The Silver Moon Princess

What The Ambush Taught Me

The fire wasn’t an accident. I understood that in the same instant I understood we’d walked,

exhausted and unguarded, directly into ground someone had chosen for us in advance.

“Ambush,” Corwin snapped, already on his feet, wound forgotten in the sudden, total focus

of a man who’d survived considerably worse. “Elara, shift. Now. Kael—”

“I see them.” Kael’s blade was already drawn, positioning himself at my back with an

instinct that felt, despite everything, like it had been there considerably longer than the two

of us had known each other.

Shapes moved at the treeline, more than the six riders from the checkpoint road, more

disciplined, closing with the coordinated patience of soldiers who’d planned this rather than

stumbled onto it.

“They knew this path,” I said, understanding landing hard and cold. “Someone told them

which way we’d run.”

“Later,” Corwin said. “Survive first, understand second.”

I shifted, silver fur rippling up faster than it had even in the forest outside the market, the

fury and fear of the past weeks finally finding a shape I could direct instead of merely endure.

The first soldier who reached our camp’s edge didn’t manage more than a single startled

shout before I met him, and this time I didn’t lose myself to instinct the way I had before —

Fenna’s voice steady somewhere underneath the chaos, a door, not a wall, and I held my own

mind even as claws and fury did what twenty years of a hidden village life had never

prepared me to do.

Corwin fought beside me despite his wound, blade moving with the economy of a man who’d

spent two decades keeping exactly one person alive above every other consideration, and

Kael fought at my back with a ferocity that told me everything about what he’d meant, days

ago, about choosing this over the comfort he’d been raised inside.

It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t easy. I felt teeth graze my shoulder, felt Corwin stumble once, badly,

before catching himself, felt the particular terror of watching Kael go down hard against a

soldier twice his size before rolling free and driving his blade home with a desperation that

had nothing practiced left in it at all.

By the time the last soldier broke and fled into the dark, the camp around us had gone

eerily silent, littered with the wreckage of a fight that had lasted minutes and felt, in memory,

like considerably longer.

I shifted back, shaking, blood that wasn’t entirely mine streaked across my skin, and found

Kael already moving toward me, a shallow cut above his eye the only visible mark of how

close the fight had actually come to going differently.

“You’re hurt,” I said.

“So are you.” His hand found my shoulder, careful over the graze there. “We’re both still

standing. Tonight, I’ll take it.”

Corwin was breathing hard against a fallen log, his earlier wound reopened and bleeding

freely again, but his eyes found mine with something fierce and exhausted and unmistakably

proud beneath the pain.

“You held your mind,” he said. “Through all of it. That’s not something Fenna could have

taught you in five more weeks of training. That’s something you just did, because you

needed to.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“You always have a choice, Elara. Tonight you chose to stay yourself, even at the center of

something that would have swallowed most wolves twice your experience.” He managed a

pained, genuine smile. “Your mother would have been unbearably proud. I intend to be

insufferable about it on her behalf for the foreseeable future.”

We didn’t rest long — Kael insisting, rightly, that whoever had planned this ambush would

send more the moment silence fell instead of a returning report, and by the time false dawn

began greying the treeline, we were moving again, slower now, wounded and exhausted but

alive in a way that felt, after everything, considerably more solid than it had any right to.

It was somewhere past midday, the drover’s path finally widening toward country I almost

recognized from Kael’s earlier descriptions, that Briony found us — having ridden hard

through the night on word from Ysbeth’s network, her face draining of color at the sight of

blood and exhaustion written across all three of us.

“You’re alive,” she breathed. “We heard fighting reported near the checkpoint road and

feared the worst.”

“We’re alive,” Corwin confirmed, grim. “Barely. Someone knew exactly which path we’d take.

That wasn’t luck, Briony. That was information, and it didn’t come from a frightened boy at a

harvest market this time.”

Something troubled crossed Briony’s face. “Then we have a leak considerably closer to the

Convocation planning than any of us wanted to believe.”

I stood in the widening morning light, blood and exhaustion and the ache of a fight I’d barely

survived still heavy in every limb, and thought of Moonspire waiting somewhere ahead of us

— a hall full of men who’d spent twenty years agreeing not to ask difficult questions, a

throne built on careful cruelty, an uncle who’d just proven he was willing to spend soldiers

freely to make sure I never reached it at all.

“How far to Moonspire from here?” I asked.

Briony studied me a long moment, taking in the blood, the exhaustion, the new, harder

certainty that hadn’t been in my face the last time she’d seen me.

“Four days,” she said, finally. “If nothing else finds us first.”

“Then we make sure nothing does.” I looked at Corwin, still bleeding, and Kael, still steady

despite everything the night had cost him, and felt something settle into place beneath the

fear — not less afraid, exactly, but finally, unmistakably certain of the direction all of it was

carrying me toward.

“Four days,” I repeated. “And then Malachi finds out exactly how wrong he was to think a

dead line stays buried.”