The Luna He Threw Away Runs the Rival Pack Now

Chapter Four: The Blood They Buried

"Say that again," I said.

"You heard me." Dain did not repeat it. He watched my face instead, watched the healer in me try to file the impossible into something orderly and fail. "The child isn't Ashfall blood. And neither, I'd wager, are you, whatever they told you growing up."

"My mother was Ashfall born," I said. "My father came from the river packs. I know my own blood, Alpha."

"Do you." He crossed to the narrow window and looked out at the grey morning. "When you dropped on my floor last night, your eyes changed. For about three heartbeats, before you went fully under. They went silver. Not the amber an Ashfall wolf carries. Silver, the color of a line I have only ever seen once, in a portrait in my grandmother's hall, of a wolf the packs spent four hundred years hunting to extinction." He turned back. "The dire-line. The old blood. The wolves the modern packs are terrified of, because a single dire-blooded wolf could break an alpha's hold over an entire pack just by walking into the room."

The room felt very far away.

"That's a story," I said. "A cradle story. To frighten pups."

"So is the Nightriver Beast," Dain said mildly. "And here I am."

I sat back down on the edge of the bed, because my legs had stopped consulting me. Eleven months as Ashfall's Luna. A whole childhood before that as the healer's odd quiet daughter, the girl who was always a little too strong to be an omega and always taught, gently, firmly, endlessly, to make herself smaller. My mother's hand on my shoulder. Don't shift in front of the others, Wren. Don't let them see. It's safer to be small.

I had thought she was ashamed of me.

I understood now that she had been hiding me.

"They rank the dire-blooded as omegas on purpose," Dain said, watching the understanding move across my face. "The old packs learned to spot the line and leash it young. Test the pup, rank her omega no matter what her blood says, teach her she's weak, punish her when the strength slips, until she does the leashing herself and saves everyone the trouble. It's the oldest trick the packs have. Bury the strong blood under a lifetime of being told it's weak." His grey eyes held mine. "Ashfall didn't throw away a healer, Wren. They threw away a dire-blooded wolf carrying a dire-blooded child, and they were too arrogant to know it. That is the single most dangerous mistake Roderic Ashfall has ever made. And he doesn't even know he made it."

"The child's father," I said, low. "He was a traveler. Passing through, one season, before Roderic. I never knew his pack." I pressed my hand flat to the swell. "You're telling me the line comes from both sides. That my child is..."

"Pure dire-blood," Dain said. "Both lines, doubled. The first in four hundred years, most likely." He said it quietly, and there was something in his face I had not seen there before, something almost like awe, and under it something wary, because a man does not become a Lycan King by loving power he cannot control. "Do you understand what you walked across my border carrying, little healer? Do you understand what Ashfall would do to get it back, if they knew? What every pack in three territories would do?"

"Yes," I said.

And I did. All at once, completely, the way the truth arrives. The reason my mother hid me. The reason I was always too strong. The reason the bond-break had not felled me. And the reason, the real reason, that I was never going to spend one more day of my life being small.

I stood up.

I felt it this time, when I did it, the thing my mother had spent my whole childhood teaching me to swallow. It rose up under my skin like a tide, cold and silver and vast, a wolf far larger than the leashed shape Ashfall had allowed me, and for the first time in twenty-two years I did not push it back down.

The temperature in the room changed. Dain went still, and his own wolf, a Lycan King's wolf, the most powerful thing in three territories, shifted in him and did something I would learn later it had never once done for anyone.

It settled. It quieted. The way a wolf quiets in the presence of older blood.

Twenty-two years of being told to make myself small, and the most powerful wolf in three territories had just gone still because my blood outranked his. My mother had not been ashamed of me. She had been terrified for me, and rightly.

"Well," Dain Corwin said softly, and there was a new and careful respect in the gravel of his voice. "There she is."

"Here I am," I agreed. My voice did not shake, and it was the first time in twenty-two years I had spoken with the whole of myself behind it instead of the small leashed portion Ashfall had allowed. "So let's amend the bargain, Alpha. I'm no longer offering you a useful healer with good information." I let the silver hold in my eyes and watched a Lycan King choose, very deliberately, not to look away. "I'm offering you the last dire-blooded wolf in four hundred years, and her child, and everything that changes. The price just went up. And you are going to want to pay it." I had spent my whole life being told my blood was a liability. It had taken a Lycan King and a poisoner and one night in the snow to teach me it was the most valuable thing in three territories.

And from the doorway behind us, where he had been standing long enough to hear all of it, Bael said, in a voice gone flat with alarm, "Alpha. There's an Ashfall envoy at the gate. They know she's here. And they're not asking for her back." He swallowed. "They're demanding we hand over the traitor and the thing she's carrying. Word for word. The thing she's carrying, Alpha. Which means they know."