The Blood Moon Vow

The dress weighed more than I did. That was the joke I made to my maid, Sable, every year on the anniversary, and every year she laughed like it was the first time, because that was her job, and because the alternative was standing there while I stared at the mirror and hated the girl in it. "Turn," Sable said, and I turned. Forty pounds of silver thread and dead men's medals sewn into the bodice. My father called it the Peace Gown. Everyone else in Ashmoor called it the Widow's Dress, because it had first been worn by my great-grandmother the night the treaty was signed, and she had spent the rest of her life a widow, and nobody in this pack had ever managed to break the pattern of that name meaning something. I was twenty-three years old and I had never once worn that dress and felt anything but cold. "You'll be radiant," Sable said, pinning the last fold at my hip. "I'll be upright," I said. "That's the best I can promise anyone tonight." Below my window, the courtyard was already filling with torches, and I could hear the low murmur of a hundred wolves in human skin trying to remember how to make small talk with people whose grandfathers had tried to kill their grandfathers. The Ashmoor-Talveth accord was thirty years old this month. My father had decided that meant it deserved a ball, a hundred candles, and, unspoken but understood by every soul in the castle, a formal announcement of my engagement to Talveth's heir, a broad, humorless man named Rurik who smelled like wet stone and called me "Your Grace" even in private, as though he thought titles might substitute for a personality. I had not agreed to the engagement. I had also not been asked. "Your father wants you downstairs before the doors open," Sable said carefully, watching my face in the mirror the way she always did before delivering bad news, as if she could soften it by seeing it land first. "Of course he does." "Elena—" "I'm going," I said. "I'm not going to fight you about it. I'm just allowed to hate it while I do it." She smiled, small and tired, and touched my shoulder once, the closest thing to comfort either of us was permitted in a house where even affection had to look useful. My father was waiting in the long hall with his hands behind his back, the posture he used when he wanted to look patient and was not. King Corvin Voss had the kind of face carved by decades of being right about things nobody wanted to hear, and tonight it was arranged into an expression I recognized as his version of gentleness, which mostly meant he wasn't shouting. "You look like your mother," he said, which from him was the highest compliment available, and also, always, a small wound, because my mother had been dead eleven years and he still said it like an accusation against time. "Thank you," I said. "Rurik will announce it before the third dance. I've already spoken to his father. It only wants your nod at the appropriate moment. You don't need to speak." "How generous," I said. "A silent bride. Very on brand for this family." His jaw moved, the only sign he allowed himself of temper. "This alliance keeps four thousand of our people fed through the winter passes. It keeps Blackthorn's dogs on their side of the river. You will smile, you will nod, and you will remember that being born a princess of this pack was never going to mean you got to choose the shape of your own life. I didn't choose mine either." "You chose to make me hate you a little for it," I said. "That part was optional." Something in his face flickered—not quite hurt, because my father had trained hurt out of himself the way other men trained muscle—but close enough to it that I almost regretted saying it. Almost. Then the doors were opening and the noise of the hall rolled over us both, and there was no more room for anything except the performance. I don't know exactly when I decided to leave the ballroom. I think it happened the way most disasters happen—not as a decision at all, but as a slow accumulation of moments I couldn't stand one more second of, until my body simply removed itself before my mind had finished arguing about whether it was allowed to. Rurik had asked me to dance twice. Twice I had let him put his hand at the small of my back like he was already measuring the space for a ring. My father had watched both dances from his chair with the satisfaction of a man closing a very good business deal, and I had smiled the whole time with a face that felt like it belonged to someone else, someone rented for the evening and due back at midnight. So when the third song ended and the musicians paused to retune, I told Sable I needed air, and I meant it more literally than she understood. The old shrine sat a half-mile past the eastern wall, in the strip of forest that belonged to neither kingdom by an accident of a hundred-year-old boundary dispute nobody had bothered to resolve because the land wasn't worth fighting over. It was where the river narrowed to something you could cross on foot, if you didn't mind wet boots, and where an older, stranger god than the one my father prayed to still