Page 302 of Salt Between the Wolves

"You asked whether you failed me," she said, locking her eyes onto his, "and this is your answer."

Silence crashed across White Pass, and behind her, for the first time since the conversation began, Soren moved, taking a single step that every warrior present noticed because the Alpha of Ironfang had finally stopped standing still.

Eira saw Elder Sael move and only then realized how still the old woman had been until that moment.

The ritual keeper stepped forward and raised one hand without any dramatic gesture, without chanting or spectacle, and that very simplicity frightened Eira more than anything else.

"Enough," she said immediately, but no one listened.

Sael's gaze shifted briefly toward Vargan, and the Alpha of Frostvein answered with a single nod.

The mark ignited.

Pain tore through her arm so violently that she staggered, not because she had been unprepared for it, but because nothing about it felt familiar.

This was not the distant pull she had felt across mountains, nor the quiet awareness she carried whenever Soren was near. For one terrible instant she felt both at once, the old bond and the new existing side by side in a way they never should have been able to.

The world lurched.

A sharp breath tore from her lungs as voices erupted somewhere nearby, though the sound reached her distorted and distant, as though she had fallen beneath water.

"Eira."

Someone was calling her name.

She could not tell who.

The mark burned hotter. Pain spread through her shoulder and across her chest like cracks racing through ice until her knees struck the snow.

No.

The refusal came instantly.

The force pressing against her was impossible to describe. It was not a voice, not a command, and not even a thought. It felt more like a certainty searching for a place to settle, a direction imposed upon her existence as though the choice had already been made and she simply had not accepted it yet.

Yield.

Return.

Submit.

The meaning arrived without language.

Eira clenched her teeth until her jaw ached and forced out a single word.

"No."

The pressure deepened.

The pass disappeared.

The armies vanished.

Everything narrowed to the burning mark and the unbearable sensation of something reaching inside her, searching for the place where obedience had once lived and expecting to find it waiting.

"No," she said again, louder this time.

Anger steadied her where fear could not.