THE HOLLOW MOON PACT

Episode5:ThePriceofaBrother

CHAPTER FIVE

The Price of a Brother

Selene had been dragged, shoved, and once, memorably, at fourteen, thrown bodily out of a tree by her brother during a training exercise gone wrong. She had never once been afraid of him. Not until he closed the carriage door on her with his own hands and refused to look at her while he did it.

"Marrok." She kept her voice steady, the same voice she used on patients who didn't yet know how badly they were hurt. "Talk to me. Now, before this goes any further."

"There isn't time." His hands were shaking on the door latch. "She said if I moved you tonight, before the moon fully turned, she'd hold onto the bargain. If I waited even one more night"

"Who is she?"

He finally looked at her, and the misery in his face was so complete, so utterly without the anger she'd have found easier to bear, that she understood before he said another word that whatever he'd done, he hadn't done it willingly.

"Father's sick," Marrok said. "Not the way the physicians think. She poisoned him six months ago slowly, so it would look like his heart failing on its own instead of what it is. She has the antidote. She's had it the whole time, dosing it out just enough to keep him alive, just enough to make sure I understood exactly what would happen if I didn't do exactly what she asked."

"Who," Selene said again, low and furious, "is she?"

"Ilsa Thorne." The name meant nothing to her and everything to him, judging by how his voice broke around it. "She's the one who found the old treaty clause. The one who convinced Father the binding could end the war for good. She told me what we are, Selene the Hollow line, both of us, gold-eyed and marked and exactly what she's spent decades hunting for. She said if I helped her move the ceremony forward, take you to the old ruin instead of the binding hall, she'd hand over enough antidote to save Father's life outright instead of stringing it out one dose at a time." His voice cracked entirely. "I told myself I'd find another way. I told myself every day for six months. And every day I didn't find one, and every day Father got a little weaker, and I ran out of time to be braver than I was."

She wanted to hate him. She found, instead, that she understood him completely, and that the understanding was worse because it meant there was no clean villain to blame here, only a man who'd been given an impossible choice by someone who specialized in making sure the choices she offered were always impossible.

"Where are we going," she said, "if not the building hall?"

"The old ruin past the eastern ridge. Ashvale ground once, before the split before there were two packs instead of one. She calls it the Hollow." Marrok's hand tightened on the door. "I don't know everything she means to do there. I know it isn't the binding Father thinks he's arranged. I know she needs your blood, and mine, and I think Selene, I think she needs Kade Ravenshaw's too, because I don't think this was ever really about ending the war. I think it was always about something she wanted for herself, and the war was just the tool she used to get both of us into the same place at the same time."

The carriage lurched into motion before Selene could answer, guarded on all sides by men. She recognized men, her own pack's men, which meant Ilsa's reach extended further than one desperate brother, further than she'd let herself imagine.

The ruin, when they reached it past midnight, was older than anything Selene had seen in either territory stones worn to a smoothness that spoke of centuries rather than decades, a circular clearing at its center marked with symbols half-eaten by moss, and at the heart of it, a woman Selene had never met but recognized instantly for what she was the moment their eyes met: someone who had stopped seeing other people as people a very long time ago.

"Isolde's daughter," Ilsa said, and there was something almost fond in it, the fondness of a collector regarding a specimen she'd waited a long time to acquire. "You have her stubbornness. I could see it from across the clearing."

"You killed my mother."

"Your mother made the mistake of understanding what I was building before I was ready for anyone to understand it." Ilsa gestured, and the guards moved Selene toward the center of the circle, toward stones stained dark with the particular patina of old, old blood. "I would apologize, if I thought it would mean anything to you. I don't waste sentiment on things that don't change outcomes."

They had Kade there before Selene fully registered it dragged in from the treeline, bloodied at the temple, restrained by four men where one usually would have been more than enough, which told her plainly how hard he'd fought before they'd gotten him this far.

His eyes found hers in the clearing, gold catching the torchlight, and in them, she saw not fear for him, but a fury so complete it was almost calm, the fury of a man who has run out of movement and is searching, with total focus, for the one nobody's accounted for yet.

"You should have run when you had the bridge," he said to her, low, "instead of walking straight into your father's summons."

"You should have told your father what you found at that lodge instead of riding back here to die with me instead of stopping her."

"I didn't ride back here to die."

"Then I'd suggest," Ilsa said, stepping between them with the mild patience of a woman who had outlasted better threats than either of theirs, "you both start thinking considerably faster than you have been, because the moon reaches its dark peak within the hour, and the ritual does not particularly care whether either of you consents to it."

She raised a hand, and the symbols cut into the stones began, impossibly, to glow, a faint gold light rising from the moss-choked grooves like something remembering, after a very long silence, exactly what it had been carved to do.

"The old stories call this the Mending, when it's done willingly," Ilsa said, almost gently, watching the light climb. "Two Hollow-marked wolves, bound by choice, are said to be able to unmake the border between your packs and end the war the way it was always meant to end not by treaty, but by truth. I have no interest in truth. I have spent sixty years engineering this exact night, this exact alignment, this exact pair of bloodlines standing on these exact stones, because I intend to take what the Mending would have given you both, and keep it for myself instead."

"That's not how the old stories go," Marrok said, from where he stood pinned between two guards who had, Selene noted with a distant, clinical part of her mind, stopped watching him quite as closely as they should have. "Grandmother always said the Hollow couldn't be stolen. Only given."

"Your grandmother," Ilsa said, without turning, "told children's stories to frighten pups away from a truth she barely understood herself. I have read the originals. I have spent longer with them than your entire bloodline has spent existing. The Hollow can be taken, Marrok Voss, from a bond forced instead of chosen. It simply costs the ones it's taken from considerably more than it would have cost them to give it freely." Her pale eyes swept back to Selene and Kade, both restrained, both bleeding, both watching her with the same furious focus. "Which is, I confess, no great loss to me either way."

The light in the stones climbed higher, gold bleeding up into the dark canopy overhead, and somewhere beneath the rising pressure of it, Selene felt something in her chest answer not fear, not yet, but recognition, the same lifting instinct she'd felt crossing the treaty border six days ago, except a thousand times stronger, as if her own blood had been waiting its whole life for exactly this moment and hated, with sudden violent clarity, that it was about to be stolen instead of given.

She caught Kade's eyes across the clearing one last time before the light closed over both of them, and understood, in the half-second before the ritual took hold, that whatever happened next would either end them both or hand Ilsa Thorne a weapon neither pack would survive.