The Rouges Moon

Chapter 11

Marisol gave us the location herself, two days after the council hall, delivered through a servant with a folded note that read simply: A cemetery outside Thistlewood, three days' ride east.

My brother's marker is the third from the old oak. I hope this settles your minds.

"Too easy," Idris said, reading over my shoulder in the archive room.

"Or she's confident enough that it doesn't matter what we find."

I turned the note over, looking for something else. Someone told me I could use it. There was nothing. Marisol didn't make careless mistakes, and a woman who didn't make careless mistakes wasn't likely to hand over a lie that could be disproven in an afternoon.

"So either the grave's real," Idris said slowly, "or it's real enough to survive a look."

That was the problem sitting underneath everything, and we both knew it. A grave could hold a body without holding the truth.

A stone could say Cassian Thorne and still not tell us whether the man buried beneath it was the same one the border logs remembered releasing as a scout, or whether he was still, right now, sitting in Kestrel's inner circle wearing a spymaster's title while his sister mourned him publicly in Ashgrave's council hall.

We left for Thistlewood at dawn, officially on a supply errand Idris had authorized herself, unofficially on the only lead either of us had left. Three days east, through a country that grew rockier and less familiar the further we traveled from Ashgrave land, and I spent most of the ride turning the same question over without finding an answer that satisfied me.

If the grave was real, we'd lost our best thread and had nothing left but suspicion.

If it wasn't, we needed to prove it fast enough to matter, before Rhys's guilt over having doubted her hardened into something we couldn't undo.

Thistlewood turned out to be smaller than its name suggested, a handful of buildings clustered around a crossroads, the kind of place packs used as neutral ground for trade because it belonged to nobody in particular.

The cemetery sat at its edge, old enough that half the markers had gone soft and unreadable with weather, young enough that a few, near the back, still looked freshly cut.

We found the oak first, exactly where the note described, and the third marker from it exactly where Marisol had said it would be.

CASSIAN THORNE. Beloved brother. Taken too soon.

I stood in front of it for a long time, and something cold settled into my stomach that had nothing to do with the wind coming off the ridge behind us.

"It's a real grave," I said.

"Or a real stone," Idris said. "That's not the same thing."

She was already crouching, running a hand along the base of the marker, checking the way the earth had settled around it, the depth of the moss growing into the letters.

I'd spent four years learning to read a room full of strangers, but Idris had apparently spent considerably longer learning to read a grave, and I let her work in silence while I kept watch on the road behind us.

"This stone's been here for three years," she said finally. "Maybe four. The moss doesn't lie about that much, even if everything else does."

"So there's a body."

"There's a burial. Whether it's actually him is a different question entirely, and it's not one we can answer standing here."

I already knew where this was going, and I hated it before she said it out loud.

"We'd need to open it," Idris said. "To be certain."

Digging up a grave in a town that belonged to nobody, on the word of two people who had no jurisdiction here and no authority to justify it if we were caught, was exactly the kind of thing that could end this entire investigation before it properly started, and both of us knew it.

If we were seen, if word got back to Marisol before we had proof solid enough to survive her explanations, we'd have handed her the exact kind of scandal she needed to paint Idris and me as unstable, vindictive, willing to desecrate a grieving woman's brother's grave over nothing more than jealousy and paranoia.

"If we're wrong," I said, "this ends everything. Rhys will never trust either of us again."

"If we're right," Idris said, "and we don't look, we've wasted a three-day ride confirming absolutely nothing." She looked at me, weighing it the same way I was.

"Your call. You're the one who's spent the last five months arguing this matters more than anything else in this pack."

I thought about the version of this story I'd already lived through once, about a river and a witness who never turned around, about seven months of marriage and a pup who never got the chance to be born, all of it built on a lie this same woman had constructed with the same patient, careful precision she'd used to build a grave that even Idris, with all her skill, could only half read.

"We look," I said. "Tonight."

We waited until well past dark, until Thistlewood's handful of buildings had gone quiet and the only light left was moonlight thin enough to work by without drawing attention.

Idris kept watch at the cemetery's edge while I did the digging, and it was slower going than I expected even with everything Garrick had taught me about efficient, quiet work.

