The Silver Moon Princess

The Waystation

We didn’t stay another night on the main road. Corwin had us moving before first light, cutting off the highway onto a narrower track he clearly knew well, and by the second evening, exhaustion had worn my unfamiliar restlessness into numb compliance.

The waystation wasn’t what I’d expected. No fortress, no hidden stronghold — just a weathered farmhouse tucked into a fold of hills, smoke rising unremarkably from its chimney, sheep grazing in a paddock that looked, from the road, entirely ordinary.

“Looks can be useful,” Corwin said, catching my skepticism. “Briony’s spent fifteen years making sure this place looks exactly as boring as it needs to.”

The woman who met us at the door was younger than expected, sharp-eyed and quick, with ink-stained fingers. She studied me for a long moment before her gaze flicked to Corwin, something unspoken passing between them.

“So it’s true,” Briony said, finally. “A silver wolf, awakened out of nowhere.”

“Not out of nowhere,” Corwin said. “Briony, this is Elara Duskmoon.”

Whatever composure Briony had walked to the door with cracked entirely. She stared at me, taking in details I didn’t understand were significant.

“You have your mother’s eyes,” she said, quiet and stunned. “I met Queen Rosalind once, when I was young. Come inside. This isn’t a conversation for a doorstep.”

The farmhouse’s ordinary exterior gave way to something considerably more organized — a back room lined with shelves of careful records, maps marked with symbols I didn’t yet understand.

“We track everything,” Briony explained, once we were settled with untouched tea. “Every powerless wolf stripped of property. Every pack council vote that excluded a member for lack of demonstrated strength. Cruelty that isn’t documented is cruelty that’s easy to deny.” She looked at me. “We’ve waited a long time for something to use against him. I never expected it to be the heir herself, alive after all.”

“I didn’t know I was alive to be waited for,” I said. “Three days ago I was drawing water from a well. I didn’t know any of this existed.”

“I believe that. Which means we have a great deal of work, and not much time. Word of that well is already traveling. If we’ve heard whispers, so has Malachi, and he will move quickly once he understands what you actually are.”

“Then what do we do?”

“First, make sure you survive controlling a power you have no experience with. Then we build the case properly, piece by piece, until even his most loyal allies can’t pretend not to see it.”

Training began the next morning, and it was nothing like the graceful shifting I’d half-imagined. It was exhausting, occasionally dangerous work, under the patient guidance of a woman named Fenna, introduced only as “someone who’s trained silver wolves before, for a different queen.”

“Again,” Fenna said, watching me stumble back into human form after another half-controlled shift left me shaking in the churned mud. “You’re fighting the shift instead of directing it. It’s not a wall to push through. It’s a door you’re learning to open.”

“It feels like something tearing its way out of my skin whether I want it to or not.”

“That’s twenty years of power with nowhere to go, finally getting the chance.” Her voice gentled. “You’re not failing, Elara. You’re doing decades of growth in days.”

By the end of the first week, I could shift and hold the form without immediately losing myself to instinct, though anything more precise remained frustratingly out of reach.

It was during a rare break that Corwin found me with news that stole whatever fragile progress the morning had bought.

“Riders came through the crossroads village two days behind us,” he said, crouching beside me. “Asking after a young woman traveling with an older guardian. Ravenswood colors.”

My stomach dropped. “Kael.”

“Or his people, sent on his information. Either way, our trail isn’t as cold as I’d hoped. We need to assume Malachi’s allies know roughly where we’ve been, even if they don’t yet know what you are.”

“What do we do?”

“We keep training, because you need it more urgently now, and we prepare for the possibility that whatever time we thought we had just got considerably shorter.” He looked at me, grim. “You wanted to know what it felt like to stop being disposable. I think we’re about to find out, sooner than either of us planned.”

Behind us, the churned mud from the morning’s training still bore the deep, uneven prints of a shift I hadn’t fully learned to control, and somewhere beyond the hills, a man with a raven crest and a warmth I hadn’t entirely trusted was already circling closer to a truth that would put both of us in danger the moment he understood it.