The Silver Moon Princess

What The Ridge cost

The lantern in the valley didn’t move again that night, and somehow the stillness of it

frightened me more than motion would have. Corwin kept us climbing anyway, refusing to

rest until the hollow behind us had folded into three more ridgelines and the sky had begun

its first grey argument with dawn.

“They’ll find the prints,” I said, when he finally allowed a stop. “In the mud. My prints.”

“They’ll find prints belonging to some silver wolf nobody’s seen in twenty years.” Corwin’s

voice was rough with exhaustion he wouldn’t admit to. “It confirms a rumor. It doesn’t hand

them your face.”

“It’s close enough.”

“It is.” He didn’t soften that. “Which is exactly why we keep moving.”

Briony’s second refuge turned out to be less a place than a wound in the hillside — an old

mine shaft, abandoned decades ago, its entrance disguised behind a fall of scrub and rock

that looked, unless you already knew to look harder, like nothing more than a collapsed

slope.

“It’s not comfortable,” she warned, working the hidden latch that swung a section of the rock

face open on old, oiled hinges. “But it’s warm, and it’s dry, and nobody’s found it in thirty

years.”

We were perhaps twenty steps into the tunnel, the last daylight narrowing behind us into a

thin grey seam, when the arrow took Corwin in the shoulder.

I didn’t understand what had happened until he staggered, one hand flying to the shaft

buried just below his collarbone, and Briony was already shoving me deeper into the

darkness while shouting something I couldn’t process over the sudden roar of my own

pulse.

“Rider,” Corwin bit out, through his teeth, forcing himself upright against the tunnel wall.

“Must have picked up our trail before dawn. Close. Elara — inside, now.”

“You’re hurt—”

“I am aware.” A ghost of dry humor, entirely at odds with the blood already soaking through

his shirt. “Inside. That is not a request.”

Briony hauled the hidden door shut behind us the moment we were through, plunging the

tunnel into absolute dark broken only by the small lantern she carried, and for a long,

terrible moment none of us spoke, listening for footsteps against stone that never came.

“He didn’t follow through the rock,” Briony breathed, finally. “He doesn’t know the entrance

is here. He’s still searching the slope.”

“For now,” Corwin said, sliding down the tunnel wall until he was sitting, his face gone pale

and damp in the lantern light. “Arrows don’t miss twice by accident. Whoever fired that one

knew exactly where we were standing.”

My hands were shaking as I knelt beside him, twenty years of ordinary village life offering

nothing useful against the sight of an arrow shaft buried in the shoulder of the only father I’d

ever known.

“Tell me what to do.”

“Nothing yet.” He caught my wrist before I could reach for the shaft. “Pulling it wrong does

more damage than leaving it. Briony—”

“I know what to do.” She was already unwinding a roll of clean linen from her pack, her

hands steady in a way that told me this wasn’t the first wound she’d treated in this tunnel.

“Hold the lantern, Elara. Close, so I can see.”

What followed was the longest quarter hour of my life — Briony working the arrowhead free

with careful, deliberate pressure while Corwin’s jaw locked hard enough I heard his teeth

grind, his hand finding mine and holding on with a grip that told me exactly how much the

silence was costing him.

“Done,” Briony said finally, packing the wound with practiced speed. “Clean shot, thankfully.

No barb. He’ll heal faster than a human would. Wolves usually do.” She looked up at Corwin.

“But not fast enough to be climbing hillsides tomorrow, no matter what you’re about to

argue.”

“I wasn’t going to argue.”

“You were absolutely going to argue.”

Despite everything, something in me almost laughed — a small, cracked sound, more relief

than humor, at the two of them falling into bickering like people who’d known each other

considerably longer than a handful of weeks.

Corwin’s eyes found mine in the lantern light, and whatever he saw there sobered him

instantly.

“I’m going to be fine, Elara.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know enough of it.” His voice gentled, though pain still roughened the edges. “I promised

your mother I’d keep you alive above every other consideration, including my own comfort.

An arrow in the shoulder doesn’t change that promise. It just means you’re going to have to

let Briony do some of the keeping-alive for a few days, whether either of us likes it.”

I stayed beside him long after Briony had banked the small lantern low to conserve oil,

listening to his breathing even out into something like uneasy sleep, and thought about the

rider still searching the slope above us, patient and close and certain enough of his ground

to have loosed an arrow at a target he hadn’t even fully seen.

Whoever had given Malachi’s people this trail hadn’t just endangered a waystation.

They’d very nearly cost me the only family I had left, and somewhere beyond this hidden

tunnel, in a capital built on twenty years of quiet cruelty, the man responsible for all of it

still had no idea how close his people had just come to ending everything before I’d even

had the chance to fight him properly.