Chapter 6: What Is Given in Secret

SERAPHINA

My mother's hand slapped back over my mouth before I could draw the breath to speak.

"Gone from where, child?" Orson's voice floated across the hall, soft and dry as paper.

"From the family vault." Isadora swallowed audibly. "Alaric told me last week that he meant to take it out of its case. It is not there now."

"A grievous loss."

"A great loss," agreed a smooth voice, and Damon strolled into the slice of hall I could see, still in his pale suit from the ball, the silver wolf ring catching the light. "Who holds keys to that vault, Elder?"

"Three people. The Alpha, the heir, and myself."

"Three honest men." Damon let a beat pass. "And yet half this pack watched a certain pale stone glowing under a gray scarf at the Moon Ball last night."

"Did they indeed."

"On a certain quiet girl who is not pack-born, and who leaves us this very week."

Inside the closet, my mother shut her eyes.

"Say it," I breathed against her palm, pulling it away. "Go out there and say Alaric gave it to me."

"They will not believe me."

"You are the Luna."

"I am the second Luna, and I am the girl's mother, and both of those make me worthless as a witness." Her fingers trembled. "Do you have proof? A letter? A note in his hand? A single person who saw him put it on you?"

"He fastened it in the car, at the traffic lights."

"Then it is your word against an elder, a Vance daughter, and the Alpha's own nephew." A tear slid down her cheek and she did not wipe it. "They will say you invented a dead woman's blessing to cover a theft."

"Then I will go to Corvin."

"Corvin will ask Orson what the law says, and Orson will tell him."

"Then I will wait for Alaric."

"Damon will not give you four days."

I pushed the closet door open and stepped out into the cold stairwell.

"Seraphina," she hissed. "Seraphina, wait, give me the stone, give it to me and I will say I found it on the dressing room floor, I will say I picked it up and forgot, and the whole thing dies before noon."

"He gave it to me, Mom."

"That will not matter."

"It matters to me."

"You are as stubborn as your father was."

I stopped on the step and turned around, and whatever she saw on my face made her step back.

"Do not ever say that to me again."

I ran. Up the servants' stair, along the east corridor, into my own narrow room, and I turned the little brass key in the lock and leaned my back against the wood with my chest heaving.

My room was already half packed. Two bags, a box of sketchbooks, a shelf of secondhand novels, and a pressed wildflower folded into the pages of an old book about birds.

"Think," I told the empty room. "You have maybe ten minutes, so think like Damon, not like yourself."

If they searched me, they would find the stone on my neck, and a stone around a thief's neck was not a gift, it was a confession.

I reached behind my nape and unhooked the clasp.

The moment the moonstone left my skin, it went cold and flat in my palm, the little blue thread inside it dimming out like a lamp turned down, and something low in my chest gave a dull ache, the way your arms ache when you set down a sleeping child you have carried too far.

"It is only for an hour," I whispered to it, which was a foolish thing to say to a rock. "Only until Corvin will see me."

I wrapped it in my mother's gray scarf, and I slid the little bundle between the pages of the bird book, and I zipped the book into the side pocket of my bag. It was a bad hiding place. It was the only one I had ever needed to invent.

Three heavy blows struck the door.

"Open up, Miss Dale."

I opened it.

Damon filled the corridor, pleasant and unhurried, with Elder Orson behind his shoulder and two Moonridge guards behind him.

"Good morning, little cousin of my cousin."

"I am not your cousin."

"No, you are not." He stepped past me into the room without being asked. "Search it."

"On whose authority?"

"On mine," Orson said, and his cane cracked twice on the floorboards. "A sacred heirloom has been reported stolen, and pack law allows a search of any room in this house, including the heir's, including mine."

"Then search his."

"We shall, in time." Damon smiled. "Alphabetically, perhaps, which puts Dale rather early."

The guards went through my life in four minutes. They tipped my drawers out onto the bed, shook my coats by the shoulders, ran their thumbs along the lining of both bags, flipped my sketchbooks so the pages fanned.

"You will bend the spines," I said.

"They are cheap books."

"They are mine."

"Were," Damon said softly.

The younger guard lifted the bird book, and it fell open the way a book always falls open at the thing you have hidden in it, and the gray scarf slid out onto the quilt, and the silver chain came with it, and the pale stone rolled free and lay there in plain sight.

The room went very quiet.

"How extraordinary," Damon said. He crossed the floor and picked it up by the chain, and let it swing. "Hidden in a book, inside a bag, under a bed."

"I hid it because I was frightened of exactly this."

"A strange thing for an innocent girl to fear at seven in the morning."

"Alaric gave it to me yesterday. A graduation gift, in the car, at a red light. Ask him."

"Ask him," Damon repeated, delighted. "The heir of Moonridge, currently in a Council hall two hundred miles north, surrounded by every elder of every neighbouring pack, defending our border. Shall I telephone and ask him whether he gave his dead mother's Luna stone to his stepsister in a car?"

My mouth went dry.

"Yes," I said. "Telephone him."

He laughed. It was a real laugh, warm and surprised, and it frightened me more than a threat would have.

"You are braver than you look, which is not saying very much." He turned to Orson. "Elder, your opinion."

"The law is the law." Orson's cloudy eyes found me, and he smiled with his thin mouth. "I did warn you, child. What is given in secret is called stolen in daylight."

"You knew."

"I know a great many things."

"You said that to me yesterday, in the hall, before anybody had reported anything."

"Did I?" He tilted his head. "Old men repeat themselves."

"You knew it was going to happen."

"Bind her hands," Damon said.

"There is no need to bind me, I have not run anywhere."

"There is every need." He came close, close enough that I could smell mint on his breath, and under it, faintly, the same rust and ash. "Do you know what I enjoy most about this morning, Seraphina?"

"No."

"Neither do you." He dropped the stone into his pocket. "That is the enjoyable part."

The guard took my wrists and bound them with a soft cord, which was somehow worse than rope, and they walked me down the great staircase in full view of the staff, past the breakfast room, past my mother standing in the doorway with her hand pressed to her mouth.

She did not say one word.