Chapter 17 The Quarry

Mia

I have been holding a sword since I was nine years old, and nobody had ever once asked me to use it on anything that mattered.

I thought about that as the trucks rolled down the last gravel mile toward the old quarry. The Sorrel betrothal had come with lessons. Etiquette, languages, ledgers, and a blade, because a future Luna should be able to defend her own table. I'd been good at it. I'd also been bored out of my mind. Every duel I ever fought ended with someone bowing and a servant bringing tea.

Josh sat beside me in the back of the truck with his jaw locked and his knee bouncing, and I could feel him not looking at me.

"You can say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you've been chewing on for the last forty minutes."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then, so low I almost missed it: "I keep thinking that if she hadn't been born, I'd have loved you the right way. From the start."

My throat went tight. "Josh."

"I'm not saying I wish she hadn't been." His voice cracked. "God, I'd never. I'm just saying it's a strange thing to grieve something you never got to have."

I didn't know what to say, so I did the only thing I could think of. I put my hand over his bouncing knee, and it went still.

"We don't have to grieve it today," I said.

"No."

"We have a quarry to get through first."

That got the smallest breath of a laugh out of him, and then the truck stopped, and the laugh went out of both of us.

The quarry was a great stone bowl cut into the hillside, ringed with cliffs and lit by a scatter of campfires. Forty wolves stood in a loose circle as our headlights swept over them. Thin, tired, hollow-eyed. Half of them were wounded. A few were children, which made my stomach turn, because nobody had said anything about children.

Kessa climbed down first and raised a hand. "They're friendly. Put your weapons up."

Nobody did. Josh was already half-shifted at my shoulder, and Evan stepped out of the lead truck with Odessa's hand locked in his and that new gold ring burning in his eyes. A low murmur ran through the northern wolves.

Then a small girl, maybe six, with a missing front tooth and a blanket around her shoulders, walked straight up to Odessa and tugged her sleeve.

"Are you the moon lady?"

Odessa crouched. "I think so."

"My granny says you're going to fix it."

"Fix what, sweetheart?"

"Everything." The girl said it with perfect, terrible confidence. Then she hugged Odessa around the neck and ran back to her mother.

Odessa stayed crouched for a second longer than she needed to. When she stood, her eyes were wet, and she didn't bother hiding it.

"Okay," she said hoarsely. "Okay. Let's get started."

Odessa

We spent three hours in the camp, and I learned more about the North than I had in twenty-three years.

Kessa's forty weren't soldiers. They were a mess of the people Silas hadn't bothered to threaten: a baker, two schoolteachers, an old man who raised bees, a midwife named Ines who looked at me with such naked relief that I had to look away. They shared their thin soup. They cleared a fire for us. They told me, in quiet voices, how they'd watched Draven's face change over the years, from a proud young Alpha into something grim and hunted.

"He used to sing," Ines said, ladling soup into my bowl. "When he was a boy. Lullabies. His mother taught him."

"The one we're going to find."

"Yes." Her eyes were bright. "If you bring her home, child, I think half this camp will bow to you. And the other half will weep."

Across the fire, Evan sat with the old beekeeper, listening to a long story about swarms. He looked more at ease than I'd seen him in days, half-smiling, nodding, completely present. But I felt the gold wolf under his skin pacing back and forth like a caged thing, and every few minutes his shoulder twitched and his eyes flicked to the dark rim of the quarry.

What is it? I asked through the bond.

Nothing. A pause. Maybe nothing.

Evan.

He doesn't like the cliffs. His voice was careful. He says the stones are too quiet.

I stopped with my spoon halfway to my mouth.

I'd been so busy listening to the people that I hadn't been listening to the place. I closed my eyes and let the silver rise, just a little, a thin silk thread of attention reaching out across the quarry.

Forty heartbeats. Forty scared, warm, human heartbeats.

And one that didn't match.

It was slow and even, perfectly steady, in a body that should have been exhausted. Too calm, like a held breath. It was coming from the east side of the camp, past the last fire, from a man sitting alone on a flat rock with a wooden bowl in his hands.

I opened my eyes and found him looking at me.

He was nothing special to look at. Thirtyish, thin, sandy hair, a face you'd forget. He lifted his bowl to me in a small, polite salute.

Then he smiled.

Evan, I said, very softly. East rock. Don't turn your head.

