The Library

Chloe's POV

I did not give Theron an answer that night, and by morning I had decided I was not going to give him one until I understood what I would be agreeing to.

Which is how I ended up in the archive at an hour when only servants and insomniacs are awake, being told no by a man who was too polite to say it.

"The lower shelves are open to you," Marcus said. "Anything above the second gallery requires the King's word."

"He carried me across a border. I assume that counts for something."

"It counts for a great deal. It does not count as the King's word." He did not move from where he was standing, which happened to be between me and the stairs. "Lady Chloe. You have been on your feet for a day and a half."

"And in that day and a half I have been asked to hand over my body and my blood to a curse nobody will describe to me in plain language." I let that sit. "You keep the histories. I am asking the man who keeps the histories for a history."

Something worked behind his face. He was, I would learn, a man who found it genuinely painful to refuse a direct question, which is a rare fault and a useful one.

"Sit," he said. "I will bring it to you. That is not the same as letting you loose up there."

He came back with a book that had been rebound at least twice and set it in front of me with more care than the thing looked worth.

*The Fall of House Shadowborn.*

"Read the first forty pages," Marcus said. "Then ask me your questions and I will tell you if the answers are mine to give."

---

Aldric Shadowborn had been, by the account of a scribe who clearly loathed him, the most gifted Lycan of his generation and the least satisfied.

The pack bond runs through the moon. Every wolf knows this the way you know your own pulse. You do not take from the moon; you are lent something, and you give it back, and the lending is the whole of what makes a pack a pack rather than a collection of predators sharing ground.

Aldric had decided that was a poor arrangement.

He wanted the lending made permanent. He wanted the moon in his blood for good, his and his heirs' and no one's to take back, and he had gone about acquiring it with a thoroughness that turned my stomach by page nineteen.

Three hundred and six years ago, on a night the scribe would not name, he had performed a working in the old hall of this keep.

The scribe did not describe the working. The scribe described the aftermath, in the flat exhausted prose of someone writing days later with their hands still shaking, and I read it twice and then sat back and looked at the fire for a while.

"You have got to the part with the hall," Marcus said. He had not left. He had simply gone quiet in the corner with his own work, which I was beginning to understand was his version of standing guard.

"How many people were in it?"

"The count varies. The lowest honest figure I have found is thirty-one."

"And they were his own."

"They were his household." Marcus took his spectacles off. "That is the part outsiders never quite believe. He did not go raiding for strangers. He used the people who trusted him enough to be in the room."

I thought about my uncle standing at that window with his shoulders loose.

"What went wrong?"

"Nothing went wrong. That is the other thing outsiders misunderstand." He rubbed his eyes. "The working functioned. He took what he reached for. The moon simply declined to be owned, and what he pulled into the bloodline was not light. It was emptiness, and the emptiness stayed."

"And it stayed."

"It compounds." Marcus put the spectacles back on. "Each generation inherits it a little heavier. Theron's father died at forty-one. His grandfather at thirty-six. Theron is thirty-four, and he has not told you that he is already three years past the age his grandfather began to go strange, because he does not consider it your concern."

"He seems to consider a great deal my concern quite suddenly."

"Yes." Marcus almost smiled. "He is not subtle. It is one of his better qualities, though you will not think so for a while."

---

I asked the question I had come to ask around the middle of the afternoon.

"Why wolfless."

Marcus set down his pen. "Because the channel must be empty."

"That is a phrase, not an answer."

"It is both, unfortunately." He came over and turned to a page near the back, where the script changed hands. "A wolf is not a passenger. She is a second will inside a shared body, and she has opinions, chiefly about being used as a conduit for three centuries of accumulated rot. She would fight it. The texts are unanimous that when she fights it, the host does not survive the disagreement."

"And a woman with no wolf."

"Has nothing in the way."

"Has nothing to defend her."

Marcus did not answer that.

He did not answer it in a very particular way, the way a man does not answer when the honest reply is *yes* and he has decided the kindest thing available is silence, and a cold feeling went up the back of my neck.

"Marcus."

"You asked why wolfless. I have told you why wolfless."

"I am asking what it does to her. The empty one. After."

He stood there. The fire moved. Somewhere below us a door closed and someone laughed at something.

"Turn to the account of the fourth generation," he said at last. "There were attempts. Not many. The texts are clearer about them than about anything else."

I turned to it.

And found that I could not, because the pages were not there.

Not torn. That was the thing that stopped my hand. Torn pages leave a ragged margin and a ghost of themselves in the binding. These had been cut, close in to the stitching, with something sharp and unhurried, by somebody who had taken the trouble to do it well.

Four leaves. Eight pages. Gone clean.

"Marcus."

He came and looked, and I watched his face, and whatever I saw on it was not the face of a man discovering something.

It was the face of a man confirming it.

"How long has this been like this?"

"I noticed it eleven years ago," he said quietly. "When I took the keeping of this archive."

"You noticed it eleven years ago and you did not mention it to anyone."

"I mentioned it to the late King." Marcus closed the book with both hands, slow and careful, like it mattered more than a book should. "He told me the matter was closed and instructed me not to raise it again. He died four months later, and I have raised it with no one since, because I could not decide whether I was keeping a promise or covering something."

"And now?"

"And now a wolfless Luna is sitting in my archive asking exactly the question those eight pages would have answered." He looked up at me, and he looked every year of his age. "So I find I am no longer certain which of those two things I have spent eleven years doing."