Chapter 202: FULL MOON RISING

RYKER

The sky starts doing it around four in the afternoon.

That thickening. That quality of light that is not quite gold and not quite grey, the weight the air takes on that has nothing to do with weather. I have felt it every full moon since my wolf came in at fourteen, and I have never once gotten used to it, and I have never once wanted to. A man who gets used to the full moon is a man who has stopped paying attention to what it does to him, and knowing what is happening inside you is the only real advantage you ever get over anyone. I built my whole personality on that principle. Ask anybody.

I am on the training yard wall when it comes in.

Through the soles of my feet first — that low vibration, the one that arrives hours ahead of the moon itself the way thunder sends its scouts ahead of the storm. Then up through the chest. Then the wolf. Shifting. Restless. Leaning his whole weight into the leash three hours before the moon has even cleared the trees.

Early tonight, I tell him.

He does not answer. He never answers. He just pulls.

Below me, one of the junior sentinels crosses the yard with his shoulders up around his ears, moving fast, the way the young ones all move on full moon afternoons — like the sky is a teacher who might call on them.

“Kellen.” He stops. Squints up at me on the wall. “East boundary tonight. Tell the watch captain I want a third man on it.”

“Third, sir? We usually run two—”

“Full moons make young wolves stupid, and stupid wolves make bad decisions at boundaries.” I hold his eyes. “You were stupid at a boundary once. Two winters ago. The fence, the girl from the mill families, the extremely memorable howling.”

His whole neck goes red. “Third man. Yes, sir.” He leaves at a speed that does his training credit.

I stay on the wall.

I have been staying on walls a lot lately. A wall is a good place to think and an excellent place to not be talked to, and those two needs have been running concurrently for three weeks with no resolution in sight. From up here I can see the whole board — the rebuilt north wall with Marco’s new sensor line, the dungeon’s east corner where Victor’s polite son is learning everyone’s name, the tree line where thirty men once stood for two hours, the window on the second floor where the light will come on around seven.

I mean to think about the patrol schedule.

I think about Amaris.

I think about her at breakfast, moving eggs in circles and calling it eating. I think about I’m fine delivered in the voice people use when fine is a placeholder for a conversation they have not scheduled yet. I think about Nia across the table, watching her not eat, and the thing Nia’s face was doing — and I recognized that thing, because my face did it three weeks ago, alone, in my own room, when I did a very simple piece of math and arrived at an answer and put the answer in a drawer and shut the drawer with more force than the drawer required.

I have not opened it since. I am aware of what is in it. Awareness and acknowledgment are different rooms in the same house and I have been living in the first one comfortably.

The wolf pulls harder.

He does not care about drawers.

That is the problem with tonight, and I have known it since the light started thickening: too much has changed and the wolf does not know about changed. The wolf does not do complicated. The wolf has a short list and the moon underlines every item on it, and tonight the list reads: her. And under that: the brother — settle it. And under that, in the oldest handwriting: mine, mine, mine.

I do not trust what I am going to do tonight.

Not the way a man means that when he is afraid of himself. The way a man means it when he knows himself thoroughly and can state, as a matter of record, that the version of me that comes out under a full moon does not consult the version that makes careful decisions in daylight. The daytime version has opinions. Extensive ones. About timing, about my father, about the order in which truths should be told. The moon version is going to hear all of those opinions the way the sea hears a memo.

The sky thickens another degree. The light goes from almost-gold to the color of held breath.

My wolf throws himself against the inside of my chest hard enough that I put my hand flat on the wall stone and breathe. The stone is cold. The stone is always cold and always honest and I have been coming to this wall for three weeks because it is the only thing in this pack that wants nothing from me.

I breathe, and I think about the corridor three weeks ago.

Rowan’s hand on her face. Her eyes finding mine over his shoulder — not guilty, not asking permission, just seeing me, fully, while my brother’s thumb moved along her jaw. And I held her eyes and did not look away and something got understood between the three of us in that corridor that none of us has said out loud since, because saying it makes it real and we have all been busy pretending we have time.

The moon does not believe in time. It believes in schedules.

Tonight I am going to need Rowan to be reasonable, which he is, professionally, except about exactly two subjects, and she is both of them. I am going to need myself to be honest, which I am, selectively, on a schedule of my own choosing, which the moon is about to revoke. And I am going to need Amaris to be whatever she is when she is not managing all three of us at once — the version underneath the wit, the one that shows up in doorways and rainstorms, the version I like best and get least.

The first silver edge of it clears the tree line.

The vibration in the stone changes pitch. Every wolf in this pack feels it at the same instant — I can hear it, doors closing down in the village, a howl starting somewhere young and impatient in the east, Kellen’s third man jogging to his post.

My wolf stops throwing himself at my chest.

He goes still instead. Pointed. Oriented like a compass needle at a second-floor window where a light has just come on.

Yes, I tell him. I know.

I push off the wall.