The earth had settled hard over three or four years, and by the time my shovel finally struck wood, my arms ached in a way that reminded me, uncomfortably, that this body still had limits even if it healed faster than anybody had a right to.

I pried the coffin open with more care than the moment probably deserved, some old instinct in me insisting on respect even for a grave I suspected of being a lie.

It wasn't empty.

There was a body inside, wrapped in the plain cloth Kestrel used for its dead, and for one long, sick moment I thought we'd been wrong about all of it, that Marisol's grief had been real after all and we were about to become exactly the kind of people who dug up an innocent woman's brother out of paranoia.

Then I looked closer, and understood why Idris had insisted we needed to see it directly instead of trusting the moss and the settled earth alone.

The body in that grave had been dead for three years, just as the stone claimed. But it wasn't a man in his late twenties, the age Cassian Thorne would have been if the border logs and the timeline lined up the way they should have.

It was older, considerably older, a man well past fifty by the look of what was left of him, buried under a stranger's name in a stranger's grave, in a cemetery that belonged to nobody, where nobody would ever think to ask questions about a marker that had been standing there for years.

"That's not him," Idris breathed, crouching beside me, staring down into the grave with an expression somewhere between vindication and horror.

"No," I said. "It's not."

We stood there for a long moment in the cold, the two of us looking down at a stranger buried under a dead man's name, and I felt something settle into place that was harder and colder than anything I'd expected to feel.

This wasn't just proof that Marisol had lied about her brother's death. This was proof of exactly how far she was willing to go to protect that lie, proof that somewhere along the way, someone else's body had been used to give a false grave the weight of truth, someone whose name we didn't know, whose family probably didn't know where he'd actually ended up, all of it arranged with the same careful, patient precision she'd used on everything else.

"We need to close this," Idris said, already moving, urgency replacing shock. "Fill it back in, exactly as we found it. If she has any way of checking whether this grave's been disturbed, we lose everything we just found."

We worked fast and carefully, replacing the earth, smoothing it back into something that looked, in the dark, close enough to undisturbed that it would take a much closer look than either of us hoped Marisol would ever have reason to give it.

By the time we finished, the moon had shifted considerably, and my hands were raw and shaking with an exhaustion that had nothing to do with the digging.

"We have her now," Idris said, quiet, once we were well clear of the cemetery and moving back toward the road. "This isn't a border log and a coincidence of names anymore. This is a body in the wrong grave."

"We still can't prove who's actually buried there," I said. "Or where Cassian Thorne really is."

"We don't need to prove where he is. We need to prove she lied about where he isn't. That's enough to break whatever hold she's built on Rhys, if we present it carefully."

I thought about the way Marisol had stood in that council hall two days earlier, wounded and composed in equal measure, the exact careful performance of grief she'd delivered without a single c***k in it. I thought about how easily Rhys's doubt had curdled back into guilt the moment she'd offered him a story sturdier than ours.

"Careful isn't going to be enough," I said. "We need more than a mismatched body. We need her to slip in front of him, in a way she can't recover from."

Idris looked at me for a long moment on that dark road outside Thistlewood, something calculating settling behind her eyes.

"You have an idea," she said. Not a question.

I did, though it wasn't fully formed yet, some rough shape of a plan built on everything I understood about Marisol that Idris didn't yet know I understood, four years of a future I remembered that hadn't happened in this timeline at all. I knew how this story went if nobody stopped it.

I was starting to believe I finally had enough pieces to write a different ending.

"Give me a few days," I said. "I need to think it through properly before I say it out loud."

Idris didn't push, though I could tell she wanted to, and we rode back toward Ashgrave territory mostly in silence, both of us carrying the weight of what we'd found and what it was going to cost us to use it right.

Somewhere behind us, in a cemetery that belonged to nobody, a stranger lay buried under a dead man's name, and somewhere ahead, in a council hall I'd once called home in another life entirely, a woman who'd built an empire of careful lies was about to learn that not every grave keeps its secrets as well as she needed this one to.

I didn't know yet exactly how I was going to use what we'd found. I only knew, riding back through the dark with dirt still under my fingernails and a plan taking rough shape in the back of my mind, that three years no longer felt like the deadline I'd been counting toward.

It felt, for the first time, like enough time to actually win.