Little Moon

Chapter Three: The Seal

The door opened before my fingers closed.

Men filled the gap. Grey coats. Hard faces. Idony Flint stood in front of them with her hand on her mouth, as if the sight of my small room had hurt her.

The round thing sat on my blanket. Old bone. Black metal. A wolf cut deep into it.

“Do not touch it,” a man said.

My wolf said the other thing. Pick it up, or they will say you ran from your own theft.

I picked it up.

It was cold. That was all. No fire. No blister. It sat in my palm like a coin that knew my skin.

The man in front took a step back. “She is holding it.”

Idony’s eyes flicked to my hand. For the first time that morning, her smile got thin.

“The Seal,” she said, loud enough for the passage. “In a maid’s room.”

“I did not put it here,” I said.

“Of course you would say that.” Her voice was soft and sad and meant for more ears than mine. “A girl from the wash rooms. Access to every door. Seen near the King’s wing last night. And now the pack’s holy thing is on her bed.”

The air still held a thread of cold flowers. I almost said so. Kenelm’s order sat on my tongue like a stone. You saw nothing.

A thick-necked man with a heavy ring pushed in. “Bring her down. Pack law is not a toy. If a low throat steals a holy thing, the yard will hear it.”

Two guards took my arms. They were not cruel. They were sure. That was worse. I kept the Seal because they had not yet told me to drop it, and because my hand did not want to let go.

We went down the servants’ stairs. Steam leaked from the wash room. Dorcas stood in the doorway with her bun falling and her mouth shut hard. Her eyes met mine. Do not speak, they said. Do not offer them a tunnel.

I did not.

The yard was already a bowl of faces. Wash girls. Guards. Rich wolves in pale cloaks. Kenelm came last from the upper steps. He had put a dark shirt over the packing. He looked like the King again. He did not look like the man who had said my name on a table.

He saw my hand.

He saw the Seal in it.

He saw that my skin was whole.

For one breath I thought he would say Linnet the way he had said it in the dark.

He looked at the crowd behind the coats, and the breath died.

“Who touched the Seal?” he asked.

I held it out. My arm shook. The bone stayed kind.

A sound moved through the rich wolves. Low. Unhappy. She is holding it. Why is she holding it.

Idony lifted her chin. “Missing from the chapel. Found on a servant’s blanket. The night after killers reached your room, my King. A girl who knows every back door. What more do you need?”

“A fire,” someone muttered. “There should be a fire.”

There was no fire.

Kenelm came down two steps. Close enough that I smelled pine and cloth and the lie we had made in the tunnel.

“Linnet Croft,” he said.

No little moon. Not here.

“I did not steal it,” I said.

“Then how is it in your room?”

“It was on my bed when I came back from the second bell. The smell in the air was not mine.”

Idony laughed a small sad laugh. “Wash soap and stories. My King, she was seen near your wing. Poor child. Frightened. Perhaps the killers paid her in courage, and she took the pack’s soul as extra.”

One true brick sat in that wall. I had been in his wing. I had opened the little door. The rest of the house leaned on that brick.

Dorcas made a sound in the crowd and cut it off. A guard looked at her. She looked at the dirt.

The man with the heavy ring said, “A common throat that steals a holy thing is a common throat we open.”

Kenelm did not look at the ring. He looked at me. I saw the pin behind his eyes. Unnamed.

“I will not have her blood on the stones,” he said.

The yard liked blood. It did not like a pause.

Idony stepped closer to him, not to me. She spoke like a hymn.

“If the King will not take a throat, let him take a gate. Send her out. Let the border keep what the palace cannot wash. The pack will see that you are just. And if she is innocent, the road will not kill a good girl.”

That was the shape he had feared when he would not mark me. Public. Simple. A choice that made him look like law.

My wolf slammed against my teeth.

“Kenelm,” I said, too quiet.

His jaw flinched.

“You said no one would touch me.”

The words left my mouth before I could pull them back. A few people near the steps heard. Not enough to save me. Enough to make his eyes go flat.

“I said what a man says when he is bleeding,” he answered, for the yard and for me at once. “This is not a hole in the ground.”

He came down the last steps until I had to lift my face.

“Linnet Croft. You will leave Harrow land by sundown. If you are found inside the stones after the last bell, the pack will do what I would not.”

The Seal sat in my palm, still not burning.

“Drop it,” the ring man said.

I set it on the step because Kenelm’s eyes asked me to, not because the ring man did. The bone looked smaller on the stone than it had on my blanket.

Idony bowed her head as if she were sorry. Her fingers, close to her skirts, were not quite steady.

Kenelm did not take my arm. He did not say stay. He opened the gate with a word.

“Sundown,” he said.

Then he turned his face to the crowd, because an Alpha who looks at a wash girl too long in the yard does not stay Alpha.

The guards let me go.

I stood in the dirt with my empty hands and his smell still under my dress and a holy thing cooling on the step behind me.

Dorcas shoved through as far as they would let her. She could not reach me. She mouthed one word.

Reed.

I did not know what it meant yet.

Sundown was not far. The light in the yard was already high and hard. I had a few hours to pack a life that had never been more than a bed, a peg, and a bowl.

I looked up once.

Kenelm was not looking at me.

Idony was.

Her pretty sad face had come back. Under it, I saw the thin smile from my doorway. The flower. The pin. The cup.

I turned toward the postern before I said something that would get me killed on the stones he had just spared.

Behind me a man picked the Seal up with a cloth, not with bare skin.

It did not wake for him.

It had woken for no one, they would say later. It had only failed to burn a thief.

I knew better.

My palm still felt the cold t

hat was not fire. My belly still felt the table. My mouth still felt the order.

No one touches you.

The gate stood open.

Sundown was coming anyway.