The Luna They Burned Aliv

They tied me to the pyre with the rope I had used to hang the Solstice lanterns three weeks earlier. I knew it was that rope because I'd knotted the end myself, a small double loop my mother taught me, and now it bit into my wrists as if it remembered. "Isaura Venn," Osric called, and his Alpha voice rolled across the square so no wolf could pretend not to hear. "You stand accused of witchcraft, of poisoning the Moon Well, and of the deaths of three pups." Three pups. I hadn't even been in the pack house when the fever started. I had been in the east village, carrying firewood to old Brannoch, because nobody else would. I searched the crowd. Two hundred wolves of Hollowmere, and I had fed half of them through last winter. Mara the baker stared at her boots. The healer's apprentice, whose first birth I'd stood beside, turned her face away. Nobody met my eyes. Nobody said she was with me. "Osric." My voice cracked. I made it steady. "Look at me. You know I didn't do this." He walked up the pyre steps alone. Up close he smelled like cedar and cold iron, the way he had every night for two years. His hand slid to my jaw, gentle, almost loving, for the benefit of the crowd. "I know," he said, so quietly only I could hear. My heart stopped. "Then—" "I've known since the first night. Say nothing, and I'll make it quick." I stared at him. This was the man the Moon Goddess had chosen for me. I had waited nineteen years for him, through every cruel whisper about the Luna-to-be who never shifted, who never heard her wolf. And he was offering me mercy like a gift. "Why?" I breathed. His eyes flicked past me, to the foot of the steps. I followed his gaze and found Cressida in a white dress, one hand resting on her flat stomach. She smiled at me. It was a small, private smile, the smile of someone who had already won. Osric stepped back and straightened. His voice rang out again. "I, Osric Valenmoor, Alpha of Hollowmere, reject you, Isaura Venn, as my mate and as Luna of this pack." The bond tore. I had expected pain, but not like this. It felt like someone had reached into my chest and ripped out a rope I never knew I was standing on. I screamed. The sound came out of me raw, and the whole square flinched. And Osric flinched too. It was small. A twitch of the jaw, a hitch in his breath. But then a thin line of blood ran from his nose, and he swiped it away fast, with the look of a man who had just been surprised. A rejection was supposed to hurt only the one rejected. Everyone knew that. Cressida saw it too. Her smile slipped. "The evidence," she said quickly, too quickly, and held up a black glass vial. "Found in the witch's own chamber." The crowd hissed. I squinted at the label through my tears, and ice spread through my veins. It was my handwriting. My loops, my crooked V. But I had never seen that vial in my life. She had planned this for months. She had practiced my handwriting. "I never wrote that!" I shouted. "Check the ink! Ask the healer! Somebody ask—" "Burn her," someone called from the back. Then another voice. Then ten. Then the whole square, my pack, my people, chanting it like a song they'd always known the words to. Osric took a torch from the guard beside him. For one second his eyes met mine, and what I saw there wasn't guilt. It was fear. Not of me. For me. Then he dropped the torch into the kindling. The fire caught fast, much too fast, as if the wood had been soaked in oil. I smelled it the moment the flames climbed. Cressida had made sure of that, too. Heat licked up my legs. My skirt blackened and curled. I coughed, choking on smoke, and pulled at the rope until my wrists bled. Please, I thought, though I didn't know who I was begging. Please, I don't want to die like this. I haven't even lived yet. The flames reached my knees, and something in me answered. It started as a hum, low and deep, like a note played on a string I hadn't known I had. The pain dulled. The fire kept climbing, but it didn't hurt anymore. It felt like warmth. It felt like being held. Something moved inside me, something enormous, something that had been asleep for nineteen years and was finally, finally opening its eyes. There you are, I thought. Yes, said a voice that was not mine. Burn it all. The rope snapped. I didn't break it. It simply gave way, as if the fire had decided I was no longer to be held. Across the square, the chanting died. A thousand gasps went up at once. Osric dropped to his knees, white to the lips. Cressida screamed, "Her eyes! Look at her eyes!" I didn't know what they saw. But I felt it: gold light pouring from my gaze, and in the flames around me, the shape of something that was not a wolf. Wings, maybe. Or the memory of wings. "Impossible," the elder whispered. "The Aurelian line died out four hundred years ago." Aurelian. My mother's maiden name. The name she had made me swear never to speak. My knees gave out, and the fire roared higher. The light in my eyes flickered, my strength draining as fast as it had come. I fell forward, and the burning platform tilted under me. Then a hand closed around mine, right through the flames. It was cold. Impossibly cold, with a callused palm and a heavy iron ring pressed against my knuckles. A man's voice spoke against my ear, low and calm and very close. "Don't scream, little ember. They're all watching." I turned my head. Through the smoke, I saw dark eyes, a scarred brow, and a face I had never seen before in my life. "Take my hand, Isaura Venn," he said, "or burn for real. Your choice. But choose now." Behind him, from the trees at the edge of the square, I heard the sound of a hundred wolves who were not mine. I could tell you what I chose. But first, I should tell you who he was.