The Rouges Moon

Chapter 12

The plan I brought to Idris three days later wasn't elegant, but it didn't need to be. It needed to be true enough that Marisol couldn't simply talk her way around it, and small enough that if it failed, neither of us lost more than we'd already risked.

"We let word travel," I said, sitting across from her in the same back room off the archives that had become, over the last five months, something like our war room.

"That someone reported disturbed ground near a cemetery outside Thistlewood. Grave robbers, we say. Common enough that nobody questions it, rare enough that it's worth mentioning if it happens to reach the right ears."

"You want her to hear it."

"I want her to hear it from someone who isn't us. If it comes from either of our mouths, she'll know exactly what it means and exactly how to prepare for it.

If it comes from a trader, or a border patrol, secondhand and half-garbled the way rumors always are by the time they've traveled three days, she has to decide how to react without knowing how much we actually know."

Idris turned that over slowly, the same careful skepticism I remembered from every step of this investigation. "And if she doesn't react at all? If she's disciplined enough to let it pass without comment?"

"Then we've lost nothing.

We will try something else." I'd thought about this part longer than any other piece of the plan. "But I don't think she'll be able to let it pass. That grave isn't just a lie she told once and moved on from.

It's the foundation everything else stands on. If she believes for even a moment that the foundation's been disturbed, she has to act, because the alternative is sitting still and hoping we never look closer, and everything I've seen of her tells me she isn't the kind of person who sits still and hopes."

We found our messenger in a trader named Wilhelm, a man who passed through Ashgrave territory every few weeks moving goods between border settlements, reliably talkative and reliably uninterested in pack politics beyond whatever gossip made good conversation over a shared meal.

Idris arranged, carefully, for him to hear the rumor from a source that wouldn't trace back to either of us, and then arranged, just as carefully, for him to have reason to mention it in the mess hall the same evening Marisol happened to be present.

I wasn't in the room when it happened. Idris was, and she found me afterward in the training yard, moving through forms in the dark the way I often did when waiting made the rest of me too restless to sit still.

"She heard it," Idris said, without preamble.

"And?"

"Nothing on her face. Not even a flicker. If I hadn't been watching it specifically, I wouldn't have noticed anything at all." Idris crossed her arms, something grim in her expression. "But her hands stopped moving for exactly as long as it took Wilhelm to finish the sentence.

She was cutting bread. The knife just stopped."

It wasn't much. It wouldn't have convinced anyone who hadn't already spent months building a case against her. But it told me what I needed to know, which was that the rumor had landed exactly where I'd hoped it would, in the part of her that couldn't afford to let a lie that important go unchecked.

"She'll try to verify it," I said. "Or she'll try to reinforce it, in case anyone else goes looking the way we did."

"Which means she'll send word somewhere. To someone."

"And we need to know who, and how, before that message gets wherever it's going."

This was the part of the plan I liked least, because it meant putting real trust in people neither of us fully controlled. Idris had a contact among the pack's message runners, a young woman named Fenna who carried correspondence between Ashgrave and the border settlements and who, according to Idris, had no particular loyalty to Marisol beyond the ordinary deference anyone showed a council advisor.

We couldn't ask Fenna to intercept anything outright, not without risking word getting back to exactly the wrong person. What we could do was ask her, carefully, to let us know if Marisol requested a courier in the next few days, and to delay that courier's departure just long enough for us to act.

It took four days.

Fenna found Idris on the fifth morning, tense and quick, with word that Marisol had requested a private courier the night before, someone outside the pack's usual message network, paid directly rather than through official channels. The courier was leaving within the hour, heading east.

East, toward Kestrel territory.

I didn't think that decision through as carefully as I should have. I simply went, catching up to the courier a half mile outside Ashgrave's border, a young man on a fast horse who had no particular reason to expect trouble and no particular skill in dealing with it once it found him anyway. I didn't hurt him. I didn't need to.

Four years of training had taught me plenty of ways to stop someone without leaving a mark that would raise questions later, and by the time I'd finished, he was sitting against a tree, dazed and confused about exactly what had happened, and I had the letter he'd been carrying.

I read it twice before I let myself fully believe what I was looking at.

The situation with the grave has been raised again. I believe it traces back to Idris, and possibly a new recruit named Vera Sharp, though I have not confirmed the second. If either becomes a genuine threat, I will need to accelerate our timeline. Confirm whether the alternate arrangement is still viable if I require it sooner than planned.

It wasn't signed. It didn't need to be. The handwriting matched notes I'd seen Marisol leave in council records, careful and precise, and the content alone was damning enough that no court in any pack territory would need much more than this to convict her of exactly what Idris and I had spent five months trying to prove.

But it was the last line that made my chest go cold in a way the rest of the letter hadn't managed.

If I require it sooner than planned.

An alternate arrangement. A timeline that could be accelerated. Whatever Marisol had built with Kestrel, whatever slow, patient plan had been in motion long before I ever climbed out of that river wearing someone else's hands, it had a contingency.

It had a version where discovery didn't mean retreat, it meant speed, moving up whatever endgame she'd spent years preparing before anyone could stop her.

I thought about the version of this story I remembered living through once, the river, the window Rhys never turned away from, and understood, with a dread that settled into my stomach like a stone, that I might have just done the one thing I'd spent every day since arriving in Ashgrave territory trying to prevent.

I might have made her move faster.

I got back to Ashgrave territory by midday, a letter folded carefully into my jacket, and found Idris in the training yard exactly where I'd told her I'd meet her.

I handed her the letter without a word, and watched her read it, watched her face shift through the same progression mine had, disbelief giving way to something sharper.

"This is enough," she said, when she finished. "This is more than enough. We bring this to Rhys today."

"There's a problem." I told her about the last line, about the accelerated timeline, about the contingency plan we now knew existed but didn't understand the shape of. "If we bring this to him and she realizes we intercepted her message, she'll know we're onto whatever this alternate arrangement is.

She might trigger it before we're ready for whatever it actually means."

"If we don't bring this to him," Idris said, "we're sitting on proof that could stop this today, hoping we figure out the rest of her plan before she executes it anyway. That's worse."

She was right, and I knew it, even as every instinct built from a lifetime I remembered but hadn't yet lived told me to be more careful, to wait, to understand the whole shape of the threat before we moved against any piece of it.

But waiting was exactly what I'd done the first time, in the life I remembered. Waited to understand Rhys fully before I trusted him with everything I felt. I waited to see the shape of Marisol's influence before I said anything to anyone. Waiting had gotten me a river and a window he never turned away from.

"All right," I said. "Today."

We found Rhys in the council hall an hour later, and this time, when Idris laid the letter on the table in front of him, there was no room left for the kind of careful, wounded counter-story Marisol had used to save herself the first time. The handwriting was hers.

The content was damning. And whatever alternate arrangement she'd built with Kestrel, whatever contingency she'd just confirmed still existed, was now sitting in front of an Alpha who finally, for the first time in three years, had no easy way to explain it away.

Rhys read it twice, the same way I had, and when he looked up, something in his face had changed entirely from the careful, guilty doubt I'd watched curdle in that same room a week earlier.

"Where is she," he said, quiet, and it wasn't a question.