My Mate

Chapter 13 — Luna

—Kael's POV—

She had never been inside the Moon Temple before.

No human had, not in a hundred years. Not since the truce was made.

The Temple is not a human temple with a roof and walls. It is a mountain with a hole in it where the moon falls straight through. Moonflowers grow everywhere, even on the stone, even in winter. The air smells like cold water and old wolf.

When I carried her over the threshold, my pack behind us still kneeling at the tree line, Aurora gasped and clutched my mantle tighter.

"It is breathing," she whispered.

"What?"

"The Temple. I can feel it breathing."

I had never heard anyone say that before. But she was a healer. Healers feel things wolves do not.

I set her down in the main courtyard where the moon goddess Selene's light pool is. The light falls from the hole in the roof right onto a flat black stone where Luna stands to be blessed.

My pack followed us in, silent on their paws, and formed a circle around the light pool. Not close enough to scare her. Just close enough to see.

Joren's mate, Sira, came forward first. She is the pack's healer before Aurora, old and scarred and kind. She had a bowl of water and moonflower petals in her hands.

"For Luna's feet," Sira said to me, not to Aurora, because she was not sure yet if Aurora understood wolf customs. "The ash burns."

Elara looked down. Her bare feet were red from crossing the white ash line. She had not complained once while we ran through the corn.

"I can do it," Aurora whispered to me, embarrassed.

"You are Luna," I whispered back. "Let her."

Aurora sat on the edge of the black stone and let Sira wash her feet with the moonflower water. The pack watched. No one growled. That was good. A week ago, two wolves had refused her fever tea.

When Sira was done, she looked at Aurora's neck, at my mark glowing silver white in the moonlight, and she did something I did not expect.

She touched her own neck, where her own faded mate mark was, and bowed her head to Aurora.

"Welcome home, Luna," Sira whispered.

Aurora started crying again. Quietly, so the pack would not see. I sat beside her on the black stone and pulled her into my side, mantle around both of us.

"Where will I sleep?" she asked me, voice small, looking around at the open courtyard with no doors, no walls, just stone and moonflowers and twenty wolves staring at her.

"My father's chambers," I said. "Our chambers now. If you want."

I carried her again, she was tired from not sleeping and running and leaving her whole life behind, through the back of the Temple to the chambers carved into the mountain itself. My father's old chambers. Where I had lived alone since he died ten years ago.

It was not much. Stone bed with furs, a table, a fire pit, and one window that faces the forest and Bramble Hollow far away. I had never let anyone clean it. It still smelled like my father a little.

Aurora looked around the stone room and then back at me.

"You live here alone?" she asked.

"Since I was seventeen. Since they killed him."

She walked to the stone bed and touched the furs, then touched the window sill where I had carved small moons over ten years, one for each year without him.

"You carved all these?" she whispered.

"One for each year I waited for the moon goddess Selene to give me a reason to not burn Bramble Hollow to the ground."

She looked at me, understanding in her brown eyes what I meant.

"And then she gave you me," she whispered.

"And then she gave me you."

She sat on the stone bed and patted the furs beside her. "Will you sit with me? Just sit. I don't want to be alone tonight."

I sat. The bed was big enough for two wolves, so big enough for a wolf and a small human girl.

She curled up against my side, head on my chest, hand over my mark on her neck like she always does when she is nervous, and finally let herself cry properly. Not quiet tears. Real sobs for her mother and father and her small room and her white cloak she left on the bed.

I did not tell her to stop crying. I just held her and let her soak my mantle with tears and stroked her black hair while my pack stood guard outside the door, smelling their Luna cry for the first time and not knowing what to do.

After a long time, her crying slowed.

"They rang the mourning bell," she whispered into my chest. "I heard it as we crossed the corn. They are mourning me as dead."

"You are not dead," I said.

"I am dead to them. Varric said if I cross, my name gets burned. He did it. I heard it."

"You are alive to me. And to Sira. And to Joren. And to twenty wolves who just knelt to you."

She looked up at me, eyes red, nose red, still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

"Do you think they will ever forgive me?" she asked.

"I think your mother already has," I said, because I had seen Mirelle let Aurora go at the window, pretending not to see. "And your father will, when he sees you are safe and happy and not eaten by a monster."

She laughed a little, wet and broken, at the monster part.

"Are you happy, Aurora? Here? With me?"

She touched my face, then my mark on my shoulder where her moonflower salve had healed my rogue wound into a small silver scar.

"I am happy where I am not hiding my neck," she whispered.

I leaned down and kissed her forehead, then her mark, soft.

"Sleep, Luna. I will keep watch."

"I don't want to sleep alone," she whispered, curling tighter into my furs, into me. "Stay?"

I lay down with her on the stone bed, fully clothed in my mantle, her in her day dress, her back to my chest, my arm around her waist, my nose in her hair where my mark was. Just holding. Just breathing together while the Temple breathed around us.

Outside the window, far away in Bramble Hollow, I could see a faint orange glow.

Varric was burning white ash in a big fire. Not a mourning fire. A war fire.

He had given me three days. We had used one day already.

In two days, he would come with the full Order from the Capital to burn my Temple and take back the daughter he had mourned as dead.

And I would have to decide if I was going to kill him in front of her to keep her.

Aurora fell asleep in my arms, holding my hand over her heart, my mark glowing faintly against the dark furs.

I did not sleep. I watched the orange war fire in Bramble Hollow and held my Luna and listened to the Temple breathe.