The Sacred Moon Ceremony Announced 

Chapter 7

The courtyard erupted.

“Three weeks!” someone shouted.

“Finally!”

“My daughter has been waiting for this!”

Elara stood at the edge of the crowd, laundry basket balanced on her hip, watching the crier pin the announcement to the board.

She didn't need to read it closely to know her name wouldn't be on it.

She checked anyway.

It wasn't.

“Of course,” she muttered, and turned to go only to nearly collide with Mira, who'd apparently been watching her check.

“You're not surprised,” Mira said.

“Would you be?”

“No. But you're still angry.”

“I'm not angry.” Elara shifted the basket higher. “I'm accustomed.”

“That's the saddest thing I've heard you say all week, and you told me last week you got blamed for a vase you were nowhere near.” Mira fell into step beside her. “You should petition Bellamy.”

“Bellamy hates me.”

“Bellamy hates everyone. It's not personal. Petition him anyway.”

Bellamy's office smelled like ink and impatience, which felt, to Elara, entirely appropriate.

“I'd like to attend the Sacred Moon Ceremony,” she said, before she could talk herself out of it.

Bellamy didn't look up from his ledger.

“No.”

“You haven't heard the request.”

“I've heard the request every year you've made it, and the answer has never changed.” He finally raised his eyes, unimpressed. “The ceremony is for wolves who might actually shift, Elara. You've never so much as flickered.”

“The decree says unmated wolves of eligible age. I qualify on both counts.”

“The decree assumes the wolves in question have wolves.” Bellamy returned to his ledger, dismissive. “Yours is absent. You'd be attending a ceremony that has nothing to offer you, and worse, reminding half the nobility present exactly whose daughter you are. I'm doing you a mercy.”

“You're doing yourself a convenience.”

Bellamy's quill paused.

“Careful.”

“I've been careful for fifteen years.” The words came out before she could stop them, sharper than she'd meant, sharper than she usually allowed herself. “I would like, once, to stand in a room I'm not scrubbing the floor of.”

“The answer is still no.” Bellamy's voice hardened. “You may go.”

Elara stood there a moment longer, jaw tight, every instinct telling her to argue further and every year of experience telling her it would only make things worse.

She turned to leave.

“You heard the steward.”

The voice came from the doorway calm, unhurried, and unmistakably not Bellamy's.

Elara turned to find Alpha King Kael Draven standing in the frame, one shoulder against the wood, watching the room with an expression she couldn't read.

Bellamy shot to his feet so fast his chair scraped the floor.

“Alpha King. Forgive me, I didn't hear you approach”

“Clearly.” Kael's gaze moved from Bellamy to Elara and lingered there a half-second longer than necessary. “I was passing. I heard the last part of the conversation.”

“A servant matter, Alpha King. Nothing requiring your attention.”

“I'll decide what requires my attention.” Kael stepped fully into the room. “You denied her petition.”

“The girl has no wolf. The ceremony holds nothing for her.”

“That's not what the decree says.” Kael's voice stayed level, almost bored, though something underneath it had sharpened. “The decree says every unmated subject of eligible age. It does not say every shifted wolf.”

Bellamy blinked.

“With respect, Alpha King, that's a technicality”

“It's a decree. Decrees don't have technicalities, Steward. They have wording, and I've just read you the wording.” Kael's eyes flicked briefly to Elara, unreadable. “Unless you'd like to explain to the council why you've been selectively enforcing royal decree based on your own judgment of who deserves to attend.”

Bellamy's mouth opened, then closed.

“No, Alpha King. Of course not.”

“Then amend the list.”

Elara stared at Kael.

She couldn't believe what she'd just heard.

Bellamy's face reddened as he reached for his quill.

“Name?” he asked, not looking at her.

“Elara Veyne,” she said, and watched him write it with visible reluctance, ink pressed hard enough into the parchment that it nearly tore.

“You're dismissed,” Bellamy said, to both of them, though the venom in it was clearly meant for one.

Elara found Kael already halfway down the corridor by the time she caught up, moving with the brisk, purposeful stride of someone who very much did not want to discuss what had just happened.

“Alpha King.”

He didn't stop.

“Alpha King.”

He stopped, but didn't turn immediately. When he did, his expression had rearranged itself back into something carefully neutral.

“You didn't have to do that,” Elara said.

“No.”

“Then why did you?”

Kael's eyes narrowed slightly.

“You ask a lot of questions for someone who just received what she wanted.”

“I was taught not to accept favors without understanding the price.”

“I didn't offer you a favor.”

“You overruled the steward for me.”

“I corrected an injustice.”

“And if I hadn't asked?”

“Then you would have remained excluded.”

“So you would have done nothing?”

Kael paused.

“Probably.”

Elara studied him.

“That's a strangely honest answer.”

“You asked for one.”

A pause followed. Long enough that Elara wondered if he even had an answer, or if he was simply as surprised by his own decision as she was.

“The steward was wrong,” Kael said finally. “The decree is the decree. I don't enjoy watching people bend the law to suit their own contempt.”

“That's not really an answer.”

“It's the one you're getting.” His eyes moved over her, brief and assessing, the way Evelyne's had a week ago, though nothing like it in feeling. “You petitioned every year. Bellamy said as much.”

“He did.”

“Why?”

Elara hesitated.

She could give him an easy answer.

Instead, she told him the truth.

“Because for one night,” she said, “I wanted to stand in a room and not be the thing everyone whispers about. I wanted to be an unmated wolf number however-many on a guest list, instead of the traitor's daughter who scrubs the floor they're all standing on.”

Something shifted in Kael's expression not quite softness, but close to it, close enough that Elara found herself watching for it to disappear again.

“You'll likely still be whispered about,” he said. “A ceremony doesn't erase fifteen years.”

“I know.”

“But you'll be standing in the room while it happens.”

He said it like it mattered more than he'd meant to admit, and then, as if catching himself, straightened, distance sliding back into his posture like a door closing.

“Don't make me regret the decision, Miss Veyne.”

“I won't.”

He held her gaze one moment longer than the exchange required long enough that Elara felt it settle somewhere strange in her chest, something she didn't have a name for and didn't particularly want to examine before he turned and continued down the corridor without another word.

Elara stood there until he'd disappeared around the corner, laundry basket still balanced on her hip, heart beating faster than the moment should have warranted.

She didn't understand why the Alpha King had intervened on behalf of a servant girl with no wolf and a dead traitor for a father. She was fairly certain, watching the stiff, almost startled set of his shoulders as he'd walked away, that he didn't entirely understand it either.

Elara watched Kael disappear around the corner.

She touched her chest.

Nothing.

She lowered her hand.

Thump.

Elara froze.

The strange pulse from the night before had returned.

Thump.

Her breath caught.

Three weeks.

Three weeks until the Sacred Moon Ceremony.

Three weeks until she entered the Temple of the First Light.

Elara's fingers tightened against her chest.

Whatever was sealed inside her had awakened once.

Now it seemed to be waiting.

Waiting for the moon.