I see him.

He's not one of them.

No. The wolf in his voice was awake now. He's one of his.

The man set down his bowl. He stood slowly, brushed off his trousers, and said in a voice that carried across the whole quarry, perfectly pleasant, "Good evening, Lunara. We've been waiting for you to get comfortable."

The cliffs lit up.

Mia

I'd like to say I reacted with grace.

What I actually did was shriek, throw a bowl of soup at the nearest silhouette, and run.

The cliffs were crowned with shadows. Dozens of them, standing shoulder to shoulder against the sky, with silver thread glinting from their wrists and throats like jewelry. They weren't northern wolves and they weren't Sorrels. They were puppets, a whole silent line of Silas's hollow things, standing perfectly still while the camp screamed and scattered below.

"Children inside the cave!" Kessa roared. "Move! Move!"

"Josh!"

"I see them!" My fiancé, my ex-fiancé, whatever Josh was to me now, shifted in a rolling snarl of brown fur and launched himself at the first figure that came off the cliff. They hit the ground together in a snap of bone, and I heard the thing screech like tearing paper.

I drew my sword.

It felt different than it ever had in the practice yard. The weight sat in my wrist like it had been waiting. The first puppet came at me with a strange loose-limbed lunge, no breath, no eyes, just a flat white mask of a face, and I stepped inside its reach and cut.

The blade went through silver thread like scissors through hair.

The puppet folded. A bright snarl of light fluttered out of its chest and drifted skyward, and the empty body slumped into the dust.

I stared.

"Mia!" Evan was on the far side of the camp with Odessa at his back, a shifting blur of gold and silver. "The thread! Cut the thread, not the body!"

"I noticed!"

I turned on the next one. And the next. I had never in my life felt so awake. I danced between campfires and screaming bakers, cutting threads, freeing silver, and every time a puppet fell, I heard a faint, relieved sigh in the air, like someone setting down something heavy.

I was winning. For about forty seconds, I was actually winning.

Then somebody caught me from behind, and a cold line of steel slid under my chin.

"Careful, Luna," murmured a voice in my ear. "You're doing so well."

I froze.

It was the sandy-haired man. He'd come across the quarry floor without a sound. He held me flat against his chest, one arm locked around my ribs, the knife a cold promise against my throat.

"Drop the sword."

I didn't.

"Mia Aldous," he said, almost fondly. "Betrothed to the Sorrel heir. Rejected, replaced, and still standing guard. You must be so tired of being a footnote."

Rage came up through me so fast it tasted like copper.

"Say that again," I whispered.

"Mia," Josh snarled from across the quarry, half-shifted, bloody to the elbows. "Don't."

"A footnote," the man repeated pleasantly. "Everyone in this story is somebody's something. His mate. Her brother. The Alpha's son. But what are you, sweetheart? What do you have that nobody can take from you?"

I looked at Josh.

Josh looked at me.

And I thought about all the years I'd spent being decorative. All the tea, all the bowing, all the polite smiles. I thought about a boy who'd shaken my hand at my own wedding rehearsal while his heart broke behind his eyes, and never once said a word.

"I have this," I said.

And I drove my sword's pommel straight back into the man's nose.

He yelped, and the knife skidded off my throat. I spun, ducked under his arm, and brought the blade up in a clean, vicious arc. It cut through the silver thread tied around his wrist, a thread I hadn't even known he wore, and a bright, furious line of light screamed out of him like a kettle.

He dropped the knife. His eyes went wide.

"Oh," he said faintly. "That's... that's not..."

He wasn't a puppet. He was a man. A real one, with a mother and a name and a mouth that was currently bleeding, and I'd just cut the one thing that was keeping him upright.

He fell to his knees. His breath came in short, terrified sobs.

"Please," he gasped. "Please. He told me he'd keep my sister safe. He told me..."

I stood over him with my sword at his throat, shaking so hard that the point trembled.

"Where?" I said. "Where is the old woman?"

"I don't know." He was crying. "I swear I don't. But he's not in the North, Luna. Silas isn't in the North. He's never been in the North. The map is wrong. It's all wrong."

The cold ran straight through me.

"What do you mean?"

"The woman isn't the prize." The man looked up at me, eyes wide and red. "She's the bait. And you just walked the Lunara right into the trap."

Behind us, Odessa screamed.