The One Who Chooses

Thirty-first of August, 1925. Harrow, T., age 18. Stood at the Ring. Did not choose. The houses of Holt, Crowe and Marrow present, each at his own stone. Accord held one hundred years, by blood. No further action.

(each at his OWN stone. three kings, three corners, nobody standing together. T. was eighteen. T. stood there and nobody told him what to do either. — K.)

Here's what silence sounds like when a whole forest is waiting on you to break it: your own pulse, and a six-year-old's, out of sync, like two people clapping along to different songs.

I didn't say no. I didn't say anything. I knelt in the dirt with Bea zipped into my hoodie, her chin wedged under my collarbone, and I thought about that entry, because apparently my brain's emergency protocol is reread the homework.

Stood. Did not choose.

T. Harrow had stood here a hundred years ago. Same stones, same moon, probably the same smug lynx. And the Register hadn't said refused or agreed. It said he stood. Like that was the whole job. Like a Harrow was a doorstop.

"She's thinking," Varek said from the trees, amused, the concierge voice crawling back in. "Harrows always think. Your great-grandfather thought for nearly an hour. In the end, his blood did the talking for him. Blood is very obedient, Katie. You are not required to be."

"Wow," I said. My voice came out scraped. "Is that the pitch? 'You don't have to be obedient, so please obey me'? Who does your branding?"

Bea giggled into my neck. It was the best sound I'd heard in my life.

"Katie." Caspian, behind me, at the stones. He sounded different, all the lazy drawl ironed out. "Listen to me. Blood holds it. Blood is all it's ever had. Our fathers each swore at their own stone, apart, and the Harrow stood in the middle and bled a little, and the Ring took what it could get."

"What it could get," I repeated.

"It's supposed to be a choice," Elias said, quieter. "Hers. Spoken. And the three of us, together. Sworn in front of each other." A pause. "That's never happened."

"Never," I said. "In a thousand years."

"We don't—" Ronan started.

"Like each other, yeah, I've been to lunch." I twisted to look at them. All three were standing outside the fallen stones, spaced out around the circle exactly like the Register said, each at his own stone, Ronan to the north with his shoulders hunched like he was about to shift, Caspian to the west with moonlight sliding off his black hair, Elias to the east, closest to his uncle's eyes in the dark. Three boys in a triangle so wide you could've parked the Odyssey between any two of them.

And it clicked. Not slow. It clicked the way the turnstile does when your MetroCard finally reads on the fourth swipe.

Varek didn't need me to say no because no was powerful. He needed me to say it because a Harrow saying anything out loud, choosing anything, was the one move nobody in this forest had ever made. If I chose no, the Ring broke. If I chose yes, the Ring needed three princes standing together to catch it, and he was betting a thousand years of grudges that they wouldn't.

He was betting on the boys being exactly as dumb as I'd thought they were in August.

I stood up. Bea's sneakers bumped my knees. The cold of the Ring was in my bones now, a deep freezer hum, and somewhere behind me Dad's scar was glowing like a brake light.

"Okay," I said. "Everybody come here."

Nobody moved.

"I'm sorry, was that unclear? Here. Inside. Next to me." I pointed at the dirt at my feet. "Holt. Crowe. Marrow. Center stone. Now."

"Katie, the moment we cross—" Caspian said.

"You'll what? Have to stand within six feet of each other? Have to breathe the same air?" My voice was climbing, and I let it. My whole family was out there in the dark, and I let it climb. "You've let people get torn up on a logging road for a thousand years because your great-great-whatevers couldn't share a rock. Mr. Carver was walking away. Mrs. Pruitt held up her hands. And you three are gonna stand at your little corners like it's a middle school dance?"

The trees shifted. Gold eyes, moving closer.

"I'm choosing," I said. "Out loud. On purpose. I'm choosing this stupid village with its one high school and its zero bagels, and I'm doing it in this—" I yanked the hoodie front out from Bea's face so they could see the heart, the NY, the fraying cuff I'd chewed through on the drive up in August. "I'm not taking it off. I'm keeping both. That's the deal. And I'm not doing it alone in the middle while you guys watch from the bleachers like your dads did. So get in here and kneel, or go home and explain to the next kid on the logging road why you didn't."

Ronan crossed first.

He didn't look at the others. He stepped over the stone like it had insulted him, and the cold hit him, I saw it, saw his jaw lock, and he walked to the center and dropped to one knee in the dirt to my right.

Caspian came in from the west with his hands in his pockets, which, sure, fine, very cool under pressure, and knelt beside Ronan close enough that their shoulders touched. Ronan flinched. Caspian didn't move away. I don't think he could have. I think his whole body was shaking.

Elias was last. He looked into the trees, toward his uncle, for one long second.

Then he came and knelt on my left, and the three of them were side by side in the moonlight, three heads bowed, one after the other, like they'd rehearsed it, like they'd been waiting a thousand years for someone to yell at them.

