Chapter 7 What the moonborn were

Brenna Oake did not sit.

She walked to the fire and held out her thin, spotted hands to the flames like a woman warming herself after a long walk. Then she turned and looked at the four of us, huddled around the little room, and I saw it again: the grief under the scholar's face.

"First," she said, "you will not interrupt me. I am old and I have been silent for twelve years, and if I stop to answer questions, I may lose my nerve."

Nobody argued.

"Second." Her pale eyes found mine. "You will not be afraid. I know that's cruel to ask. But fear is loud, child, and there are things in this world that follow loud things."

I nodded. My throat was too tight to speak.

Rhys had not let go of my elbow. I didn't ask him to. Somewhere in the last few minutes, his hand had slid down to rest against mine, his thumb pressing small, steady circles into my knuckles, as though he were keeping time for my heart. On my other side, Kieran had dropped onto the edge of the bed. Sable stood against the wall near the door, arms folded, eyes never leaving Brenna.

"Good," said Brenna. "Then I'll begin."

"Four territories," she said. "North, East, South, West. You know them. You know the Alphas who rule them and the rivalries that keep them apart. What they don't teach you at Crestmoor is why there are four, and why, for nine hundred years, they have not gone to war."

"The Charter," said Rhys.

"The Charter is paper." Brenna smiled thinly. "Paper doesn't hold back wolves. Something else did."

She lowered herself, at last, onto the little window seat. Her knees cracked.

"The Moonborn."

The word dropped into the room like a stone into a still pond, and I felt the ripples go through every one of us.

"They were not a pack," she said. "They were not a bloodline in the way you understand the word. They were a function. Every few generations, a child was born in one of the four territories who could hear what no other wolf could hear: the bonds between packs. Every oath, every treaty, every blood-debt. To a Moonborn, they were threads. Visible. Touchable. Mendable."

"Mendable," Kieran repeated.

"A Moonborn could strengthen a bond between two packs that were drifting toward war. She could soften a grudge that had festered for a century. She could sit at the table between two Alphas who wanted nothing more than to rip out each other's throats, and hold them, gently, until they remembered why they'd signed the peace." Brenna's voice softened. "She was never a ruler. She wasn't permitted to be. She was a keeper. The one who held the balance."

"And my mother?" I whispered.

"Your mother was the last."

The fire popped.

"Her name was Ilyria," Brenna said. "She was born in the East, though her mother was Southern and her father was from the North. All four lands in her blood, which had not happened in six hundred years. When she was nineteen, the Council named her Keeper. When she was twenty-four, she married, and nobody ever learned who. And when she was twenty-six..."

She stopped. For the first time, her composure flickered.

"When she was twenty-six, she had a daughter."

I was suddenly aware of my own heartbeat. It filled my ears, my throat, my fingertips.

"The Moonborn gift runs through the mother's line," Brenna said. "And it does not wake until a girl's eighteenth birthday. Ilyria knew the child would be powerful. She also knew exactly what that would make her, to the wrong people." A pause. "So she hid you. Not just from the world. From yourself."

"What does that mean?"

"Your wolf was never gone, Mara. Your mother put her to sleep. A deep, deliberate sleep, laid down with her own blood and her own voice, so that no one hunting for the next Keeper would be able to sense you." Brenna's hands tightened in her lap. "She meant it as protection. It was the last gift she gave you."

My wolf made a sound inside me. Not a word. A low, trembling whine, the sound of an animal that has just been told it was loved before it was ever born.

She sang me to sleep, she said, and her voice broke. That's what the song was.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth.

"Keep breathing," Rhys murmured, so softly only I could hear. His grip tightened. "I've got you."

"Twelve years ago," said Brenna, "on the night of the winter solstice, the Moonborn seat was attacked."

She said it flatly, the way you recite a thing you have rehearsed in the dark many times.

"The attackers wore no colors. They carried no banners. They came at midnight, forty strong, and they did not stop until every living wolf within the Keeper's household was dead. Servants. Guards. Cooks. Children." A muscle jumped in her jaw. "Ilyria fought. I'm told she took nine of them with her. But she was outnumbered, and she was alone, and in the end..."

She didn't finish.

"There was no body," she said instead. "Only blood on the floor of the great hall, a great deal of it, and a trail leading to a cliff above the sea. The Council ruled it a death. They declared the Moonborn extinct." She looked up. "I was the examiner who signed the declaration. I have regretted it every day since."

"Why?"

"Because I walked the hall afterward." Her eyes were bright and hard. "And I counted. Forty attackers. Forty sets of footprints going in. Forty-one coming out."

