The Ashes of The Rejected Queen

Chapter 4 — Two Days Walking and One Truth

Mara talked while we walked.

Not about the big things not yet. She talked around them the way you circle a fire, getting closer slowly, letting the heat reach you before you get close enough to burn. She told me about the forest. About the Ashwood how old it was, how the trees here had seen four centuries of werewolf history and remembered all of it. She told me about the Hollow Sanctum, where we were going. A settlement, she said. Hidden. For wolves who didn't fit anywhere else.

She didn't tell me what I was.

Not on the first day.

I didn't push. Partly because I was exhausted in every possible way the rejection, the rogues, the walking, the crying I had done and was absolutely not going to do again. Partly because my wolf had gone very calm and very quiet after the fight, settled against my insides like a large animal that has finally been let outside after too long, and her calmness made me calm.

We slept in the forest that first night. Mara made a small fire and produced food from her cloak dried meat, hard bread, something that tasted like berries and honey and I ate without asking questions because I was starving and because some things matter more than pride.

I lay on my back and looked at the stars and I thought about Zane.

I didn't want to. But the bond even broken, even ripped out left a scar that pulsed. I could feel the place where it used to be like a missing tooth, my mind going back to it over and over even when I told it to stop. I wondered what he was doing right now. Whether he felt anything at all. Whether there was even a small part of him that had watched me walk away and felt something crack.

Probably not.

Probably he was celebrating.

My wolf made a low sound that I was starting to understand meant stop torturing yourself. I pressed my hand flat on the ground and felt the cold earth under my palm and focused on that instead.

He is not the point, I told myself. He is not the story. You are.

I almost believed it.

The second day Mara began to talk about real things.

"The Black Luna," she said, while we picked our way through a rocky section of path. "Do you know the term?"

"No."

"Most wolves don't. She comes rarely enough that she passes into legend before the next generation can verify she was real." She was quiet for a moment. "The last one was four hundred years ago. Her name was Calla. She changed the course of three packs and two wars before she was thirty."

I stepped over a root. "What happened to her?"

"She lived a long and extraordinary life and died surrounded by people who loved her." Mara glanced at me. "I tell you that because you will wonder. People like you always wonder if the power comes with a cost."

"Doesn't it?"

"The cost was paid already. By you. Last night." She let that sit for a moment. "Rejection of a true mate bond is not just painful, Sera. It is a violation of something sacred. The Moon Goddess does not ignore those violations. She responds to them."

I thought about my wolf. About the way she had stayed hidden for eighteen years. About the way she had slammed against me when the rogues came. About the way those men had looked at me afterward.

"She responds by sending the Black Luna," I said slowly.

"She responds by waking the Black Luna." Mara corrected. "You were always this. You were born this. But you needed the crack to let the light in. The rejection was the crack."

Something shifted in my chest at that. Something complicated because it meant that what Zane had done, the worst thing that had ever happened to me, was also the thing that made me.

"So he actually did me a favor," I said flatly.

Mara made a sound that might have been a laugh. "I would not put it that way within his hearing. But." She tilted her head. "There is something to what you said."

We reached the Hollow Sanctum on the afternoon of the second day.

I don't know what I expected. Something hidden, something small. What I found was a village real buildings, maybe fifty of them, tucked into a valley so perfectly surrounded by old growth trees that you could pass within a hundred meters and never know it was there. Wolves moved through it, going about their day. Some looked up when we arrived. Some didn't.

A man sitting on a fence post looked up when I passed. Big. Grey-bearded. Eyes like weathered stone. He looked at me for a long moment the way a person looks at a storm forming on the horizon — assessing, calibrating.

"That her?" he said to Mara.

"Yes."

"Hm." He looked back at whatever he was whittling. "Took longer than I thought."

"Dax," Mara said, in a tone that suggested this was an ongoing disagreement.

"I'm just saying. Expected her three months ago."

"The Moon Goddess does not operate on your schedule."

"Nothing does. I've noticed." But there was something in the way he said it gruff, unmoved, already somehow familiar that made me think I would like him. Eventually.

Mara showed me to a small room in one of the buildings. Real bed. Real walls. A window that looked out at the trees. It was more than I had expected and the sight of it this small, simple, real thing hit me somewhere soft.

"Rest today," she said. "Tomorrow I will explain everything. All of it. The full truth of what you are."

"Why not tonight?"

She looked at me with those silver eyes. "Because tonight you still need to grieve. There is no shame in it. Grief is not weakness it is the last thing you will give that rejection. After tonight, no more."

She left me alone.

I sat on the edge of the bed. Put my face in my hands. Felt the bond scar pulse once, twice.

I let myself feel it. All of it. The humiliation. The loss. The love I had carried for two years that had nowhere to go now. I let myself feel Zane's voice saying unworthy and I let it hurt because it did hurt and pretending otherwise would have been a lie.

I felt all of it.

And then I lifted my face from my hands. Looked at the window. At the dark treeline and the stars beginning to appear above it.

Last time, I told the grief. This is the last time you get this much of me.

Inside me, my wolf uncurled slowly and pressed herself against my ribs like a warm hand. Not words. Just presence. Just I am here and I am not going anywhere and when you are ready we are going to be something neither of us can fully imagine yet.

I almost smiled.

Almost.

Then my door banged open and a girl fell through it literally fell, stumbled over the threshold, caught herself on the doorframe and looked up at me with wide dark eyes and a grin so bright it was almost offensive given the day I'd had.

"You're the new one," she announced. "I'm Juno. I've been waiting for something interesting to happen here for six months and apparently you're it." She looked me over. "You look terrible."

"I've had a bad night."

"Obviously." She dropped down onto the floor cross-legged like she'd been invited. "Tell me everything. Don't leave out the rejection, I already know about that, Mara told me you were coming. Start from the thing that happened after."

I stared at her.

"The rogues," she said impatiently. "I heard three wolves came back to their camp tonight with their tails between their legs talking about black eyes and something that moved faster than made sense." She leaned forward. "That was you, wasn't it."

It wasn't a question.