The Lowest Rank

There is a rank below omega. Nobody likes to say so, because a pack that admits there is a rank below omega has to admit it put someone in it. But the rank exists, and I have lived in it since I was nine years old, and the Blackpine pack calls it by my name. They don't mean it as a name. When the kitchen needs scrubbing they say *get Della*. When the alpha's hunting dogs need walking in the rain they say *get Della*. When something has gone wrong and someone has to be at fault so the morning can move on, they say *Della did it*, and the morning moves on, and I scrub the next thing. By now the word and the work have grown together. I am not a girl who does the lowest tasks. I am the lowest task, in a girl's shape, and Blackpine has stopped being able to tell the difference. I was not born to this. That is the part I hold onto, on the bad days, the way you'd hold a stone in your pocket. My parents were pack members in good standing — middling rank, nothing grand, but theirs. Then there was a border skirmish the winter I turned nine, and they went out to defend Blackpine's territory like the law said they must, and Blackpine's territory was successfully defended, and they did not come home. A pack is supposed to take in its orphans. The law is very clear. The law says the pack that a wolf dies for is the pack that raises what the wolf leaves behind. Blackpine took me in the way you take in a draft. It let me through the door and then spent eleven years resenting the cold. I am twenty now. I have a corner of the kitchen that is mine, a pallet behind the dry-goods shelves, warm at least, which I have learned to be grateful for because gratitude is cheaper than bitterness and I cannot afford bitterness. I have one friend, old Mabon the kennel-master, who talks to me like a person and once, when I was twelve and crying, told me that the size of a pack's cruelty is the surest measure of its fear — that strong packs don't need someone to stand on. I did not understand him then. I am beginning to. And I have one thing that is entirely, secretly, untouchably mine, which is this: I have never shifted in front of them. My wolf came late. She should have come at sixteen and she did not come until I was nearly nineteen, and by then I had learned enough about Blackpine to know that a first shift is a vulnerable, public, ceremonial thing, and that Blackpine would have found a way to make mine humiliating. So when she finally came — on a cold night, alone, out past the woodshed where no one walks — I did not tell a soul. I shifted in the dark, by myself, and I have done it that way ever since. My wolf is the one citizen of Blackpine that the pack does not own, has not scrubbed, cannot send out in the rain. She is mine. She is grey, and she is fast, and on the worst nights she is the only reason I am still here instead of run off rogue into a forest that would kill me kinder than this kitchen ever has. Tonight the kitchen is louder than usual, because tomorrow the new alpha arrives. The old alpha is dead — peacefully, in his sleep, which is more peace than he ever extended to me — and his successor comes from the bloodline at first light. The whole pack is scrubbing and baking and stringing the hall with the green branches of welcome. I am scrubbing too. Of course I am scrubbing. *Get Della.* I do not care who the new alpha is. I want to be honest about that, here at the start, so that what happens next is not mistaken for a girl who was hoping. I had stopped hoping a long time before tomorrow. An alpha is just the name of the person at the top of a thing that has its boot on you; changing the name does not move the boot. So I scrub the long table for the welcome feast, and I do not let myself wonder about him, and I go to my pallet behind the dry-goods shelves, and I do not know — how could I know — that the man arriving at dawn is the other half of my soul, and that by sundown tomorrow he will have looked me in the eyes, recognized exactly what I am to him, and decided, in front of every wolf I have ever scrubbed a floor for, that he would rather not.