What Maren Won't Say

Maren doubled my training the day the Proving was called, which meant I was on the ground more often than I was upright.

"Again," she said, for what had to be the twentieth time that morning, circling with the patience of someone who'd decided sleep was optional until I improved. "You're rushing the read. Slow down. Watch the weight, not the shoulders."

I got up. My whole body had opinions about that instruction by now, none of them polite.

The yard had emptied out an hour into the session — Maren's doing, a curt word to the pages who usually lingered to watch. Whatever happened out here today, she'd decided, wasn't for an audience.

"You're favoring your left side," she said, circling. "Every time you fall, you catch yourself the same way. Predictable is how you die in a real fight."

"Noted," I said, and got up predictably on my left side anyway, because apparently nine years of one particular shoulder taking the weight doesn't unlearn itself on command.

We'd been at it two hours when it happened again — not the small flash from the first night, a bigger version of it, close enough to the real thing that I felt the difference in my chest before I understood it in my head. Maren came at me with an opening feint, and for one full second before she moved, I didn't just know which way her weight was going.

I knew what she was about to say.

Not guessed. Not read it off her stance. I stepped where she wasn't going to be, put her on the ground, and said, before she'd hit the dirt, the exact three words I could feel forming in her throat:

"—not this time."

Maren lay in the dirt, staring up at me, and for the first time since I'd met her, General Maren looked afraid.

"Say that again," she said, very carefully, not moving.

"You were going to say 'not this time,'" I said. "I don't know how I knew. I just — knew, the way I know my own hand's about to close before I close it. Same as before. Just bigger."

She got up slowly, brushing dirt from her sleeves, and this time she didn't ask me to do it again. She stood very still, looking at me the way you'd look at a door you'd been standing next to for years without knowing it opened onto a drop.

"Maren." I kept my voice level, the way she'd taught me to keep everything level. "You know something. You've known something since the first night this happened. I need you to tell me what it is, especially now, with the Proving three days out."

"I don't know what it is," she said. "I know what it isn't."

"Which is?"

"A wolfless girl's instinct," she said. "Instinct doesn't hand you words before they're spoken, Sera. Instinct reads bodies. What you just did — that's not reading a body. That's reading a mind that hasn't finished deciding what it's about to do." She looked away, out toward the practice yard's far wall, like the admission cost her something to say to open air instead of my face. "There's exactly one thing in nine hundred years of this kingdom's record that does that. It isn't a wolf-gift. It's older than wolves."

My stomach dropped somewhere I hadn't known it could reach.

"Then what am I?"

Maren was quiet long enough that I thought she wasn't going to answer at all.

"I don't know yet," she said finally. "And I'm not going to guess out loud three days before you stand in front of the whole court and let them test whether the King's bond to you is real. Whatever's under 'wolfless,' Sera — it's not weakness. I'd stake my rank on that much. But I won't hand you a half-finished answer to carry into the Proving when a wrong guess could cost you more than a right one waiting would."

"And after the Proving?"

Something in her face softened, just barely — the closest thing to a promise General Maren had ever made me.

"After the Proving," she said, "we find out together. That's the deal. Right now, we train, because whatever you are, girl, the court is going to try to kill it in three days to see if it flinches."

"You said it isn't a wolf-gift," I said. "You said it's older than wolves. Older how? Older than Blackpine? Older than this kingdom?"

"Older than the Ninth Accord," Maren said, and something in the way she said it told me she'd chosen those particular words carefully, weighing exactly how much truth she could hand me without handing me a guess dressed up as a fact. "That's as far as I'll go today. Ask me again after the Proving, and I'll owe you the rest."

"That's not an answer, Maren. That's a promise to give me one later."

"It's the only honest thing I have to offer you right now," she said. "I'd rather owe you a truth than hand you a guess and watch you build your nerve around something that turns out to be wrong."

She reset her stance, and so did I, and for the rest of that morning neither of us said another word about what had happened in the dirt — but I caught her watching me between drills, in the pauses, with an expression I hadn't seen on her before and wouldn't have a name for until much later: the specific, careful look of someone recalculating exactly how much they were willing to risk to protect something they didn't yet understand.

To be continued — Chapter 12: Lady Aveline isn't just calling for the Proving — she's making sure it can't be won.