Chapter 44 — Run the Moon

Chapter 44: Chapter 44 — Run the Moon

~ Raven ~

"It is time for your First Howl."

For about three seconds, nobody made a sound.

A hundred first-years stood barefoot on painted stone and waited for the words to mean something, but none of them knew what a First Howl was, and Raven watched the not-knowing travel across the court like cold water.

The court erupted again, louder than before.

"That’s not a real thing—"

"My brother studied here! He never said anything about this—"

"They dragged us out of bed! They can’t just—"

Near the front, a girl stood with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, looking desperately from one student to another.

"What if they’re lying?" she demanded. "What if this isn’t an initiation at all?"

"I’m reporting every one of them," a boy declared, although his shaking voice ruined some of the effect. "Every mask in this court. My father sits on the academy’s endowment board—"

"Then he probably paid for the masks," someone muttered.

The masked leader watched all of it without moving, hands folded, head tilted a fraction, the posture of a man enjoying his evening.

"If we came to kill you, pups," he said, "you would not have made it this far."

The court decided, unanimously, that this was worse.

"Oh, charming—"

"Who are you—"

Tessa shoved forward two steps and pointed at him with a hand that hadn’t stopped shaking since the corridor. "Who gave you permission? Those were locked rooms. Female rooms. Half of you standing there are men — you came through a locked door into a room where four girls were sleeping. I want a name, I want the name of whoever—"

A masked wolf shifted toward her and Brielle’s head snapped around.

"Touch her." Brielle hauled against the bands on her wrists, and something in her throat had gone rough and low, not entirely a human sound. "Go on. Touch either of us again and see how the rest of your night develops."

"Are you both all right?" Thalia had got herself between them and was checking their faces, one and then the other, still grey around the mouth. "Tessa. Are you — did anyone actually hurt you? Raven?"

"I’m fine."

"You are not fine, you’re bleeding—"

"That’s from the door frame." Probably. Raven wiped her elbow on her nightdress and went back to counting.

Because something had been bothering her since the archway, and it wasn’t the masks.

She looked at the faces. Not the wolf faces — the real ones, the frightened ones, packed shoulder to shoulder across the court.

The tall girl from the admission queue who’d cried when the scan came back. The boy who’d been three places ahead of her at classification. Two of the girls who had crowded her dormitory doorway last night with questions about Dante. A dozen more she half-knew from the Wing selection, all of them wearing the plain insignia they’d handed out with the uniforms.

Every single person on this floor was a first-year.

Raven turned around slowly. Nobody older. Not one of the seniors from Nikolai’s common room, not the eyebrow people, not the boy with the honey jar. The residence had been full of students two floors up and they’d walked past all of them.

They didn’t raid the Wing. They came shopping.

The leader raised one hand and made a small gesture, like a man dismissing a waiter.

Every restraint band in the court opened at once.

They dropped off a hundred wrists in one metallic clatter, Raven’s fell with the rest, and she stood rubbing the feeling back into her hands while the meaning of that arrived on the rest of the court’s faces.

Nobody unlocks a hundred academy restraints from the middle of a training ground with a flick of the fingers. Not unless the wards are already theirs and every lock in the residence had been theirs from the beginning.

Raven looked at the court properly for the first time.

The boundary lines were painted, not chalked — dry, worn at the edges, laid down long before tonight.

The silver markers waited in a neat row along the platform’s lip, counted out in advance. At intervals down both sides of the court, masked figures stood in marked positions beside wheeled racks, and every rack was stacked with dark leather balls.

Prepared, she thought. All of it. Days of it.

And a voice came back to her from a stairwell, warm and easy, right before a hand ruffled her hair.

You’ll understand in a week.

Her hands closed at her sides.

A week. He’d stood there smiling at her with the whole thing already scheduled, watched her walk up to her room and go to sleep, and given her six extra days she didn’t have.

The senior with the honey jar had almost said night and got kicked in the shin for it, and Nikolai — Nikolai had corrected the number to a week and moved the conversation along.

Raven searched the ring of masks. Then the galleries above, where the moonlight didn’t reach and the balustrades made a good place to stand and watch.

Nothing. Every mask the same. Every figure the same height they wanted to be.

Lying bastard.

She’d let herself think he was the harmless one. Two days in and the warmest wolf in this academy had lied straight into her face over the top of her own head.

Fine. Noted. She’d stop making that mistake tonight.

"The challenge," the leader said, and the court quietened despite itself, "is called Run the Moon."

He walked a slow line along the front rank, and students moved back from him without deciding to.

