Three Years Back
1611 Words
Ceiling beams. Whitewash. A water stain shaped like a running hare.
I stared at it and forgot how to breathe.
I knew that stain. It lived over my bed in my father’s house, in the room I had slept in for nineteen years — the narrow bed, the lavender sachet under the pillow, the oak chest beneath the window.
A room that should have been three years and one lifetime away.
My hands flew to my throat. No rope. Down my arms. No blisters, no weeping burns. Only smooth skin, the sleeve of a cotton nightgown, and a heart slamming hard enough to shake the fabric.
The stink of oil-soaked wood still sat in my nose. Three hundred voices still roared in my ears.
Breathe, Aria.
I sat up too fast and the room swam. Gray light at the window. Birdsong. Pans clattered in the kitchen below, and a girl’s voice hummed off-key above the noise.
I knew that humming.
Dead women don’t hum kitchen songs. Banished ones don’t, either.
Tessa.
My eyes burned. I pressed the heel of my hand against them and made myself think, because madness was one explanation, and I needed to rule out the rest.
Proof. I needed proof.
Something stung when I gripped the bedframe. I turned my arm over.
A scrape ran from my wristbone toward my thumb, scabbed dark at the center, angry pink at the edges. I knew that scrape the way I knew my own name. Blackthorn. The ravine north of the herb garden, where I had climbed down after wild feverfew, slipped, and torn my wrist open — three days before my engagement ceremony.
Wolves heal overnight. Wolfless girls carry their scrapes for weeks, and the pack never let me forget it. But that ugly little scab was a date written on my own skin, and for the first time in my life I was glad of my slow healing.
Three days old. Which made today—
I lurched off the bed and reached the desk in two strides. My moon chart lay where it always lay, corners weighted with river stones, every finished day crossed off in careful ink. The crosses marched across the page and stopped one square short of a circled date.
Circled twice, in my own hand, with a foolish little star drawn beside it.
The engagement of Aria Frost to Alpha Kane Blackwood.
One square away. One day.
Today.
I sat down hard on the desk chair. Under my ribs, something that had been screaming since the fire went very, very quiet.
She had heard me. The Moon Goddess had given me back the beginning — down to the very morning.
The door banged open.
“You’re up! Perfect. I told Cook you’d never sleep through today, and she said—”
The rest was lost, because I crossed the room and pulled her into my arms, tray, honey water, and all.
“My lady?” Tessa went stiff as a fence post. One hand kept the tray level; the other patted my back, careful, as if I might bite. “Aria. You’re shaking. What’s happened?”
Alive. Warm and solid, smelling of bread and cheap soap, patting me as though I were the one who needed protecting. The last time I had seen this girl, two warriors were twisting her arms behind her back while she screamed to the whole pack that I was innocent.
Never again. Whatever else I did with this second life — never again.
“Bad dream,” I said into her hair.
“Must have been a monster of one.” She wriggled free, set the tray down, and peered at me, freckles bunching as she frowned. “Your eyes look strange this morning.”
“Strange how?”
“Older.” Then she laughed at herself and pushed the cup into my hands. “Listen to me talking nonsense. Drink — you’ve a long day. Oh, before I forget. Don’t go looking for the blue sash. Miss Chloe borrowed it at dawn, and Madam Diana said you wouldn’t mind, seeing as you’ll have a whole new wardrobe once you’re the Alpha’s lady.”
The last time I lived this morning, I had cried over that sash — quietly, into my pillow, and then smiled through breakfast, because good girls don’t make scenes on happy days.
“Let her keep it,” I said.
Tessa’s mouth fell open. “Truly? Last month she took your pearl combs and you wouldn’t eat for a day.”
“The combs suited her.” I drank. Honey and lemon balm, made the way I liked without asking. “Borrowed things have a way of coming home, Tessa. All of it comes home, in the end.”
She gave me a long look, half worried, half something else. “You are strange this morning,” she decided. “I think I like it.”
While she wrestled my hair into ceremony braids, I watched the yard through the window. Long tables. Garlands on the fence posts. Silver Crest banners hanging limp in the still morning air, warriors hauling benches, and Diana’s voice carrying up from the porch — sharpening itself on everyone below her, softening for everyone above.
Somewhere in that house, my sister was stitching my blue sash onto her own dress and rehearsing her blushes.
Let her rehearse.
I made my accounting while the braids went in. Item by item, calm as a merchant on market morning.
What I had that the pack could see: nothing. No wolf. No scent. No rank beyond my father’s borrowed one.
What I carried where no one could see: three years. Every raid, every scandal, every secret the future had shown me before it burned me alive. Somewhere beyond the eastern ridge, trouble was already on its way to this territory — and I was the only soul under the moon who knew it was coming.
And I knew my sister. Every trick in her pretty basket. The tears that never quite fall. The borrowed things. The little glass vials. She would lay her snares just as she had before.
This time I would simply step aside — and hold the door while she walked into them herself.
Kane, though.
Kane I would deal with personally. Today.
My father got no line in the ledger at all. You cannot collect a debt from an empty room.
There was my herb craft, too. Ten years of setting bones and brewing fevers down — skills I had gathered like flowers for a man who never looked at them. A lovesick girl’s offering, once. This time, they would be ground to stand on.
And one rule above everything: no one could ever learn how I knew the things I knew. Not Kane. Not even Tessa. A wolfless girl with impossible knowledge is not called a prophet. She is called a witch, and I had already felt what this pack builds for women it fears.
Built it high. Soaked it well.
“There.” Tessa tied off the last braid. “Dress next. No — stockings first. Sit.”
I knelt at the oak chest instead, dug past the winter wool, and closed my fingers around a small bundle at the bottom, wrapped in an old stocking, exactly where it had waited for thirteen years.
My mother’s pendant.
A stone darker than a moonless sky, caged in fine silverwork — tiny five-pointed flowers on a drooping stem, blackened with tarnish. Heavier than it looked. Colder, too. In thirteen years I had never once seen that stone catch the light. Not from a candle. Not from the sun.
Keep it close. Keep it quiet. She had pressed it into my six-year-old hands and folded my fingers shut over it, and by morning she was gone.
In my first life, I stopped wearing it at fifteen — after Diana called it peasant junk, and Kane’s mother wondered aloud whether tarnished silver was fitting for a future Luna. I had packed my mother away to please them.
I fastened the chain and tucked the dark stone beneath my collar, cool against my breastbone.
This time, I would please no one.
Then I reached back and unclasped the other chain. Kane’s promise token — the polished silver crescent he had fastened there himself, two years ago, the day our fathers signed us to each other. I had not taken it off since.
It came away easily. Funny. I had expected it to weigh more.
I coiled it on the desk beside the moon chart, where I could find it quickly.
I would be returning it shortly.
“That old thing?” Tessa nodded at my collar, scandalized. “It doesn’t match the dress.”
“It matches me.”
Feet hammered up the stairs before she could argue. A kitchen girl skidded into the doorway, cheeks blazing.
“He’s here,” she gasped. “Alpha Kane — just rode through the gates with six warriors and a cart of gifts. Madam Diana says come down this instant. The elders are gathering in the Great Hall. The ceremony’s about to begin!”
Tessa spun to me, glowing, and squeezed my hands. “Ready, my lady?”
I looked past her, into the mirror. The girl in the glass was nineteen, wolfless, and perfectly calm — and she was smiling. Not the smile I had worn through five years of pleasing people.
A new one.
The last time I lived this day, I floated down those stairs and promised Kane Blackwood the rest of my life.
This time, I knew exactly which words to say.
- Writer