The ground under us hummed.

And the gold eyes in the trees went backward.

Not forward. Back. Varek's lynxes peeled off into the dark, and I heard him laugh, low, from somewhere deeper than before.

"Lovely," he said. "Swear all night, children. The Ring holds only what stands inside it. I'll be out here. I'm patient. Your sister will have to go home eventually."

He was going to wait. He'd wait out the oath, out the moon, out us, and then he'd pick us off one at a time between the Ring and Route 11, and the Register would say lynx, so-called, and no further action.

I looked down at Bea.

"Bea-bug. You see Sela?"

Sela was crouched just outside the north stone, ears flat, shaking. Bea nodded.

"You're gonna hold on to her for me. Like a pony ride. And she's gonna take you straight to Mom. Okay?"

"Okay," Bea whispered. "Are you gonna play hide and seek?"

"Something like that."

I unzipped the hoodie and Bea slid out and the night air hit my chest like a slap. Sela came in low over the stone, and Bea wound her fists into that thick spotted fur, and Sela carried her out toward my mother so fast and so gently I almost cried. Almost. I'm telling you that so you know I counted.

Mom's arms closed around Bea. Dad's arms closed around both of them.

Then I zipped the hoodie back up to my chin and turned toward the trees.

"Katie," Ronan said. He was half off his knee already. "No."

"Stay down. Keep swearing. Don't break the line."

"You don't run in these woods, city girl."

I'd heard him say that in August, sneering at my neon Hokas, and I'd wanted to throw one at his head.

"Watch me," I said, and ran.

Out of the Ring, past the north stone, into the black. The cold of the circle peeled off my skin, and then it was just pine, and wet leaves, and my breath tearing out of me in clouds, and branches whipping my face. My shoes were the brightest thing in the Greywood. Good. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be the easiest snack in Maine.

Something big moved to my left. Paced me. Didn't hurry.

I kept running, and I talked, because of course I did. "You know what this is like? This is like the guy on the 6 train who follows you between cars. Very menacing. Very sad. Everybody's embarrassed for you, Varek."

A shape went through the moonlight between two trunks. Huge. Silver-gray. Tufted ears like knives.

"You were a closed door, your father," his voice said, and it came from everywhere. "You are an open one. Open doors swing both ways, little Harrow."

"Great metaphor, did you get it off a mug?"

My foot caught a root and I went down hard, palms in the dirt, the way Elias had taught me, roll and don't catch yourself on your wrist, and I came up already turning, already sprinting back the way I'd come. That was the whole plan. I want you to know the whole plan was one line long. Make him chase. Make him hungry enough to forget where he was.

He forgot.

I heard him hit his stride behind me, heard the weight of him, the leaves exploding under his paws, felt the heat of something enormous breathing on the back of my neck, and the north stone was there, pale in the dark, and I jumped it.

He jumped it too.

The Ring was awake now. All the way awake. The cold that had gone into my bones before went into his, and I heard it, a sound like a wet branch snapping, like a scream that had nowhere to go. He landed wrong. He skidded through the dirt in the middle of the circle, half lynx, half man, half nothing, clawing at the ground like it had turned to ice under him.

The Accord limits hunting. I'd read that line a dozen times in the Register's margins. I never pictured what it looked like when a hunter ran inside a promise.

Three shapes came down on him at once. A gray wolf, a raven the size of a door spreading its wings across his face, a young lynx with Elias's green eyes pinning his throat. Not separately. Not taking turns. Together, in the same second, like they'd been doing it their whole lives.

Varek went still.

In the trees, one by one, his lynxes stood up out of the dark, turned toward Elias, and lowered their heads.

I was on my knees again, I don't remember getting there, gasping and laughing and possibly crying, it was dark, nobody can prove anything. My right palm stung. I turned it over.

A thin line was burning white across it, right where Dad's was.

"Huh," I said.

Ronan, human again, dropped down in front of me, breathing hard, gray eyes wild. He took my wrist and held it up to the moon like evidence, and his thumb rested right over my pulse, and for a second nobody said anything at all.

"You ran," he said.

"I was very clear about that."

Caspian crouched beside us, a scratch bleeding through his eyebrow, grinning like he'd lost a bet and loved it. Elias stayed over his uncle, one knee on his chest, but he was looking at me.

Out past the stones, Dad was holding up his own left hand. The red glow on it was fading, going dark for the first time since we'd crossed the county line.

I wiped my face with the cuff of my hoodie and got up.

"Okay," I said. "Elias, your uncle's going wherever you guys put people. Sela's mom gets out tonight, not tomorrow, tonight. Owen, if you're still on that walkie, tell Max and Mia they're grounded until college. And somebody find me a pen." I held out my scarred hand. "Because I'm writing this one myself, and Hollowmere is about to have a very long column called further action."