"You start behind that line. You cross this court. You climb that platform, you take a marker, you are done — and you may go back to your beds with your dignity approximately intact."

He stopped. "Several of you run at once, but nobody runs with anybody. You are not a pack yet. You are a crowd."

"And them?" Brielle’s chin jerked at the racks.

"Ah." The mask turned toward her, delighted. "Them."

He lifted one of the leather balls off the nearest rack, turning it in his glove so the carved runes caught the moon.

"Feed a little aura into one of these and it wakes up. Then it hits you, and your wolf loses its manners."

A tap on the carvings. "Red makes you angry. Not sensibly angry — stupid angry. The kind where you turn around and charge a wall because the wall was nearest."

He tossed it, caught it.

"Blue takes the floor out from under you. Yellow tells you very sincerely that you are about to die and you should be elsewhere. And black—"

He held it up. "Black tells you to lie down, because your betters are talking."

"None of it lasts," he added. "Take four in a row, though, and your wolf stops listening to you at all. That part is quite entertaining from up here."

Somebody at the front started crying, quietly.

"Dodge them. Catch them. Slap them out of the air if you’re feeling athletic. What you may not do is touch a thrower, cross a side line, or put your hands on another contestant."

The leader spread his arms. "You lose if you leave the court, if you stay down through a ten-count, or if the time runs out while you’re still admiring the scenery."

"And if we lose?" the endowment boy called out. "What, we run again tomorrow?"

"Oh, no." The mask cocked. "If you lose, you get the Pup Mark."

He touched two gloved fingers to the middle of his own forehead.

"A red paw print. There. It doesn’t wash off. Hair won’t hide it, powder won’t cover it, and it fades at sunset tomorrow — which, by happy accident, is after your first day of classes."

The court came apart.

"After—"

"Absolutely not, I’m not walking into a lecture hall with—"

"Do you know what my mother will—" The endowment boy had gone red to his ears. "My family endowed the east library, and you intend to put a paw print on my—"

"On your forehead, yes. Centred. We take pride in the work."

"Anyone who comes near my face with that," Tessa said, at volume, "loses the hand. I’m being literal. I want that written down somewhere."

Brielle didn’t look at her.

"You threatened them before they put you on your knees, too."

"I was ambushed."

"We were all ambushed."

"Yes, well, some of us were ambushed harder—"

"There’s one more thing." The leader had waited them out. "The platform."

He let the pause run until the court fed him the silence.

"It carries an old ward. The Wolfcall. Every ball that hits you out there winds your wolf tighter — rage, fear, submission, all of it packed down with nowhere to go. Reach the platform, take a marker, and the ward lets go of it. All at once."

He turned, unhurried, and looked over the hundred of them.

"Your wolf will decide it has crossed hostile ground and lived. It will answer the only way it knows how." A shrug. "Nobody claims a marker without howling. That is the whole point of the name."

Raven stood very still.

Her wolf had been confirmed in front of four examiners and half the academy. It had also spent eighteen years asleep, and it lived behind chains she’d seen with her own eyes, and she had never once shifted or howled or produced any sound a wolf would recognise as belonging to it.

So there were two possibilities. Either that platform pulled something out of her in front of a hundred witnesses—

Or it pulled nothing at all, and the whole first year watched the girl with the impossible record stand on the silver and make no sound whatsoever despite her impressiveness previously.

One disaster at a time, she told herself, and went back to studying the throwers’ positions, because there was nothing else useful to do with her hands.

"First heat." The leader’s voice carried. "Twelve of you. Behind the line."

Masked wolves waded into the crowd and started pulling students out by the arm.

Thalia’s fingers locked around Raven’s wrist. "No — wait, no, I haven’t — I don’t even know what I’m supposed to—" She was already being drawn backward, and her heels skidded on the paint, and she got out one look over her shoulder that Raven felt land somewhere under her ribs.

Tessa went next, and Tessa went loud.

"Take your hand off me. I can walk." She shook the glove off her elbow, straightened her nightdress with as much dignity as anyone had managed all night, and marched herself to the line. "Twelve of us and a hundred of you. Cowards, the lot of—"

"Behind the line, pup."

"I’m going behind the line."

Along both walls, the throwers lifted the balls from the racks.

Light crawled out of the carvings — red, then blue, then yellow, then black, spreading through the leather until every ball in the court burned with its own colour and the painted floor lit up beneath them.

At the far end, the silver platform woke. A pale glow ran the length of it, gathering along the row of markers.

The twelve lowered themselves behind the line. Some crouched like runners. Most just stood there with their hands out, not knowing what shape to make.

The leader raised one hand.

"Run."