The Luna He Threw Away Runs the Rival Pack Now

The last thing my husband ever said about me was where to put my body. "Under the kennels." Torvald did not even look down at me when he said it. He was looking at her. "Deep. I don't want the pups digging her up." I was still alive when he said it. That was the part no one tells you about dying on a packhouse floor with silver in your belly. It is slow, and you hear everything. You hear it the way you hear rain through a wall, muffled and far away and somehow more terrible for the distance. The pack went quiet. All of them, the wolves I had healed and fed and defended for three years, gone silent as a held breath. I heard Sable laugh, soft and delighted, the way you laugh at a gift you have waited a long time to open. I heard my own blood find the grout between the flagstones and start to travel, and I thought, absurdly, that I had scrubbed those stones on my knees for three years and never once been thanked, and now I was going to stain them and be buried under the dogs. "Torvald." His name came out of me in a bubble of red. Three years his wife. Three years his Luna. Three years of setting his warriors' bones and swallowing his moods and believing that if I was only good enough, only useful enough, only quiet enough, he would one day look at me the way he was looking at her right now. "I loved you." "I know," he said. That was all. I know. As if my love were a debt he had noted in a ledger and declined to pay. Sable stepped over my legs to reach him. She was wearing white. She was wearing my Luna's circlet, the one they had taken off my head an hour ago while I screamed, and the silver of it caught the moonlight through the high windows and threw it down at me like a joke. She bent over me with the silver knife still wet in her hand, close enough that I could smell the sweetness on her, and she whispered, so only I could hear, in a voice like sugar poured over a grave: "Thank you, Luna. You have no idea what you're giving me." I did not know what she meant. I was too busy dying to ask. The pack knelt to her. My pack. The wolves I had carried through fever seasons and hard winters, kneeling in my own blood to the woman who had spilled it. Torvald lifted the crown of my whole life and set it on her head, and I watched the two of them turn away from me toward a future they had cut out of my throat, and the cold came up through the flagstones and into my bones, and the light in the high windows began, very gently, to go out. I hated them. I want that written down, because I had been a soft thing my whole life. A healer. A peacemaker. A woman who apologized to doors she walked into. But I died on that floor with no softness left in me at all. I died with my whole heart clenched into a single burning wish, aimed at the moon in the window like an arrow loosed at God. Let me do it again. Let me do it again knowing. That's all I ask. Just let me do it again knowing. The dark took me the way deep water takes a stone. And then, from a very long way off, a voice I knew and had not heard in three years said, "Renna. Renna, wake up, you'll be late for your own wedding, and your mother is beside herself." I opened my eyes. Sunlight. Not moonlight. Yellow morning sun through a window I knew, in a room I knew, in the little house at the edge of Ironmoon territory where I had grown up and which had burned to the ground two years before I died. My mother stood over my bed, alive, exasperated, holding a white dress across her arms as if it were a sleeping child. My wedding dress. I sat up so fast the room tilted and swam. My hands flew to my belly, to the place where the silver had gone in, and found smooth skin under my nightshirt. Whole. Unmarked. Alive. My heart slammed against my ribs, once, twice, hard enough to hurt, as if it too could not believe it had been given back. "Mama." My voice came out a stranger's, cracked and small. "What day is it." "Your wedding day, you goose." She frowned and came closer, laying the back of her hand against my forehead the way she had when I was a child with a fever. "Renna, you have gone white as milk. Are you unwell? Should I send for the healer?" I am the healer, I almost said. I will be the pack's healer, and then its Luna, and then a corpse under the kennels. But I did not say it, because my mother was alive and warm and standing over me with worried eyes, and she had been ash and memory for two years, and the sight of her broke something open in my chest that I had thought the silver knife had emptied for good. Three years. I was three years in the past, on the very morning I had married Alpha Torvald Ironmoon, the man who was, this very evening, going to smile at me at an altar and begin the slow, patient work of murdering me. I did not faint. I did not weep, though the tears were there, hot and close. I looked at the white dress in my living mother's hands, and I felt the burning wish from the floor of the packhouse settle over me like a second skin, snug and cold and certain, and I smiled for the first time in two lifetimes. "No, Mama," I said. "I have never been better in my life. Help me dress." I swung my legs out of the bed onto a floor that should not exist, in a body that should be in the ground, with three years of every betrayal laid out clean and bright in my head. "I'm getting married today."