Rejected by Moonlight

Chapter Thirteen: The Cost

We did not fall into each other's arms. I want to be truthful about the shape of that year, because it was not a shape anybody would put in a song.

I would not live in Ironmoon. That was the first fight and it lasted a month. I had three hundred wolves and six hundred new ones and a wall in a gap, and I was not going to be a Luna who came home to a mountain and let her own house go back to being a ruin, and Kael Draven — who had spent three years wanting one thing — stood in my hall and argued for it and then, on the twenty-ninth day, stopped.

"All right," he said.

"All right?"

"You hold Greywall. I hold Ironmoon." He was sitting on my dais steps because standing was still expensive. "Nine miles. My father used to ride nine miles for a good horse. We're two packs with one Luna and a treaty and a road, and if the North has never done it before, then the North has never had a Moonborn to do it with." He looked up. "Ivy, I am done deciding what you are for."

So we built the road.

The cost was real and it stayed. I want that written down, because I have heard versions of this story where the moon gives everything back at the end, and the moon does not do that.

Kael did not shift for a year and seven months. When it came back, it came back wrong for a long while — slow, and it cost him a day afterward, and he never again ran a border patrol. Ironmoon's warriors adapted to an Alpha who fought on two legs and won anyway, which took about four months and one extremely instructive incident with a challenger from the eastern holdings.

And me: I can shift. I kept my wolf. Vesper is white and enormous and mine.

But I cannot call.

Not at all, not one wolf, not a whisper on the ice. Whatever the Moonborn thing was in me, it went out onto that field and it did not come back, and the six hundred who submitted stayed submitted, and no rogue has ever again come off the northern ice and felt Greywall pull at them. Which means Greywall holds the gap on walls and warriors and grain and a road, like everybody else. Like a normal pack. That's the joke of it: I ended two hundred years of Ironmoon terror about a Moonborn Luna by spending the Moonborn part in four seconds on a Tuesday morning.

Seraphine says the prophecy is closed. A Moonborn Luna will end his line's ending. One Moonborn, one ending, ended.

I think Seraphine is wrong, but we'll come to that.

What we got instead of magic was fairly ordinary, and I would not trade one hour of it.

He learned my daughter's whole vocabulary of complaints in about a fortnight. He was better with Wren than I expected and worse with Elowen than he'd hoped, because Elowen had three years of not having a father and had opinions, and she made him earn every inch, and he let her. There was a night in the second winter when she woke screaming from a dream about the ice and it was Kael she went to, not me, and I stood in a doorway and watched him carry my daughter up and down a cold hall for an hour and I understood that I had forgiven him a long time before I got round to admitting it.

And the bond, being answered, went both ways.

That took getting used to. Three years of a one-way wound and then suddenly I could feel him — his temper in a bad council, his shoulder in wet weather, and once, memorably, his entire opinion of a Vaelhollow trade delegation, which arrived in my chest during dinner and made me put my face in my hands.

Rune Vaelen came to the road-opening, incidentally. He looked at Greywall, and at Ironmoon's banner flying next to House Hale's, and at Kael Draven with his stick, and he said to me, cheerfully, out of the side of his mouth: "Well, I lost that beautifully."

"You did."

"Twelve hundred wolves, a high seat, and a man who is fond of you."

"And a woman who'd have spent sixty years being your solution."

Rune Vaelen laughed and put his fist over his heart, and we have been allies for eleven years, and my son still calls him Ru, which I have decided is fair.