Page 84 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

It’s warm out. Somebody has the doors of the barn open, somebody else is complaining about it. There’s a soccer game running on the field below the lodge. It started after breakfast and has acquired rules along the way. Two of the younger wolves are arguing about one of them.

I sit on the lodge steps with a cup of tea in my hands that I have no use for at all. I make it anyway. Most mornings, some afternoons. I hold it until it’s cold. There’s a reason humans do this and I’ve started to understand what it is. I still catch myself reading the yard. Counting who’s in it, going over every person out there one at a time, sitting off at the edge where I can see all of it at once.

Then I quit and sit there instead. That took practice. The first week I couldn’t manage an hour of it. Now I can get most of an afternoon.

Valen is on the step below mine with his back against the post and one boot up on the rail. His hair’s grown out past where he used to keep it. He’s too big for that step and he sits on it anyway, knees up, taking most of it. The sun is full on one side of his face and he isn’t squinting against it. His gray eyes are lighter in it than they are indoors.

He and Rafe were out at the north edge of the territory since first light. He came in for lunch, sat down on that step, and hasn’t moved since. A month ago he couldn’t have done that.

Down in the field somebody puts the ball through Rhonan’s legs. Every wolf on that field starts hollering at him at once. Valen laughs with his head back against the post. I still stop whatever I’m doing every time he does that.

“Somebody’s dragged that goal fifteen feet downhill again,” he says.

“Third time since lunch.”

“It’s whichever side is losing.” He tips his head at the field. “Downhill, the ball runs into it on its own.”

“Rhonan’s the one dragging it.”

He chuckles. “I know.”

He puts his hand on my ankle where it’s resting near him. The mark I left over his heart is under his shirt. Mine is under mine. I still can’t read one thing off that man, and I know exactly where he is now without looking for him, the same as I know where my own hand is. That pack of his sat by the door of his cabin from the first morning he slept in it. It stayed packed the whole time he was in this valley. It’s in my closet now with nothing in it. He moved in here three weeks ago because mine’s the bigger cabin.

Rhonan and Serena came home two days after Faelan died, the same week the portals opened again. The first thing Rhonan did on this side was go out and look at the crack for himself. Evren never went home. The portals opened and everybody in this valley assumed he’d go back to his own realm for a stretch. He hasn’t put a foot through one. He calls it a vacation from royal duties. Nobody here has ever believed that or ever said so.

Half this compound is out on that field. Dane’s playing. Callum’s playing. Nobody from Drakoria had ever seen this game until somebody put a ball in front of them, so Rhonan is learning it one piece at a time and losing his temper about the offside. Rafe has picked the ball up with both hands twice in ten minutes. Both times they’ve had to stop the game and explain it to him again. Evren is the only one of the three who’s any good at it. He had it inside an afternoon and he won’t say how. He’s on the field now, arguing a call he has no standing to argue. Then he walks down and drags the goal back uphill to where it started.

Rhonan wants to know who made him referee. Nobody answers him. Evren has been easier this week than I’ve ever seen him. The heat that came off that boy every day of the hunt has gone down to nothing.

Evie sits apart from everybody. She’s on the far side of the yard on an upturned crate with her back to the game. She’s been there most of the afternoon. That’s ordinary. It’s been ordinary for weeks. Scarlett stopped commenting on it a while back, and Kaspian stopped asking me about it after I told him twice that I had nothing to give him. I read that girl from the first week I met her. Everything she was carrying sat right on the surface where I could reach it. That stopped the week the marks started moving and it hasn’t come back.

Evie stands up and walks north, past the last of the cabins. I watch her go for a second.

Down on the field Rhonan finally has the offside called against him and argues it anyway. Valen says something under his breath about how long that took. I laugh at him.

Then the air changes. A month of that ward sitting there solid, and now there’s give in it. Out north, at the edge of what I can reach from this step, like cloth going under a thumb. I’m on my feet. The game stops. Every head on that field comes up at once. Rafe has both hands out toward the north end of the compound before anybody has said a word.

Evren turns and looks for Evie. My eyes follow his. She isn’t on the crate. He takes off running toward the crack. I knock my cup off the step going after him. Valen is past me before we clear the cabins. Whatever’s wrong out there sharpens the closer we come to it.

We come over the rise. Evie is past the cord. She’s standing right at the opening with her back to us, close enough that another half step would put her in it. That ward is built to keep anybody from getting that close. It isn’t stopping her. It’s intact. I can read that much from here. Rafe built it to keep people away from that opening. It let her walk right up to it.

“Evie.” Evren’s voice comes out of him ragged. “Evie, stop.”

I reach for her. I’m ten feet short and closing. It isn’t going to be enough. She walks forward off the edge. There’s no drama in it anywhere. The opening doesn’t widen. Nothing roars. She’s standing there. Then the crack has her, clean and complete, the way water takes a stone. She never looks back. Not at Evren, not at me, not at the compound behind us. There’s no sound at all from where she went.

For a moment I’m certain we can get her out - if somebody drops down on that edge, reaches in, pulls her up. Then it starts closing. Both sides at once, coming in on each other.

“No!”

The opening is half the size it was. It’s shutting with Evie inside it. Nothing in this valley can stop it. Evren throws himself at it. He hits the ground with both arms into what’s left of the opening, reaching, there’s still a hand’s width of it when he reaches it. The ground closes on his arms and pushes them back out. It doesn’t burn him, doesn’t throw him, just won’t let him in.

Then there’s nothing there. Dirt, grass, the cord on its stakes, the sign. No seam anywhere. Half this compound is on the rise by then. They came up that slope behind us at a dead run and every one of them saw it happen. Nobody comes past the cord. Somebody back there starts crying and doesn’t stop.

Evren starts on the ground with his hands. Not searching it. Tearing at it, throwing dirt back between his knees, digging for a hole that isn’t there anymore. Then he puts his head back and screams her name. Fire comes out of his mouth with it. It’s up both his arms too. There’s nothing controlled in any part of it. It runs from his wrists to his elbows and takes the grass around both his hands. That’s the first fire I’ve seen off him in a week. I watched him drag a goal back uphill an hour ago and thought the boy had finally settled.

I go down on my knees beside him and put both hands on the ground. There’s nothing there to read. No signature, no residue, nothing at all of whatever opened for that girl and shut against the man reaching after her. It isn’t hidden from me and it isn’t warded against me. There’s simply nothing left behind. I know what an erasure reads like. Every emptied archive I’ve opened this year still had the edges of what somebody cut out of it. There are no edges here.

Valen drops down on the other side of Evren and puts a hand on the dirt. Whatever a living lock is built to feel off a seal, he’s finding what I found. He looks up at me. His eyes have gone pale in the light and there is nothing moving in his face at all. He shakes his head once. He knows what that ground is. Whatever it did, it did without him.