The Silver Moon Princess

What The Record Showed

By the second week, I could hold the shift for an hour without losing my grip on my own mind, which Fenna declared, with the closest thing to pride I’d seen from her, considerably ahead of schedule.

“Your mother could hold hers for a full day by your age,” Fenna told me, watching me pace the paddock in wolf form, silver fur catching the morning light. “But she’d had twenty years of steady growth. You’re compressing decades into weeks. Don’t measure yourself against her timeline. Measure yourself against where you were three weeks ago.”

I shifted back, breathing hard. “It still feels like I’m playing catch-up to a life I should have had.”

“You are. That’s not a flaw in you. That’s a crime committed against you, and there’s a difference.” Fenna’s expression softened. “The anger you’re carrying — don’t let anyone talk you out of it. It’s fuel, if you learn to direct it instead of letting it direct you.”

Briony found me an hour later in the back room where the records lined every shelf. She’d been working since before dawn, and whatever she’d found had cost her something to read.

“I want you to see this,” she said, sliding a thin, worn ledger across the table. “Before we go further with training. I think you need to understand what you’re actually fighting to change, not just the throne you’re fighting to reclaim.”

The ledger was a record of pack council rulings — decades of them, each entry a brief, clinical summary. I read through a dozen before the pattern became impossible to ignore: powerless wolves stripped of inherited land because they couldn’t demonstrate sufficient strength to defend it. Marriages voided because one partner’s power fell below an arbitrary threshold. Children removed from powerless parents and reassigned to stronger households, framed each time as being for the child’s protection.

“This has been happening for twenty years,” I said, my voice unsteady. “Since right after he took the throne.”

“Since almost the exact month.” Briony’s voice had gone quiet, controlled fury beneath her usual precision. “He didn’t seize power through obvious cruelty. That’s what makes him so difficult to fight. He built it procedurally, ruling by ruling, each one justified with reasonable-sounding logic about safety and strength, until an entire generation grew up believing this was simply how Lycaea had always worked.”

I turned another page and found an entry that made my chest go tight and cold at once — a ruling, eighteen years old, stripping a family of their holding after the father was declared powerless following an injury, their youngest daughter reassigned to a stronger household “for appropriate development.”

“That’s a child,” I said. “They took a child because her father got hurt.”

“There are hundreds of entries like that one. I’ve spent fifteen years documenting them, because I understood, even before I knew you existed, that someday there would need to be proof this extensive to overturn a system this entrenched.”

I sat with the ledger open a long while, the morning’s exhaustion folding into something heavier, more purposeful. Twenty years of my own hidden life had shielded me from the worst of what Malachi’s order actually did. Reading it laid bare, methodical and clinical, made the fury I’d felt since Corwin’s confession feel suddenly, urgently insufficient.

“This isn’t just about my mother anymore,” I said. “It’s about every person in this ledger.”

“I hoped you’d see it that way. Some heirs, if they’d survived what you survived, would come back solely for revenge. Revenge doesn’t give that family back their daughter. Only changing the law itself can do that.”

“Then that’s what we do.” I closed the ledger. “We don’t just take back a throne. We tear down everything he built on top of it.”

Briony studied me, something assessing and increasingly hopeful in her expression. “That’s a considerably larger undertaking, Elara. It means convincing allied houses currently loyal to Malachi that the order they’ve benefited from is rotten enough to abandon.”

“Houses like Ravenswood,” I said quietly, Kael’s face surfacing unbidden — the easy warmth of that inn conversation, the careful concealment of a signet ring turned inward.

“Houses exactly like Ravenswood.” Briony’s expression sharpened. “If his curiosity about you runs deeper than suspicion, that could matter a great deal. His family’s alliance has helped hold Malachi’s throne steady for twenty years. If we could turn even one house that significant—”

“I don’t know if that’s realistic. He’s loyal to his family. To the order he’s grown up inside.”

“Most people are, right up until they’re given real reason not to be.” Briony closed the remaining ledgers. “Whatever else happens, I think you’re going to find out very soon exactly how far that reason of yours is capable of carrying you — and how many people it’s capable of changing along the way.”

Outside, the afternoon had begun sliding toward evening, and somewhere beyond the waystation’s ordinary disguise, whatever fragile safety these past weeks had offered was rapidly running out of time to last.