The Luna They Sold

Chapter 2 — Reading the Contract

"With what?" Wren said. She turned and met her stepsister's eyes. "A comb and a bag? You kept everything else."

Maris's mouth tightened, but she said nothing. She had learned young that silence was safer than admitting theft out loud.

Aldous walked out. The younger man—pale-eyed, watching Wren the way men watched cards in a high-stakes game—followed.

Wren climbed the stairs to her room and pulled the canvas field bag from beneath the bed. She owned little. Three dresses, all mended. Two pairs of stockings. The wool shawl her mother had knit the winter before she died. Underclothes. The silver comb in its cedar box. Her mother's last ledger, the one Corwin did not know existed. She wrapped the ledger in a spare slip and buried it at the bottom of the bag. The pages inside held six years of her mother's entries, every number correct, every line justified. Odessa Ashwood had taught her that ink did not lie. Men did.

The mark on her left hand itched beneath the linen strip she had wound around it before dawn. She did not unwrap it. The crescent had been pale at first light, faint as a scar, but it had darkened as the sun rose. Now it burned.

She buckled the bag and went downstairs.

The car sat in the gravel drive, black and northern and gleaming in the thin morning light. Aldous held the rear door open. Corwin stood on the porch with his arms crossed. Maris watched from the parlor window, her face smooth as a plate.

Wren stopped at the porch steps. "The original ledgers," she said to Corwin. "Send them to Greyfall within the week. All six years."

"Why?"

"Because the contract obligates me to manage the Ashwood accounts during the term. I can't manage what I can't see."

It was a lie. She wanted them because they were her mother's work, and because Corwin would burn them the moment she was gone.

Corwin's jaw worked. "Fine."

She walked to the car. Aldous's gaze tracked her wrapped hand when she gripped the door frame, but he said nothing. She slid into the back seat. The leather was cold and smelled of oil and smoke. The interior was spotless. No dust, no torn seams, no stray wrappers. Grey pack money did not allow for disorder.

The younger man took the passenger seat. Aldous closed her door, circled to the driver's side, and started the engine. The sound was low and steady, nothing like the Ashwood truck that coughed black smoke and died on hills.

The car rolled forward. Wren did not look back.

They were an hour north, the road climbing into the pine country, when the younger man spoke for the first time. "You wrote the redemption clause in the old tongue."

"I wrote what my mother wrote."

"Your mother was a clerk," he said. "Clerks don't learn vow-tongue by accident."

Wren looked at the back of his head. His hair was dark, clipped short at the neck. "I don't know what vow-tongue is."