THE FORGED LUNA

The line at the Moon Registry moved like a funeral procession, slow and silent and smelling of wet wool. Wren Hollis held her number ticket in both hands and tried to keep her knee from bouncing. Forty-one. The board above the marble counters read thirty-three. Around her, wolves of every rank waited beneath the great Moon Crystal, which hung behind a wall of glass like a frozen drop of light. Every birth, every bond, every death in the nation was written inside that stone. She had never set foot in this building. Gideon always said there was no need. “Leave the paperwork to me,” he would murmur, kissing her forehead at the door. “You carry enough already.” For five years, she had believed him. She had believed a great many things for five years. But this morning her lawyer had called with a problem Gideon could not smooth over. The court would not release her parents’ estate without a certified copy of her Mate Certificate. A formality, Mr. Abernathy had assured her. Six years was a long time to hold a trust, and the judges wanted proof of her standing. She had asked Gideon to handle it three times. Three times he had promised next week. So this morning she had slipped the certificate out of its frame, tucked it inside her coat, and taken the bus. It was the one thing in the Hale house she had ever thought of as hers. A thick cream page, a silver moon pressed into the corner, her name beside his. Proof that someone had chosen her, even after the night everyone said she had killed her own parents. The silver brand on the back of her neck itched, the way it always did when she was nervous. Six years it had sat there, a cold ring of scar that kept her wolf locked in silence. Gideon’s tonic dulled the ache. It dulled most things. He pressed a fresh cup into her hand every morning, and every morning she drank it all. Theo would be finishing his lessons soon, five years old and sticky-fingered, waiting for the one person who always came to collect him. She had two hours before the nursery bell rang. “Forty-one?” Wren jumped. The clerk at counter six, a young woman with a tidy braid and ink on her fingers, was smiling at her. The name tag read Pia. “Sorry. Yes. That’s me.” She hurried forward and set the certificate on the counter, smoothing it flat. “I need a certified reissue. Wren Hollis, bonded to Gideon Hale. Five years ago this spring.” “Of course.” Pia slid the page beneath a round lens of Moon-glass and flicked a switch. Pale light poured over the paper. “This takes a moment. Every seal glows when the crystal recognizes it.” Wren watched the little silver moon in the corner of her certificate and waited for it to shine. It stayed gray. Pia’s smile faltered. She tried a second lens, then a third. The light swept over the page again and again, and the moon stayed as dull as a coin dropped in a gutter. “That’s strange,” Pia murmured. “I’m going to get the registrar. Please don’t go anywhere.” Pia vanished through a back door. Her hands, Wren noticed, were not quite steady. Registrar Dunmore came out a minute later. He was a thin, gray man with a silver lily pinned to his lapel and the unhurried walk of a man who answered to no one in the room. He studied the certificate for a long time. He pressed a thumbnail against the silver moon, then lifted the page and sniffed it, once, delicately. “Mrs. Hale,” he said at last. “Hollis,” she corrected, before she could stop herself. “My name is Wren Hollis.” “Miss Hollis, then.” Dunmore laid the page down very gently, as if it might bite. “This seal was never pressed by this office. The paper is real. The ink is real. The moon is a clever imitation, and the crystal does not know it.” Wren laughed. It came out thin and strange. “That’s impossible. We were married in the Hale family study. There were witnesses. Gideon signed it in front of me.” “And the crystal?” Dunmore asked mildly. “Did you stand before the crystal and swear your oath?” She opened her mouth to say yes. Nothing came out. There had been no crystal. There had been a cold study, a stack of papers, an elder who never once met her eyes, and Gideon’s warm hand on her back. *Bound wolves can’t be crystal-tested,* he had told her gently. *It would only hurt you. The Registry makes allowances for girls like you.* She had been nineteen, grieving, and so grateful that someone wanted her at all. “The Registry holds no record of a bond between Wren Hollis and Gideon Hale,” Dunmore said. “Not today. Not five years ago. Not ever.” The words landed one at a time, like stones dropped into a well, and Wren listened for the bottom. Five years. Five years of breakfasts, and Sunday dinners with his parents, and nights she lay awake beside him, apologizing in the dark for a body that could not give him a child. Five years of raising little Theo, Gideon’s orphaned cousin’s boy, as if he were hers, because the healer said she would never carry a child. “There must be some mistake,” she whispered. “A clerical error. An old file. Please, check again.” “We have checked, Miss Hollis.” Dunmore’s voice was perfectly polite. His eyes were not. “I’ll need to verify this against the deep archive. If you would wait in the family room.” It was not a request. He had already taken her certificate. Wren stood, her legs oddly distant, and followed him down a short corridor to a small paneled room with two stiff chairs and a dying fern. “Pia will bring you water.” The door closed. The lock clicked. Wren stared at it. Then she tried the handle. It did not turn. “Hello?” She knocked, softly at first. “Mr. Dunmore? The door is stuck.” Nobody answered. The silence in the little room pressed against her ears, and at the back of her neck the old brand began to burn. She pressed her palm against it and breathed through the sting. There was a simple explanation. There had to be. Through the narrow glass panel beside the door, she saw Pia hurry down the corridor with a paper cup. The young clerk stopped short at the sight of the lock. Her eyes met Wren’s, wide with something that looked like fear. Then she set the cup on the floor and walked away without a word. Wren sank into one of the stiff chairs. Her hands would not stop trembling, so she pinned them between her knees. Think. A forged seal. A missing record. Who could have done such a thing? Who had given her that page five years ago, and told her to frame it, and watched her hang it where she would see it every morning? A door opened somewhere close. Footsteps entered the registrar’s office on the other side of the wall behind her chair, one set slow and one quick. The wall was old plaster over Moon-glass, and it carried sound the way a lake carries a stone’s ripple. Wren held her breath. “Dunmore. Good man.” A voice she knew better than her own heartbeat, warm with amusement. “Where is she?” Gideon. He was supposed to be in a board meeting across the city, tired and busy and unreachable, the way he always was. “In the family room, sir. Locked in.” Dunmore sounded almost bored. “The stamp flagged this morning, exactly as you feared.” Gideon laughed softly, the way he laughed when Theo said something clever. “Relax. She has never asked a single question in five years. She is too grateful.” A pause, and then his voice dropped into something low and tender, turned toward someone else in the room, a tone Wren had never once heard aimed at her. “Don’t worry, love. She’ll never find out.” Love. He had never called her that. Not once, in five years.