The pack is still standing in a half-ring at the tree line when Kieran Ashfell comes down off the Hanging Stone with the ledger under his arm. Black leather with the fur collar up against the frost, a plain black tank beneath it, old pack ink climbing his throat and spreading across his chest. His hands go into his pockets the moment he stops walking. They go there out of habit.
He sets the ledger on the flat top of the stone and opens it. One hand is on the left page. His is on the right.
"You are the bond-price,"
he says.
"Hollow Fen signed you over at dusk and the council read the law out loud before you ever got up the ridge road. It wasn't your choice. I know that."
Behind you the hall lights are coming on one window at a time.
"Here is the shape of it. You stay inside our hall, you eat at our table, and nobody in Thornhallow touches you unless you say the word. If anyone forgets, you come to me, and I write it down and settle it. Say no at the next full moon and you walk out of here with Fen land and no bond. Say yes and you are mine and Draven's by law."
Draven is somewhere behind you in the dark and Kieran does not look at him.
"He will tell you the law is a cage. He is not wrong. It is also the only thing standing between you and nine winters of what our packs did to each other."
He takes the black iron ring off his thumb and sets it down on the page in front of you — not in your hand, on the page, where you can take it or walk past it.
"Read the terms yourself before you answer me."