He Crowned Another Luna, So I Let His Pack Burn

Chapter 6 The Golden Girl's Mistake

Overnight, the lodge became a wedding.

There was a particular horror to it, Maeryn thought, moving through the preparations with her hands folded and her face serene garlands going up over doors that had been barred at dusk, mead barrels rolled across floorboards that still held the ghost-brown stain of Tovan's blood. Fear makes packs frantic for ritual. Ilsabet had understood that faster than anyone, and so Hollowmere sang while it trembled, and dressed its terror in white flowers, and called it faith.

Maeryn let it happen around her. She had one visit left to pay.

She found Verah at the shrine at midday and found she was not the first. Voices carried through the cold air below the stone ring, and Maeryn stopped on the path, screened by juniper, and listened to the golden girl make her first true mistake.

"only asking to share the burden." Ilsabet's voice, honey over steel. "I'll be Luna by tomorrow moonrise. The pack should see me serve at every station a Luna serves. Including this one. Whatever prayers Luna Maeryn offers here, teach them to me and I'll offer them beside her. Or " a pause, delicately weighted "in her place, when she wishes to rest."

"No." Verah's voice was the door of a tomb.

"Priestess. I don't think you understand what I'm offering the shrine. Patronage. The new Alpha-hold's favor. This place is falling to ruin and I can"

"You can carry water," Verah said, "if your hands itch for holy work. The shrine does not pass by wanting, girl. It does not pass by marriage, rank, gold, or a crown placed on you by a man in a hurry. It passes by blood, and yours is the wrong vintage. Now take your patronage off my hill."

A silence, sharp as the frost. When Ilsabet spoke again, all the honey was gone, and what remained was so cold and clear that Maeryn, in the junipers, felt the hair rise on her arms because this, at last, was the actual voice of the woman who would rule Hollowmere by tomorrow night.

"Old woman. By tomorrow moonrise I will be Luna of this pack, and I have made a study of every thread of power in it, and they all cut, eventually, except one. Whatever happens on this hill each full moon is the one door in Hollowmere I cannot see behind. I am telling you plainly: I will own what is behind that door. The only question is whether you are useful to me when I do."

"Then I will answer plainly," said Verah, unmoved, ancient, granite. "Pray you never see behind it. Everyone who does bleeds."

Maeryn stepped back down the path, silent on the frost, and was half a mile toward the lodge before she let herself smile.

Every thread of power cuts, eventually, except one. On that single point, the golden girl and the old priestess were in perfect agreement. Ilsabet had counted her way to the correct door. She simply had no idea that the woman she was so busy erasing was the door.

Corvan was waiting in Maeryn's rooms when she returned standing at her window, turning something over in his hands. Her spare linen wrappings.

"The healers tell me," he said, without turning, "that you take fresh dressings every moon. Twelve years of moons. They tell me it like it's weather. Like it's simply a thing that is true about the Luna, the way the north is cold." He turned, and his face was a battlefield pride and dawning dread fighting over ground neither had ever contested. "A monster at my border asks for a bleeding one. My wife has bled every full moon of my reign, and I" his voice cracked, low "I find I can't remember ever asking why. Tell me I asked, Maeryn. Tell me that once, in twelve years, I asked, and you refused me, and this is your secret and not my failure."

The fire ticked. Outside, the pack was singing.

He was one honest hour from the truth. She could give it to him now watch it break him, watch him understand, tonight, with time still on the board. Part of her, the part that had loved him at nineteen behind the Grey Sister, ached to.

But he hadn't asked her a question. Even now even now he had asked her to soothe him.

"You never asked," Maeryn said gently. "And I never refused you anything. Both things are true, Corvan. They've always both been true."

"Then tell me now. What do you do at the shrine?"

Twelve years too late, there it was. The question. She looked at her mate on the eve of her replacement, and gave him precisely, lethally, all that he had ever earned.

"I pray," said Maeryn.

And relief Goddess forgive him, relief washed over his face, because it was the answer that let him sleep, and he took it the way he had taken everything of hers: gratefully, and without weighing it. He kissed her brow and went to his rehearsal dinner.

She was still standing there when the sound came.

It began as a feeling in the floorboards, a bone-deep note below hearing, and then it rose a crack like a mountain clearing its throat, rolling down from the north, and under it a long grinding shriek of stone giving way. The singing in the lodge died. A dog began to scream. And through her window Maeryn saw, far off between the black hills, the faint blue lights of the northern ward-line steady for twelve unbroken years flare once, guttering, like a candle in a draft.

Then, from beyond the border, for the first time since the year of her mating, the horns of the Varkoth answered the dark. Not one horn.

Dozens.