Lunar Attunement

Chloe's POV

I gave Theron my answer on the third evening, and I gave it badly, because I had rehearsed it and the rehearsal did not survive contact with his face.

"I will do it," I said. "With conditions."

He had been standing at the window with his back to me. He did not turn around straight away, and when he did, whatever had been on his face was already packed away.

"Name them."

"You do not lie to me. Not to protect me, not to spare me, not because you have decided I have had enough for one week." I kept my voice level with some effort. "If something in your histories says this costs me, you tell me the same day you learn it."

"Done."

"You did not think about that."

"I have been thinking about it for four days." He came away from the window. "What else."

"You stop the moment I say stop. Not the moment you agree with my reasons. The moment I say it."

Something moved behind his eyes. "That one is harder."

"Then it is the one I need most."

"Yes," he said. "It is." He was quiet for a moment. "Done."

"And you find my wolf."

"I have already sent to four courts and a hedge-witch in Vale who I am told is either the finest binding-breaker alive or an outright fraud." He said it flatly, without offering it as a gift, which was the only way I could have received it. "I did that on the first night. Before you woke. In case you said no."

I did not have anything to say to that.

"There is a thing I want in return," Theron said. "Only one."

"Go on."

"Do not thank me for any of it." He turned back to the window. "I am not doing you a kindness. I am spending you, and I would like us both to keep that clear."

We began the next night, in the gardens, under a moon three days off full.

Sera walked me down and stopped at the archway. "I am not permitted past this point."

"Says who?"

"Says the King, who is being careful, and says me, who has no interest in watching." She adjusted my collar with brisk unsentimental hands. "You will feel a fool for the first hour. Everyone does. Do not let that make you stop early."

The clearing at the heart of the garden was a circle of grass that had gone silver, ringed by trees so old their trunks had grown into each other. Theron was already standing in it, and he had left his coat somewhere, which in that cold said something about what he expected to happen.

"Close your eyes," he said. "Do not reach for anything. Only notice."

"Notice what?"

"You will know."

I stood there feeling exactly as ridiculous as Sera had promised, and for a long while there was nothing at all except cold air and the sound of my own breathing and a growing certainty that I had agreed to something absurd.

Then I noticed it.

A warmth. Low in my chest, behind the sternum, very faint. It had been there the whole time. It had, I understood with a jolt, been there for four days, and I had been too busy being terrified to sit still long enough to feel it.

"Oh," I said.

"There." Theron's voice had changed. "Do not grab it."

"I am not."

"You are about to."

I was about to.

"Let it come to you," he said. "The moon has been doing this since before there were wolves to do it to. You are not persuading it of anything. You are only stopping being in the way."

I stopped being in the way.

The warmth spread, unhurried, out from my chest and down my arms, and it did not feel like power. That is what nobody had told me. It felt like something had been waiting for me, and was glad I had finally come.

Silver light lifted off the grass and moved toward me.

"Good," Theron said, low. "Now hold it. Do not let it run through you and away. Hold it, and when it is too much, and it will be too much, tell me and I will take it."

It was too much within four breaths.

The pressure built behind my eyes and in my teeth and in the long bones of my arms, and I heard myself make a sound, and then his hands closed over mine from behind and the pressure found somewhere to go.

The light went out of me and into him.

And on the side of his throat, the second curse mark cracked with a sound I felt rather than heard.

I opened my eyes. The whole clearing had gone white-silver, the grass, the trees, the air itself, and Theron's arms were locked around mine and his breath had gone ragged against my ear and neither of us was moving.

"How do you feel," he said, and it came out wrecked.

"Alive." My own voice was not much better. "I feel alive. Is that wrong?"

"No."

"You are shaking."

"Yes."

---

Marcus was standing at the edge of the clearing.

I do not know how long he had been there. Long enough. He had a lamp in one hand that he had clearly forgotten about, because the flame had guttered right down, and he was looking at the two of us the way a man looks at a thing he has read about all his life and never expected to be in a garden with.

Theron let go of me at once. "Marcus."

Marcus did not answer.

"Marcus."

"Two marks," Marcus said. His voice came out strange. "In four days. Your father managed nothing in twenty-two years and he had every scholar in three kingdoms working the problem."

"I am aware."

"You are not aware." Marcus came forward a few steps, and his eyes were not on Theron at all now. They were on me, careful, taking in every detail. "Forgive me. Lady Chloe. May I ask you something ill-mannered."

"Everyone else has."

"When you held it. Before he took it from you." He wet his lips. "Did anything answer?"

The question landed somewhere under my ribs.

Because something had.

In the fourth breath, in the moment before the pressure became unbearable, in the place where my wolf had been since I was nine years old and where there had been nothing at all for eleven days, something had turned over. Once. Small, and quick, and gone before I could be sure of it.

I had not mentioned it. I had not intended to mention it, because saying it aloud would make it a thing that could be taken away from me twice.

Marcus watched me not say it.

"I see," he said quietly.

"You have not seen anything."

"No," he agreed. "And I will not have seen it tomorrow either, if that is what you would prefer." He raised the dead lamp slightly, an odd little gesture, almost an apology. "I only wanted to know whether I should keep looking for eight pages, or whether we have gone past what they would have told us."

He turned and went back up the path toward the keep.

Theron watched him go. "What was that about pages?"

And there it was. Three hours old, my first condition, *you do not lie to me*, and the mirror of it sitting in my own mouth.

"He found something missing from the archive," I said. "Eight of them. Cut out."

"Cut out by who?"

"Nobody knows. He noticed eleven years ago and your father told him to leave it."

Theron went very still, in a way I would come to know well.

"My father," he said, "told him to leave it."

"That is what he says."

"My father spent the last six years of his life trying to break this thing." Theron's voice had dropped very low. "He would not have left it. Not for a day. Not for an hour."

Which meant either Marcus was lying about a dead man.

Or the late King had known exactly what those eight pages said, and had decided his son should not.