"Your hand," he said to me.

I gave him my right. He drew the edge across the pad of my thumb, quick and shallow, the way you nick a fruit, and the blood came up fast, and I set my thumb to the pack stone and left a mark on it.

Roan bled second. That is the Whitlock order. The one who is asked bleeds first and the one who asks bleeds after, and in four hundred years nobody in that pack had thought to ask what the order was for.

He crossed the ground towards me. Six steps. Golden, taller than me by a head, smelling of the good soap they keep for guests, and his face was doing something careful.

I knew that face. I had watched it three hundred times, over ledgers, over other people's bad news. It is the face he makes when he has already decided and is waiting for you to catch up to him.

He drew breath.

Here is what I want on the record, and there is a record now, and I am the one keeping it.

He was going to say it. The words were already loaded and aimed. I did not take one thing from that man that he was not about to take from me first.

I simply went earlier.

"I, Maeve Hart," I said, "reject Roan Whitlock as my mate."

My voice came out flat and carrying, the way it goes when I am past being frightened and into whatever comes next.

The ground got so quiet I could hear wind moving in the barley.

Roan's mouth was still open on the shape of his own first word.

Somebody behind me said, "She what?"

And then somebody else. One of Roan's aunts, a woman called Cathry, who had spent a month telling the pack how sorry she was that it had to fall out this way, and how it had all been settled years ago, and how the girl had always known.

She started saying it again. "It was settled years back, everyone knew the girl—"

She stopped.

Not politely. Not the way you stop when you think better of a thing. Her mouth kept working and no sound came out of it, and her hand went up to her throat, and she stood there in front of four hundred people opening and closing like a fish on a board.

Two rows over, the ceremony speaker stopped in the middle of the word "always."

Then a boy near the front, who had been telling people all week that he had seen me refuse Roan months ago, which was a story he invented to make himself interesting.

Three of them. Silenced at once, all three in the middle of a sentence.

My thumb was still bleeding. There was blood in my palm where I had closed my hand on it.

Something went through me and out of me like heat going out of an open door, and my ears rang, and I tasted copper high up behind my nose.

It lasted about one breath. Then Cathry coughed and swore and could speak again, and the ground filled up with noise, and I wiped my nose on the inside of my wrist and looked at the smear there and put my arm down.

Nerves. I gave it that name and moved on, because I had four hundred people in front of me and one more thing I still meant to do.

Over at the edge of the crowd an old woman had both hands across her mouth.

She was very old, one of the ones who get carried to things. She was staring at my hand. At the blood on it. And she said a single word into her fingers, and I only caught it because the ground had gone quiet again.

"Hale."

I did not know the word. It sat in my ear like a stone in a shoe for about four seconds. Then Roan finally got his voice back, and I forgot it for a very long time.

"Maeve." Quiet. Reasonable. Already reaching for the version of this he could live inside. "You aren't well. Let's not do this in front of—"

"It's done," I said. "I said it at the stone with my blood on it. Ask your father whether it's done."

Garrick Whitlock said nothing at all, which was an answer.

They started arguing about procedure. Four hundred people, and inside a minute it had turned into a debate over whether a rejection spoken second could stand as the first one, which tells you everything about the Whitlock pack.

I stood in the middle of it and looked for Celeste.

She was six feet away, at the front, where family stands. She had not moved. She was not stunned, whatever she told people afterwards. She was working. I watched her sort through it the way she sorts through a drawer, and I watched her find the piece she wanted, and I watched her face settle into sorrow like a hand going down into a glove.

Then she reached up to push her hair back.

The ring caught the light.

Iron and garnet, on the smallest finger of a woman who was going to watch me go over a cliff.

I did not say anything. I have a rule about that now. When the thing I want to say is a promise, I stop talking and I go and keep it instead.

But I made it, standing there in borrowed grey with my thumb bleeding into the skirt, and I will set it down once so that it exists somewhere outside my own skull.

This time I do not survive them.

This time I collect.

A rejection is supposed to be followed by a feast, and nobody had thought to cancel the feast.

So four hundred people filed into the Whitlock hall and ate roast mutton under the harvest banners, and every one of them talked about me with their backs half turned, and I sat at the end of the third table and ate everything in front of me.

I was hungry and I ate. There is a kind of woman who cannot swallow when she is in trouble. Dying cured me of that.

Roan came for me between the meat and the bread.

He crouched at the end of the bench so we would be at a height, which is a thing he does, and set one hand on the table near mine without touching it, which is also a thing he does. Then he made his voice low and warm and entirely private, in a room with four hundred people in it.

"You're frightened," he said. "That's all this is."

"No."

"Maeve." He almost smiled. "Where would you go?"

And there it was. Right on time. Four days early, in fact