The Luna They Burned Aliv

Chapter 4: The Thread

Chain him," Daghan said.

"He's dying," I said.

"He's *bait*." Daghan didn't look at me. He was looking at Osric, who lay on a pallet in the healer's tent with his face gray and blood crusting his lip. "Cressida sends her bound Alpha to our fire, he drops at your feet with a story about your dead mother, and you're ready to follow him into a cellar. Tell me that isn't a trap."

"It could be a trap."

"Then why are you kneeling next to him?"

Because the cedar box had held my mother's seal for ten years, and the seal was in Daghan's pocket. Because Osric had no reason to lie about an empty grave. I didn't say any of that. I just put my hand on Osric's chest and felt his heart stutter like a bird against glass.

The healer, a broad woman named Wrenna with flour-white hair, pulled back his collar and swore. A thin black thread ran under his skin from his throat to his sternum, pulsing in time with his pulse. "Blood oath," she said. "Old work. It's tightening. He won't see dawn."

"Can you cut it?"

"I can cut his heart out with it." She wiped her hands. "Only fire clean enough to burn the oath without burning the man. And there's one fire I've heard of that does that."

Every eye in the tent turned to me.

"No," Daghan said.

"You said Moonrot's two weeks away—"

"And you gave me two inches today and nearly fainted. You've got maybe one more working in you tonight. Spend it on him and my arm starts crawling again." His voice dropped. "That's eleven wolves, Isaura. I'm not trading eleven for the man who lit your pyre."

"He *didn't* want to!"

"You don't know that."

"I know he's the only one who can tell us where Tamsin is." I stood, and my knees shook, and I locked them. "You said you needed what I am. Fine. Then let me decide what it's for."

Silence. Daghan's jaw worked. Then he looked away first.

"One try," he said roughly. "If you pass out, Pell carries you out of here and I chain him anyway."

---

I laid both hands over the thread and closed my eyes.

This time I didn't have to remember the fire. It was already there, a coal under my ribs, waiting. I let it climb into my palms.

Gold light spilled between my fingers. The thread screamed. I couldn't hear it, but I felt it, a high furious whine under Osric's skin, as it writhed against the heat. Osric's back arched off the pallet. Wrenna gripped his shoulders.

"Hold him!"

The thread burned from black to red to white, and then, abruptly, I wasn't in the tent anymore.

I stood in a stone room I'd never seen. Fire ringed the walls in a perfect circle. A woman knelt in the center with her back to me, her hair the same dark brown as mine, her hands raised to the flames. Her voice was soft and fierce.

"Not her. Take me. Not her."

Then she turned, and my breath stopped. It was my mother's face. Younger, wild, streaked with ash. Her eyes met mine across the fire, and she *saw* me.

"Isaura," she whispered. "He's lying to you."

Everything went white.

I came back on my knees with Pell's arms around my waist. My mouth tasted of smoke. The thread was gone. Osric lay still, and then his chest rose in a long, shuddering breath.

"He's alive," Wrenna said. "Gods, he's alive."

I stared at my own hands. "Who is lying?" I mumbled. "She said someone was lying to me."

Nobody answered. Daghan was watching me with a strange new stillness, like a man who'd just realized how large the thing in front of him really was.

---

Osric woke an hour later and talked fast, as though the words had been choking him for years.

"I dug up the box at midnight," he said. He sat against the tent pole with a blanket around his shoulders, shaking. "Under the lid, there was no body. Just this."

He pulled out a strip of scorched linen. Written across it in brown ink were five words.

*Ask the elder who signed.*

"Orrin," I whispered.

"He signed your mother's death record. I checked the registry last week." Osric's eyes were bloodshot. "Nine years ago, he declared her dead of a fever. No body was ever shown to the pack. You were nine, Isaura. You were told not to look."

I remembered. The closed coffin, Orrin's hand heavy on my shoulder, his voice saying *Be brave, child.* The man who'd just helped Daghan quote the Ashen Law in front of the whole pack.

He'd helped me *live*. And he'd put my mother in the ground.

"Then why would he save me?" I said slowly.

"Because," Daghan said from the doorway, "the one thing worse than a witch burning is a witch burning *wrong*." He walked in. "Think. He couldn't stop the pyre without exposing himself. But he could make sure it failed. Why? Someone higher up is watching how this ends."

"Cressida," I said.

"Or someone who commands her."

Osric flinched. It was small, but I saw it.

"You know something," I said.

"I know that the oath wasn't hers." His voice cracked. "She's powerful, but she's not *that* powerful. The thread I felt on my heart didn't taste like her mother's blood. It tasted like something older." He looked at me. "I think she's been working for someone. And I think your mother knew."

Pell's head popped through the flap. She was breathing hard. "Alpha! The scouts say Cressida's mother's house is lit up. There's a ceremony at midnight. They've got torches and a cart and—" She swallowed. "And a small cage on the cart."

Tamsin.

I was already on my feet. "How long?"

"Two hours."

"Then we go now."

"We go *smart*," Daghan said, but he was reaching for his coat. "Osric, you stay here."

"No." Osric pushed up. "I know the cellar. I know where the guards stand. You need me."

"I don't trust you."

"You don't have to." Osric looked at me. "She does."

I did, God help me. And I hated it.

---

We reached the house in ninety minutes. It sat at the edge of Hollowmere's territory, a squat stone building with a light burning in every window. Torches ringed the yard. Cressida's mother stood in the doorway in black, a gaunt woman with a face like a closed fist.

The cart was in the yard. And the cage was empty.

"She moved her," Osric breathed.

"Or she's inside." Daghan signaled his wolves. "Pell, left. Wrenna, hold the road. Isaura, with me."

We went through the back door and down the cellar steps with Osric leading, three silent shapes in the dark. The air smelled of damp and iron. At the bottom, a single lantern burned on a hook.

There was a cell. The door hung open. Straw lay scattered across the floor, and a small blanket was folded neatly in the corner, the way a child folds something when she's been told to be good.

But the cell was empty.

I stepped inside and my foot hit something small and hard. I picked it up, and the world tilted.

A ring. Iron, heavy, with a bird stamped on the face and a circle of flame around it.

My mother's ring.

Tucked under the band was a note in her handwriting, still wet. The ink was fresh.

*She's safe. Do not follow. Do not trust Daghan.*

I read it twice. Then I heard a footstep on the stairs behind me, and the click of a blade leaving its sheath.

---

That's about 1,500 words. Want me to write Chapter 5 next, or change anything in this one?