The Discarded Luna

What he threw away

Rhydian didn't jump back.

That was the thing I remembered afterward, that he took his time. He set the cup down on the window ledge, unhurried as a man putting down a hand of cards he'd already won, and turned to face the stairs with his hands loose at his sides.

Kade came up into the lamplight and stopped.

I have never in my life seen my mate look at me the way he looked at me in that corridor. Three years I'd have given both hands for that look, that focus, that heat, that seeing.

It wasn't for me. It was for the man standing near me.

"Get away from my Luna."

"Which one?" Rhydian said.

Kade's wolf came up so fast the lamp guttered. The whole hall filled with the pressure of it, that Alpha weight that makes lesser wolves' knees fold and I felt it hit me and slide off, the way it always did now, like rain on glass.

Rhydian didn't move at all. He just looked mildly interested, the way you'd look at a dog on a short chain.

"Careful, Ashborne," he said. "You've got eleven days and nine miles and forty of my men asleep in your east wing. Bark at me tomorrow, with maps." He glanced back at me. "Luna. Sleep well."

He went. Unhurried. Whistling, faintly, something old and northern.

Kade's hand closed around my upper arm. Not hard. Just closed.

"What were you doing with him?"

"Walking to my room."

"He was in your air, Elara."

"He was in the corridor." I looked at his hand until he let go. "Do you want to know what he said to me, Kade?"

For one second — one — I thought he'd ask. I thought he'd say yes, tell me, what's happened to you, why are you so thin, why did you sew your own dress.

"Stay away from him," he said. "That man burned Kellsmoor with the doors nailed shut. He isn't charming, he's hunting, and he's using you to embarrass me."

"Yes, Alpha."

He flinched at that. Good.

Down the hall, a door opened, and Sera's sleepy voice floated out: "Kade? Tobin's had a nightmare, he's asking for you."

And my mate turned around and went.

I stood in the dark corridor of the house I'd run for three years and listened to him murmur to another woman's son through a wall.

Then I picked up the teacup from the window ledge and carried it downstairs.

Let me tell you how I got here, since nobody in that house ever asked.

My mother was a rogue. My father was a name on nothing. Blackthorn took me in at seven because Rowan Ashborne, aged eleven, found me eating out of the kitchen bins and refused to let them send me on. I grew up in the servants' hall learning to be useful, because useful girls get to stay.

At nineteen I walked into the training yard and Kade Ashborne dropped a practice blade.

Mate.

I still remember the sound the whole yard made. The Alpha's son, mated to the rogue girl. He grinned like he'd won something. For six months he was mine, like really mine, laughing, ridiculous, sneaking me out to the ridge to watch the moon come up over Kellsmoor.

He marked me under that moon and my wolf sang so loud I wept.

She never sang again.

Six months later Rowan died on the eastern line with an arrow in his throat, and Kade came home grey and silent, and he stopped touching me. Not cruelly. He just... stopped. The way a man stops going into a room where something bad happened.

I told myself grief has a season. I told myself patience is a kind of love.

Three years, four months, eleven days.

I poured the tea on the roses.

It was a childish thing to do and I did it anyway, standing barefoot in the frost by the east wall at two in the morning, tipping that bitter green water out over the roots of the bushes my mother-in-law had planted before I was born.

By dawn they were black.

Not wilted. Black— every leaf, every cane, down to the soil, in a neat six-foot arc exactly where I'd poured.

I stood looking at them in the grey light with my hands over my mouth for a long, long time.

Then I went to find Old Maeve.

She was in the stillroom, grinding something, and when she saw my face she stopped grinding.

"Maeve." I set the empty cup on her table. "What's in my tea?"

"Chamomile, willow bark, iron"

"Maeve." My voice cracked. "It killed the roses."

Old Maeve had delivered half this pack. She'd set my wrist when I was nine. She looked at that cup like it was a live coal, and her hands started to shake so badly she had to put them in her apron.

"Child," she whispered. "Don't. Please don't."

"Who told you to make it?"

"I can't."

"Who?"

"I have grandchildren in this valley," she said, and her eyes were streaming, and she wouldn't look at me. "Elara. Sweet girl. Pour it out every night if you like, but don't say a word to a living soul, and for the Moon's sake don't let anyone see you glow"

"Glow?"

Maeve went white to the lips. She'd said too much and she knew it, and she turned back to her mortar and would not speak again, not one word, not even when I said her name three times.

The greenhouse was warm and green and smelled like wet earth, and I went there to breathe because it was the only place in the territory nobody wanted anything from me.

He was already inside, sitting on an overturned crate among the seedlings like a king in the world's smallest throne room, sleeves rolled, hands filthy, repotting a tomato plant.

I stopped in the doorway. "Why."

"It was dying." Rhydian didn't look up. "Root-bound. Nobody's fault. Someone just put it in a pot too small three years ago and never checked."

I hated him. I sat down on the other crate.

"The roses died," I said.

"Mm."

"You knew they would."

"I knew what was in the cup." He tamped soil down with his thumbs. "Ask me the real question, Elara."

Nobody said my name like that here. Not since Rowan. Like it was a whole word and not a chore.

"What am I?" I said.

Rhydian set the plant down.

"There's a thing my grandmother's people counted by," he said. "Once a century, sometimes less, the Moon puts her hand on a girl at birth. Blessed-born. They don't shift young. They don't smell like other wolves. They come into it late and all at once, and when they do, packs change hands." He wiped his palms on his knees. "You can't hide one. You can only smother her. Keep her sick, keep her small, keep her grateful."

"That's a story."

"I smelled you from ten miles down the mountain road," he said. "Through pine, through diesel, through forty of my own men. I nearly drove off the ridge." He looked up, and his pale eyes weren't amused at all. "I came here for nine miles of land, Luna. Then I got out of the car in your garden and thought — what in the Moon's name is buried in this house."

I was shaking. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because nobody has told you anything for three years." He stood. "May I?"

I didn't ask what. I turned around.

His hand found the place at the base of my spine where the little crescent scar had been since birth , the one the midwives called a birthmark, the one that itched every full moon, the one Kade had never once noticed.

The second his fingers touched it, silver light came up out of my skin.

It poured through the thin fabric of my shirt, lit the whole greenhouse white, threw the shadows of a hundred seedlings across the glass. I felt something enormous roll over in the empty room in my chest

and open one eye.

Rhydian's breath went out of him like he'd been hit.

"Elara."

And outside, high and thin and terrible, a child began to scream.