Beneath The Blood Moon

"I reject this bond." Four words. They landed on five hundred people at once, and the terrace went so quiet Sofia could hear the torches burning. She hadn't imagined, thirty seconds earlier when he'd asked her name, that a king could look at someone like she was the only solid thing in a room full of smoke. Then his jaw had gone hard, and he'd said the four words that ended it. Her knee hit stone before she chose to kneel. Her hand flew to her sternum, pressing against a pain with no shape, no edges, just a raw wrongness where something had been and now wasn't. "Remove her from the grounds," the king said, to a warrior, not to her. "The ceremony continues." He turned his back. Calla, beside her at the wall, made a small strangled sound. "Sofia. Are you—" Sofia got up on her own. Nobody helped her. Nobody at Hollow Ridge ever did, not the wolfless girl, the one whose wolf had never once surfaced in nineteen years of waiting for it. She'd stopped waiting a long time ago. She made it to the outer wall before her legs stopped pretending. She pressed her spine to the cold stone and breathed through her teeth, and that was when she felt it. Her wrist was burning. Three lines, silver white, raked across her inner skin like claw marks dragged from beneath the surface. Not a bruise. Something alive, pulsing to a rhythm that had nothing to do with her racing heart. "Don't let anyone see that." A boy dropped out of the wall's shadow, seventeen, wire glasses crooked, a book clutched like it might run off without him. "Who are you?" "Eli. Archive apprentice." His eyes hadn't left her wrist. "I know what that is." "Then tell me." He hesitated, and she watched him decide how much to say and how fast. "There's a bloodline. Everyone thinks it's extinct. Twenty years, since the palace fell." "Whose bloodline." "The Blood Moon royal family." He said it like it cost him something. "The Queen had a daughter. An infant. Nobody ever found her after the siege." Sofia's stomach dropped past the stone floor. "And you think I'm her." "I think," Eli said, "that mark doesn't come from nowhere." A horn sounded across the grounds. Sharp. Wrong. Eli went the color of old paper. "Someone's already seen it." A warrior's voice cut through the crowd, carrying over five hundred conversations that all stopped at once. "Summon the wolfless girl. Bring her to the king immediately." Sofia looked at her wrist. It burned steady, patient, like it had been waiting nineteen years for someone to finally ask it a question. She pulled her sleeve down and walked toward the man who'd just destroyed her in front of everyone she'd ever known. The council hall smelled of wood oil and old decisions. Six elders lined one side of the table. Zayn's advisors sat at the far end, and beside them, a narrow silver haired man watched the door like a man watching a trap spring shut. Zayn didn't look at her when she walked in. "Show the mark," Elder Soren said, no greeting. Sofia pushed her sleeve up. One elder made a sound like he'd been struck. The silver haired man rose and crossed to her, pale eyed, careful in the way of someone who makes sure nothing on his face means anything. "Hold still," he said, and reached for her wrist. The mark flared. He snatched his hand back before it touched her, and for half a second something showed through the crack. Fear. She filed it away. "Where did you come from?" he asked, light, too light. "Hollow Ridge. Nineteen years." "Your parents?" "Dead when I was four." "I don't believe that," he said. "I think you were given a name, and the people who gave it to you were told to." He let that sit. "The mark belongs to the youngest daughter of the last queen. Taken from the palace the night it fell." The room held its breath. "You're saying I'm—" "I'm asking questions, Chancellor Voss," Zayn said, standing. "Leave us." He said it to her. Everyone else understood he meant them. Alone, he came around the table, not fast, just direct enough that the room shrank with every step. "The pain," he said. "From the rejection. Is it still there." "I don't care about the pain," she said. "I care about what Voss said. Do you know what I am?" His eyes dropped to her wrist, and something moved across his face before he flattened it. "I have a theory." "Tell me." "If it's correct, it changes a great deal." "Including your rejection." His jaw shifted, barely. "Yes," he said. "Including that." The door crashed open. A warrior stumbled in, grey faced. "Your Majesty. The eastern perimeter. Something's come through." He swallowed. "Mordain's people. At least forty. They're asking for her, by name." Through the open door, Sofia saw firelight from the wrong direction. South. Where the tree line was burning. Forty strangers who already knew her name were walking through smoke, straight toward her.