The Luna He Threw Away Runs the Rival Pack Now

They expected me to beg. That was their first mistake, and by the end of the night it would not be their last. I stood in the center of the Ashfall packhouse floor, on the same stones where I had been named Luna eleven months before, and I watched my mate climb the dais without once meeting my eyes. Roderic Ashfall. Big, golden, beloved. The alpha every mother in three territories had wanted for her daughter. The alpha I had been fool enough to be grateful for. "Wren Hale," he said, to the rafters, to the crowd, to anyone but me. "You stand accused of poisoning this pack." The hall went quiet. Two hundred wolves I had healed, fed, sat up all night with through fevers, and not one of them spoke for me. "Say it to my face," I said. His jaw tightened. He hated that. Roderic had a beautiful face for speeches and no spine at all for the person the speech was about. "Six of our pups have sickened this season," he said, still to the rafters. "Two elders dead. The healer keeps the poisons. The healer had the means. The evidence was found in your stores." "The evidence was placed in my stores," I said, "by whoever actually did it. And you know exactly who that is, Roderic, because she is standing at your right hand wearing my Luna's pendant." Every head turned. Ysolde did not flinch. She was good. I had to give her that. She stood beside the dais in pale grey silk, my pendant at her throat, her lovely stricken face arranged into perfect wounded sympathy, and she let one tear slide down her cheek at exactly the right moment. "I forgive you, Wren," she said softly. "I know the sickness has made you frightened. I know you need someone to blame." "The sickness," I repeated. "Interesting word. Not a curse. Not an accident. A sickness. As if you already know it is something in the water." I stepped toward the dais, and two warriors moved to block me, and I stopped, and I smiled, because I had spent eleven months as this pack's healer and I knew things no one had thought to hide from me. "The pups who sickened all drank from the eastern spring. The elders who died both took the tonic Ysolde brews for the council. And the poison found in my stores was foxglove, which I have never once stocked, because I do not treat heart complaints, because we have no one in this pack with a bad heart." I let that land. "Except your new favorite, Roderic. Ask her why a woman with a healthy heart keeps foxglove." For one breath, one single breath, I saw doubt cross Roderic's beautiful face. And then Ysolde put her hand on his arm, and it was gone. "She is clever," Ysolde murmured. "She was always clever. That is what makes her dangerous, my love." My love. Eleven months, and he had never once called me that in front of the pack. He had married me because I was useful and pretty and grateful. He had never loved me. I understood that now, standing on the stones, watching him choose the woman poisoning his pack over the woman trying to save it, and the understanding did not break me the way they wanted. It cleared my head. "Wren Hale," Roderic said, and now, finally, he looked at me, and his eyes were flat and closed as a shut gate. "You are stripped of your rank. You are cast out of the Ashfall pack. You will cross the border by moonrise, and if you are found on Ashfall land after that, you will be killed on sight." He drew a breath. "The bond between us is severed. You are no one." The rejection hit me the way the moon meant it to. A wave of cold nausea, the bond tearing loose, the wolf inside me howling at the wrongness of it. I did not go down. I planted my feet on the stones where I had been made Luna, and I stayed standing through the worst of it, and I watched two hundred wolves watch me not fall, and I saw the first flicker of something cross their faces that was not contempt. Fear. Because a rejected Luna is supposed to collapse. And I was still standing. "You want me gone by moonrise," I said, when my voice came back. My hand had drifted, without my meaning it to, to the flat of my stomach, where a secret I had told no one was three months along and just beginning to show under my healer's robes. "Fine. I will go. But hear me, Roderic Ashfall, and hear me well, because I am only going to say this once." The hall held its breath. "You are keeping the poisoner and throwing away the cure," I said. "Your pack will get sicker. Your pups will keep dying. And one day, when it is very bad, you are going to send for the healer you cast into the snow, and I want you to remember, in that moment, that I told you the truth on these stones and you chose her tears over my proof." I turned my back on him, which you may only do to an alpha once in your life. "I will cross your border by moonrise. And I will not be crossing it back." I walked the length of that hall alone, through two hundred silent wolves, and not one of them stopped me, and not one of them helped me, and I kept my chin level and my hand over the secret and my tears somewhere they would never see. I made it out the gates. I made it to the tree line. And then, in the dark, with the packhouse lights falling away behind me, a voice spoke out of the shadows in a low amused drawl that did not belong to anyone from Ashfall at all. "Well," said the stranger, and I heard a blade slide free of its sheath. "The famous Luna of Ashfall, thrown out in the snow. And walking straight toward the one border in the world she should be running from."