Welcome to the Shadow Court

Chloe's POV

I woke because someone was arguing about me.

Not near me. Below me, somewhere down through the floor, two voices going back and forth in the particular rhythm of people who have been having the same argument for some time and are no longer enjoying it.

I lay still with my eyes shut and did what I had been taught to do since I was nine years old, which is find out where you are before anyone knows you are awake.

First thing I noticed was the warmth all the way through.Linen against my skin, and good linen. A fire somewhere to my left, well banked. The smell of stone and cold iron and something faintly resinous underneath it.

And silence where my wolf had been.

That last landed the way it had every morning since the council chamber, sharp and sudden. You do not get used to it. You only get better at not making a sound about it.

I opened my eyes.

Black stone, vaulted, high enough that the ceiling went into shadow. Tall windows with snow light coming through them. A bed I could have laid four of myself across.

I sat up, and my body reported back in a long list of complaints, and every one of them was the complaint of something healing rather than something dying. My fingers had gone a bad waxy colour at the tips and would be a while sorting themselves out. My wrist was bandaged over the sigil.

Someone had bathed me and dressed me and put me here.

"Four days," a voice said from the doorway. "In case you were counting."

She was perhaps my age, silver-haired, with eyes the colour of mercury and an expression that suggested she had already decided what she thought of me and was waiting to see if I would improve it.

"I was," I said. "I was up to about two."

"You were badly off by two." She came in with a tray and set it down without ceremony. "You were nearer four hours from finished when he brought you through that door. The healers argued about you for a night and a day. One of them wanted to send for a priest instead."

"And you?"

"I told them to stop arguing and warm you up." She poured something into a cup. "I am Sera. I am told I am attending to you, which as far as I can work out means I do the work and the council takes the credit. Drink that."

"What is it?"

"Bone broth and an unkind quantity of salt. Drink it anyway."

I drank it. It was awful. I finished the cup.

Sera watched me with something that was not quite approval and not quite anything else. "You have not asked where you are."

"I am working up to it."

"Most people lead with it."

"Most people have somewhere to go back to."

That stopped her for a moment. Something in her face rearranged itself, and whatever she had decided about me before she came in went quietly out the window.

"The Shadow Court," she said. "You are three days inside the western border, in the King's own keep, in a room nobody has slept in for sixty years. Which should tell you something about how they are all taking this."

"And the King."

"Downstairs. Losing an argument about you." She began laying out clothes. "He will want to see you standing up. Let him wait long enough to be uncomfortable, but not so long that he sends someone. That is the whole of the advice I have."

The clothes were black leather and a deep green tunic and boots that laced to the knee, and they fit, which meant someone had measured me while I was unconscious, and I decided not to think about that.

The great hall had a throne of black stone and about forty people in it who all stopped talking at once.

I have walked into a room that went silent before. It happens to a Luna. But there is a difference between a room going quiet out of respect and a room going quiet because something dangerous just walked in.

Theron stood at the foot of the dais.

In the clearing I had seen a shape and a pair of red eyes. Upright and in daylight he was simply a very large man in his middle thirties who had not slept properly in a long time, and I do not know why that unsettled me more.

"You are on your feet," he said.

"You are surprised."

"I am pleased. There is a difference." He came down the last step. "Do you know who I am?"

"I know you carried me out of the borderlands, and I know I said something to you before I lost consciousness, and I know that whatever it was, you have been chewing on it for four days."

The corner of his mouth moved. It was gone before it finished.

"Theron Shadowborn," he said. "This is my court, and these are my advisors, and they have spent the morning explaining to me that you are a mistake."

"Your Majesty," said an older man to his left, mildly.

"Marcus keeps my histories. He is the polite one." Theron did not look away from me. "Kael commands my armies and is not. Darius holds my strategy and will not say a word until he has decided which way this goes."

The scarred one, Kael, looked me over the way you look over a horse you have been asked to pay too much for. "You were Luna of Silverpine."

"I was."

"And now?"

"Now I am a woman in borrowed boots."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only honest one available to me."

Something flickered across Marcus's face. Kael's expression did not change at all, which I was learning meant more from him than movement would.

"Show her," Marcus said quietly.

Theron pulled down the collar of his shirt.

The marks ran from his collarbone up the side of his throat, dark, twisted, moving very slightly under the skin. I had expected a scar. This was not a scar. Something was still living there.

And through the uppermost one, straight down the middle, ran a hairline crack.

The hall had gone extremely quiet.

"That happened in the clearing," Theron said. "The moment I put my hand on you. Three hundred years, eleven generations, and no Shadowborn has ever put a mark on this thing." He let the collar fall. "You did it unconscious and dying and you were not even trying."

"I do not know what I did."

"No. That is rather the difficulty." He held my eyes. "So I will be plain with you, because you have been lied to enough this month. My bloodline is cursed. It hollows us out. My father died at forty-one and my grandfather at thirty-six and I am thirty-four, and the old texts say the cure is a Luna with no wolf in her, because a wolf fights the moon and an empty channel does not."

"You want to use me."

"I want you to agree to be used. There is a difference, and it is the only one I have to offer." He did not soften it. I will give him that. "I want your blood and your body and your consent, and I want them given, because the texts are clear that taken does not work."

Behind him, forty people were pretending not to listen and failing.

"And in exchange?"

"Shelter. Protection. A name that no one can take off you again. And every resource this court has thrown at the question of your wolf, if you want her back."

*If you want her back.*

He had aimed that. He knew he had aimed it. I hated that it landed.

"I need to think," I said.

"Take a day. Take three." He turned away. "You will not get much longer than that."

"Why not?"

He stopped.

"Because a rider came to my western gate at dawn," Theron said, "under Silverpine colours, asking very politely for the return of the body."

I felt dizzy, my stomach dropping.

"They think I am dead."

"They did," Marcus said, and his voice had changed, and he was not looking at Theron anymore, he was looking at Kael. "The rider came back an hour ago with a second message. This one asks for you by name, alive, and it names the room you woke up in."

Nobody in that hall

moved.

"Four days," I said. "I have been awake for less than one."

"Yes," Marcus said.

"Then somebody in this building has been writing letters."