Luna Priestess

The Archive

I couldn’t stop thinking about what Maren said. There was a Priestess. She said it like she wished she hadn’t. Like it slipped out before she could stop it. Then she shut the door on it fast, before I could get a name out of her.

I needed that name.

I thought about asking her again, the next time she rode out to check on me. I already knew how that would go.

She’d go quiet, and careful, and tell me it wasn’t the right time, the same way she’d told me a hundred things weren’t the right time since I was six years old. Waiting for Maren to decide it was the right time had never once worked in my favour.

So I decided not to wait.

Ashen Pack kept its own archive. Smaller than the Temple’s, but old. A back room off the west wing that smelled like dust and cold stone and hadn’t been aired out in years, from the smell of it.

I found the pack historian there, an older wolf named Bram, hunched over a ledger like he’d been doing it his whole life and planned to keep doing it until he died at that desk.

“Priestess,” he said, not looking up. “Can I help you find something?”

“I’m looking for old Temple records. Anything about a Priestess whose Sight failed.”

He looked up at that. Studied me a second too long, like he was wondering how much pack gossip had already reached him, and I got the feeling it had reached him plenty.

“That’s an odd thing to go looking for.”

“It’s an odd week.”

He almost smiled. Almost. “The Temple sends copies over whenever alliance business touches Temple law. Births, deaths, broken oaths, that sort of thing.

If something happened with a Priestess, it might be in here. Might not. Nobody’s gone through those crates in years, and the Temple’s never been generous about sharing what it keeps for itself.”

He pointed me toward a corner stacked high with old crates and went back to his ledger, done with me for the moment.

I spent the whole afternoon back there on the floor, sneezing dust, pulling apart bundles tied with string so old it snapped the second I touched it. Most of what I found was nothing.

Trade deals between packs. Border arguments that dragged on for pages. A three-year fight over who got to use which field for grazing that somehow filled an entire folder on its own.

I almost gave up twice. My knees had gone numb from sitting on cold stone, and my hands were black with dust, and I kept telling myself this was a waste of an afternoon, that whatever Maren was hiding wasn’t going to be sitting in some Ashen storeroom waiting for me to find it.

I found it in the third crate. Near the bottom. One folded page was shoved in sideways, like somebody had wanted it lost instead of filed properly.

The paper was thin and had gone brown with age, and it crackled when I unfolded it.

Record of Temple Incident, it said at the top. Confidential. Council Eyes Only.

My hands went cold before I even got to the first full line.

On the night of the Alliance Summit, the Priestess...lost her Sight completely in the presence of Alpha, witnessed by members of the Council. The Council found her guilty of concealing a broken Vow. She was sentenced under Temple law.

Both names were gone. Not smudged, not faded by time. Cut. A clean, straight line taken right through the paper, exactly where two names should have been, like someone had sat down with a blade and made very sure nobody would ever read them again.

I kept reading anyway, even though my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

The Priestess’s daughter, born before the sentencing, was surrendered to the Temple as a ward, her parentage sealed by Council order.

I stopped breathing.

I read it again, slower, in case I’d gotten it wrong somehow. I hadn’t gotten it wrong.

Her parentage sealed by Council order.

I set the page down flat on the floor in front of me and just stared at it, my whole body gone numb in a way that had nothing to do with the cold stone underneath me.

I thought about the scrap of cloth I was found with as a baby, tucked in the crescent moon someone had stitched into it, the only thing I’d ever owned that might have come from somebody who actually wanted me.

I thought about Maren’s face, pale, catching herself right before she said too much, and I thought about a Priestess whose Sight had failed exactly the way mine had, in front of the exact same kind of Council, at the exact same kind of summit.

A Priestess who’d been executed for it.

And I thought, with a cold certainty that settled into my bones and didn’t leave, that I already knew whose daughter I was.

I found one more thing before Bram told me it was getting too dark to keep reading. Tucked into the fold of the page, easy to miss if you weren’t looking hard enough. A few letters that had survived whatever blade cut the rest of the name away.

Not a full name. Just the tail end of something longer, a fragment left behind where the knife must have slipped.

—orn field.

I sat there on that cold floor holding the scrap of paper in both hands, staring at a handful of letters that meant nothing on their own and everything the second I let myself think about them for one more breath.

She’d had a daughter.

And I was starting to think I already knew exactly who that daughter was.

I don’t know how long I sat there. Long enough that the light coming through the small window had gone from gold to grey, long enough that my legs had gone stiff underneath me, and I had to peel myself off the floor like an old woman.

I folded the page back up, carefully, like it might fall apart if I moved too fast, and slid it inside my robe against my ribs. I told myself I’d put it back later. I didn’t put it back.

Bram poked his head in a few minutes later, a candle in one hand. “Priestess? It’s gone dark. You should head back before the halls fill up for supper.”

“Right. Sorry.” I got to my feet, brushing dust off my knees, hoping my face wasn’t doing whatever my chest was doing right now.

“Thank you. For letting me look.”

“Find what you needed?”

I almost laughed. It came out more like a breath. “I don’t know yet.”

He gave me a look like he didn’t quite believe that, but he didn’t push, which I was grateful for, because I didn’t have it in me to lie any better than that right then.

I walked back to the guest wing with the page pressed flat against my side, heart going too fast, my mind running through every version of what those four letters could mean.

Thornfield. It had to be Thornfield. That was my name, the only name I had, the one the Temple gave me because a baby needs a name and nobody had bothered inventing one for me before I arrived.

I’d always been told it was just a Temple name. Plain. Meaningless. Handed towards the way you’d hand out a blanket.

What if it wasn’t meaningless at all? What if somebody, cutting a page apart with a blade, careful enough to erase every trace of a woman’s identity, had missed one broken word by accident, and that broken word was the only piece of my own mother I would ever get to keep?

I didn’t sleep that night either. I lay there staring at the ceiling with the page hidden under my mattress, thinking about Maren’s face when she said there was a Priestess, and understood, finally, exactly why she’d looked so afraid saying it.

She hadn’t been afraid of the Council.

She’d been afraid of me finding out the truth before she was ready to tell me herself.