Rejected by Moonlight

Chapter Eight: Nineteen Hours

He didn't shout. I think I'd have preferred shouting.

He stood up — slowly, like a man testing whether the floor was real — and he said, "Clear the hall."

"This is my hall."

"Yes." He didn't look away from me. "Please."

I cleared the hall. Bryn went last and made a point of it.

When it was the two of us and two toddlers and one banked fire, Kael Draven walked up my three dais steps, and stopped an arm's length away, exactly as he had in Ironmoon three years before, and the pull between us was so strong that Wren, on my hip, turned his head and frowned at the air like there was a noise in it.

"The spring of the second year," Kael said. "There were nineteen hours."

"Yes."

"I was unconscious for eleven of them. Harlow told me afterward that my heart stopped twice." His voice was perfectly level and his hands were not. "I have spent fourteen months believing someone was torturing you. I sent men into Vaelhollow's territory over it. I nearly started a war in the second week of that spring because I could not think of anything a person could do to a woman for nineteen hours that wasn't —"

He stopped.

"It was labor," I said. "Elowen took eleven hours. Wren came nineteen hours after her."

Kael Draven turned away from me and put his hand flat on one of the roof-posts I'd raised myself and stood there with his head down for long enough that Elowen got bored and sat on my foot.

"I was in a war council," he said, to the post. "When it started. I remember thinking, in the middle of it, that I hoped whatever it was would kill me before it killed you, because if you died the bond would take me anyway and I'd rather not be conscious for the part where I found out I was too late." He laughed, one syllable, ugly. "And it was my son."

"It was your son."

"I'd have come." He turned around. "Ivy, I would have burned the North down and walked —"

"I know." And here is the thing I had to say, and I said it standing up, holding one of them, with the other one on my foot. "That's why I didn't tell you. Kael, listen to me, because I've had three years and I've got it word-perfect." I made myself keep my voice steady. "If I'd sent word, you'd have come and taken us home. And you'd have been good to me. You'd have put me on that dais and dared anyone in Ironmoon to look sideways at me, and Marrick Vale would have smiled and poured the wine, and I would have spent my whole life as the shiftless kitchen girl the Alpha took back because she had his babies." I shook my head. "That's the story, in every hall from here to the sea, forever. He took her back for the children. Not one wolf in six hundred miles would have said my name any other way, including me."

He was very still.

"So I built this instead," I said. "And now the story is that the shiftless girl you threw out held the gap your father died in. And now we can talk."

Kael Draven looked at me for a long moment. And then, unbelievably, something eased at the corner of his mouth — something almost like relief.

"You didn't hide from me," he said slowly. "You were building a position."

"I was building a position."

"Three years."

"You had nineteen. I was catching up."

And he laughed — properly, once, cracked open — and my son, who had never in his life heard that sound, leaned out of my arms toward it.

I let him go.

I want to be careful about how I say this. I did not hand my son to his father as forgiveness. I did it because Wren asked, and because I had made exactly one promise in that turf-roofed room in Vaelhollow, and it was that whatever else I built out of my life, my children were not going to be a weapon in it.

Kael took him like a man being handed something molten. He was shaking again. Wren, entirely unbothered, put both hands on his father's face, examined him, and announced: "Cold."

"Yes," said Kael Draven, with his mouth against his son's hair. "For a while."

We sat on the dais steps until the fire went down. He asked me two hundred questions and I answered about eighty of them. Elowen fell asleep across his knee at some point, which she has never once let me live down since. Around midnight he said, without looking up:

"I need to tell you the other thing. The reason I actually came in weather like this instead of waiting a week."

"Greywall's not a courtesy call."

"No." He shifted Elowen carefully. "Ivy, when the scouts brought back your banner, I went into my grandfather's archive to find out what House Hale meant, because I only ever knew it was a name we didn't say. It took me four nights." He looked up. "The Moonborn weren't burned out for treason. They were burned out because the Ironmoon Alpha of the day was told by his Seer that a Moonborn Luna would end his line."

My stomach went cold.

"Seers run in families," I said.

"Seers run in one family." Kael's face was grim. "Vale. Every generation, for six hundred years. And I have read the original prophecy, Ivy, the whole of it, in the hand of a woman dead two centuries — and then I went and read the copy in the current pack record." He held my eyes. "They're not the same. One word is missing from ours."

"Which word?"

"Not."

I sat down on the step.

"'A Moonborn Luna will end his line,'" Kael said. "That's what my pack has believed for six hundred years. What the original says is: a Moonborn Luna will end his line's ending." He let that sit. "House Vale has been shaving one word off a prophecy for two hundred years to keep an entire bloodline off that dais. My grandfather knew your name was cursed. He didn't know who wrote the curse."

Outside, the wind had stopped. I noticed it because Greywall's shutters had stopped rattling, and in three years I had learned that the wind stopping is never good news on the icefield; it means something has moved into the lee of the wall.

"Kael."

"Seraphine prophesied my Luna two years before the ceremony," he said, standing, handing me my daughter. "In front of the whole hall. She named a Luna who would hold Ironmoon through the coming dark and every wolf assumed she meant herself. Ivy, she's a real Seer. That's the part everyone forgets because her father is a snake. She saw it. She saw a woman on that dais holding my pack through the dark —"

"— and she knew it wasn't her," I said.

And that is when the horn went on Greywall's wall.

Not the rogue-horn. The long one. The one that means riders, from the south, in numbers, at the gate.

From Ironmoon.

Bryn came through the doors with snow on him and his sword already out and shouted, across my hall, the sentence that ended the first half of my life:

"Alpha — four hundred wolves on the ice, Vale banners, and they're saying Kael Draven is dead and you murdered him."