had an altar nobody maintained anymore, half-swallowed by moss. I went there because it was the only place in the world where I was allowed to not be anybody's future. I did not expect to find him there. He was sitting on the broken edge of the altar stone with his jacket off and his sleeves pushed up, and even in the dark my wolf noticed him before I did—every hair on my arms lifting, some ancient alarm going off that had nothing to do with fear. He turned at the sound of my boots on the wet leaves, and for one full second neither of us moved, because we both understood, before either of us said a word, exactly what the other one was. Blackthorn. The black-and-silver signet on his open collar told me that much before his scent did—pine and gun oil and something underneath it, something warmer, that had nothing to do with his kingdom at all. "You're a long way from your side of the river," I said, because it was that or scream, and screaming would have brought guards, and I found, to my own considerable alarm, that I did not want guards yet. "So are you," he said. His voice was low and rough at the edges, like he didn't use it for pleasantries often. "Princess." "You know who I am." "Every wolf on my side of the river knows who you are. There've been three paintings commissioned of your face since the peace with Talveth was announced. My father keeps one in his war room. Says it helps him remember what he's fighting to keep out." It should have been an insult. It landed instead like something closer to an apology, delivered in the wrong language by someone who'd never been taught the right one. "And you," I said. "Kian Malric. The heir Blackthorn keeps threatening to send across the river with an army instead of a hand." "That's the plan, some days." He stood, slow, the way you move around something you don't want to startle, and I realized with a strange lurch that he meant me. "Tonight isn't one of them." I should have run. I want that on the record, for whatever it's worth now—I knew, standing there in the wet dark with the ball still glowing gold through the trees behind me, that every rule I had ever been raised inside was screaming at me to turn around. Instead I took a step closer, and the alarm in my blood didn't quiet down. It changed key. It became something with a rhythm to it, something that matched the sudden unbearable awareness of my own pulse in my throat. "Why are you here?" I asked. "Really." "Same reason as you, I'd guess." He nodded back toward the distant lights, the faint sound of the retuned orchestra starting up again. "Somebody's arranging my life for me too. I didn't want to watch it happen tonight either." "An arrangement with who?" "Doesn't matter. Some pack my father wants leverage over. I've never met her." He looked at me, and something in his face went carefully, deliberately still, the look of a man choosing his next words like they might cost him something. "I keep telling myself it doesn't matter who it is. That I'll do my duty same as every Malric before me. Tonight's the first night I've had trouble believing myself." "That's a dangerous thing to say to a stranger." "You're not a stranger," he said. "That's the problem." And then it happened—the thing neither of us could have stopped even if every soldier from both kingdoms had been standing in that clearing to see it. Heat bloomed under my collarbone like a struck match, sharp enough that I gasped and pressed my hand flat over it, and across the clearing I watched him do the exact same thing, his hand flying to his own chest with the exact same shocked expression I imagined was on my face. The moon-bond mark. I had heard of it my whole life the way you hear about lightning striking twice, or wolves living past a hundred—a thing that was technically real and functionally a myth, because nobody actually alive had seen it happen. It was supposed to take days to fully surface. It was supposed to require touch, at least, some deliberate act of claiming. It was not supposed to happen from thirty feet away, between two people who had known each other's names for four minutes, on the one strip of ground in the whole territory that belonged to nobody at all. "Tell me you feel that too," Kian said, and his voice had lost every trace of its earlier control. "Tell me I'm not standing here about to start a war by myself." I didn't answer him with words. I pulled the collar of my gown aside instead, and showed him the mark already rising dark and unmistakable against my skin, shaped like nothing either of our houses had ever put on a crest, and I watched his face change from disbelief into something that looked, terrifyingly, like relief. "Oh," he said softly. "Oh, we're in trouble." Behind us, faint on the wind, I heard my father's voice calling my name across the courtyard, the first note of an alarm that would not go quiet again for a very long time. I looked at Kian Malric—enemy, stranger, the other half of a bond neither of our fathers would ever accept—and felt, for the first time since my mother died, something that was not cold at all. "Yes," I said. "We are."