Nobody spoke.

"One of them had been carrying something," Brenna said. "Small. Light. Wrapped in a blanket. The prints were deeper on one side, the way they get when someone holds a weight against one hip." Her gaze drifted to me. "A toddler's weight."

It felt as though the floor had tilted beneath my feet.

"They took me," I said.

"Someone did."

"The killers took me."

"Or someone saved you from the killers. Or someone who was both." Brenna lifted a hand before I could speak. "I don't know, child. That's the truth. I've searched for twelve years, and every trail ends the same way: at a border post in the West, on a winter morning, where a six-year-old girl in a torn coat was found."

"Six," said Kieran slowly. "But the massacre was twelve years ago, and she was a toddler."

"Yes."

"So where was she for the missing years?"

Brenna looked at him for a long moment.

"That," she said, "is the question that has kept me awake."

I couldn't stop shaking.

I didn't realize how badly until Sable moved. He'd crossed the room without a sound and crouched in front of me, close enough that I could see the faint flecks of gold in his dark green eyes. He didn't touch me. He just stayed there, steady and quiet, like a wall to lean on.

"Look at me," he said.

I did.

"You are not what they did to you." Seven words. Quiet and certain, as though he had thought about them a long time. "You are not what you were called. You are hers."

Something broke in my chest.

I put my face in my hands and cried, loudly and without shame, for the first time in twelve years. I cried for a mother whose face I couldn't remember. I cried for a girl who had spent her life carrying bags up stairs. I cried until my ribs hurt, and the whole time, three sets of hands rested against me, on my shoulder, my back, my knee, solid and unspeaking and warm.

When I finally came up for air, the old woman was watching us with a strange, soft expression.

"You see," she murmured. "That is why the bond comes in threes."

I wiped my face. "What do you mean?"

"A Keeper holds the threads between four lands. It's heavy work, and lonely. So the old magic made a provision." She nodded at the three boys. "She was never meant to carry it alone. Three Anchors. One from each of the other territories. Three wolves strong enough to hold her up while she held everything else."

"Anchors," Rhys said.

"The bond you're feeling isn't a mating-bond, or not only one. It's older. Deeper. It's a vow your wolves made before any of you were born." She smiled sadly. "That it should also be, forgive me, a romance... I can't explain that. The old texts are rather silent. I suspect the magic has a sense of humor."

Kieran made a strangled noise that might have been a laugh. Rhys's ears went faintly red. Sable looked away, jaw tight, and I realized, with a flush of heat that had nothing to do with the fire, that I was holding all three of their hands.

I didn't remember reaching for them.

I didn't let go.

"Who did it?" I asked.

My voice came out hoarse. "You said you'd tell me who killed my mother."

Brenna's face closed like a door.

"I did say that."

"So tell me."

"I can't."

"You said..."

"I said I would tell you who killed her. I didn't say I could." She pressed her lips together, and I saw her struggling, the way a person struggles against a rope. "Twelve years ago, before I signed that declaration, I swore a Council oath. A blood-oath, child. I am forbidden to speak the name of the Moonborn's murderer to any living soul. If I try, my throat closes."

"Then write it down."

"I tried that too." A bitter smile touched her mouth. "The ink runs."

Rhys leaned forward. "There are ways around an oath."

"There are. I've spent a decade looking for one." She met his eyes. "But I can tell you this much. The hand that killed Ilyria Moonborn wore iron."

I went cold.

Pine and hot iron. The smell of the old forge at Ashfen. The smell that clung to my winter coat, my blankets, every memory I had of being cared for.

"Brenna," I whispered.

"I did not say that name."

"But..."

"I did not say it." Her voice was sharp as a slap, and her eyes were fierce. "And I will not say it. Because the moment I do, I die, and you lose the one person at this academy who knows where to find the rest of the answers." She drew a long breath. "Do you understand me?"

I nodded slowly.

"Good." She stood, wincing, and gathered her robe about her. "Then I'll leave you with one more thing, and then I'll go, because it's nearly dawn, and I'd rather not be seen."

She crossed to the door. Her hand on the latch, she paused.

"The person who carried you out of that hall twelve years ago," she said, without turning, "did not die at the border. Whoever it was, whoever kept you alive during the missing years, I believe they are still alive."

The fire guttered.

"And I believe," said Brenna Oake, "that they are inside this academy tonight."

She opened the door.

On the threshold, folded neatly on the stone and sealed with a drop of dark wax, lay a single letter.

It had not been there ten minutes ago.

It was addressed in a hand I knew better than my own. Careful. Elegant. Fatherly.

To my dearest Mara.