Chapter 15

Noa’s POV

“Who else has a key to that kitchen?” Asher said.

“Nobody. You gave me the only one. Term four.”

“Then whoever took it didn’t need a key.”

He was already on his feet. He shouldn’t have been. He swayed once and caught himself on the desk, and the shirt fell open over the wound, and I saw the black edge of it, still angry from the night.

“Sit down,” I said.

“No.”

“You were on the floor two hours ago.”

“And now I’m not.” He buttoned his shirt with fast, hard fingers. “Show me.”

~

The kitchen looked just the way I’d left it. The oven was banked low. The bread cloths were folded on the long table. The window over the sink was closed and latched. The door had been locked when I came down. I was sure. I had heard the bolt turn back under my key.

The windowsill was bare.

There was a faint ring in the dust where the jar had stood. That was all.

Asher crouched by the back door. He breathed in slowly. His eyes went gold at the edges.

“Mint,” he said. “And lavender.”

My stomach dropped. “Simon.”

“Simon. Last night. Before he came to me, or after he left.” He stood. “Through this door. He has a doctor’s master key. Every door in the house. I gave it to him myself, three years ago, so he could reach me at night.”

“So he walked in here while you were on the floor.”

“While I was on the floor and you were next to me.” His hands closed into fists. “We were both in that room. He knew where we’d be.”

Ora stirred, faint and far away.

The jar, she said. Find the jar, Noa. It’s cold. I can feel it getting cold.

I pressed my hand to my chest. “She can feel it. Ora. She says it’s getting cold.”

Asher looked at me sharply. “Can she tell where?”

Ora? Where?

Down, she said, so faintly I almost missed it. Down and dark. Salt. It smells like salt.

“Somewhere low,” I said. “Underground, maybe. She says it smells like salt.”

Asher was already moving.

~

We didn’t have to look far.

We were halfway across the kitchen yard, Asher in front and me behind with my shawl flapping, when the door of the old smokehouse at the edge of the yard banged open and Kezia Vane walked out of it.

She was in the same black tank top. Her arms were dusty to the elbow. And in one hand, held carefully upright, she was carrying my jar.

Asher stepped in front of me so fast I walked into his back.

“Put it down,” he said.

“Relax, Alpha.” Kezia stopped on the cobbles. She held the jar out at arm’s length. “I’m giving it back.”

“Why do you have it?”

“Because I don’t sleep much, and I was running laps at five, and I saw a nice old man in a gray coat come out of your kitchen yard with a bundle under his arm.” She shrugged. “He went into that smokehouse. He came out without it. So I went in.”

I came around Asher. I didn’t ask. He didn’t stop me.

Kezia put the jar into my hands.

It was freezing. The glass was crusted with coarse white salt on the outside. Inside, the starter had gone flat and gray and dead-looking, with a thin dark crust over the top.

“He buried it in a barrel of curing salt,” Kezia said. “Right to the lid. I don’t know a thing about bread. But I know you don’t do that to a thing you want to keep alive.”

I unscrewed the lid with shaking fingers. I put my palm flat over the mouth of the jar. I closed my eyes and began to hum.

At first, nothing.

Then a faint warmth, like breath on a cold window. A single bubble pushed up through the crust and popped. Then another. The sour sweet smell rose up, weak and thin, and somewhere inside me Ora let out a long shuddering sigh, the kind you let out after you’ve been holding your breath underwater.

There, she whispered. There. Oh, there.

I opened my eyes. They were wet.

Kezia was watching me with an odd look on her face. Not soft. But not hard, either.

“It’s alive?” she said.

“It’s alive.”

“Good.” She dusted her hands on her cargo pants. “Then we’re square.”

“We were never not square,” I said.

“We will be on the full moon.” She looked at me evenly. “Let’s get one thing clear, Luna. I’m going to beat you. I’ve beaten everyone. But I’m going to beat you, not your jar. Nobody wins my fights for me by poisoning the other wolf’s food or stealing her magic in the night. If I win like that, I didn’t win.”

“So you’re on our side,” said Asher slowly.

“I’m on my side. I’ve always been on my side.” Kezia’s eyes slid toward the pack house, toward the east windows where the council rooms were. “My uncle Reuben pays for my truck and my training. He put me in your ring. That doesn’t make me his dog.”

She turned to go. Halfway across the yard, she stopped. She didn’t turn around.

“Luna.”

“Yes?”

“Ask your Alpha a question for me.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “Ask him why my uncle picked the full moon. Not any night in the cycle. The full moon.”

“He doesn’t know,” I said.

“No,” Kezia said. “I didn’t think he did. So ask him this one instead. Ask him what a Hearth Wolf’s blood does under a full moon.”

She walked away. Her boots rang on the cobbles. A crow flew up from the smokehouse roof.

I turned to Asher.

He had gone very pale.

“I don’t know,” he said, before I could ask. “I swear to you. I don’t know.”

“Your ears aren’t pink.”

“Because I’m not lying.”

“I know.” I held the jar to my chest. It was getting warmer. “That’s what scares me.”

~

Dana came to the barn at noon.

I hadn’t expected her to come at all. But she walked in through the big doors in running shorts and an old Ironwood sweatshirt, with a towel around her neck and a set of padded mitts under one arm. She looked at Asher, who was sitting on a hay bale where I’d ordered him to sit. She looked at me.

“Alpha,” she said. “Luna.”

“Dana,” I said.

“I said I’d show you.” She tossed me a pair of the mitts. “Put those on. You’re going to need them.”

Asher raised an eyebrow. “You fought Kezia?”

“For forty seconds.” Dana pulled on her own mitts. “That’s about thirty seconds longer than most.”

“Then show her.”

So she did.

She came at me low and fast from the left, the way she’d said Kezia would. The first time she hit my hip, and I went down in the straw so hard the air whooshed out of me. The second time I went down. The third time I went down. The fourth time I felt her coming, a flicker of her shoulder dropping, and I sank, and planted, and she bounced off me like a ball off a wall and went sprawling in the straw herself.

She sat up with hay in her hair and her mouth open.

On the hay bale, Asher began to laugh.

It was a real laugh. Low and rough and helpless, the first one I had ever heard come out of him. It rolled around the old barn. It made a warm and stupid ache start under my ribs. Dana stared at him as if she’d seen a cow fly.

“Again,” I said, because I didn’t trust what my face was doing.

We went again. And again. By three, my arms were bruised and my knees were green and I had dropped Dana into the straw nine times out of twenty. She got up from the ninth one breathing hard and looked at me with grudging respect.

“You’re slow,” she said.

“I know.”

“You can’t hit. At all.”

“I know.”

“But I can’t move you.” She shook her head. “Kezia’s never fought anyone she couldn’t move. She doesn’t know what to do when they won’t go down.”

“Then she’s about to find out,” said Asher quietly.

Dana pulled off her mitts. At the barn door she hesitated, and looked back at me, and her face twisted, unsure.

“Lily drew you a picture,” she said. “Last night. In crayon. You’re a big gold wolf holding a little red girl out of a river.” She cleared her throat. “It’s on our fridge.”

She left before I could answer.

~

Leah found me that night in the kitchen, with my arms in a bowl of dough up to the elbows and the starter jar sitting warm and bubbling on the table, where I could see it every second.

She didn’t knock. She came in fast and shut the door behind her and leaned on it, breathing as though she had run the whole way.

“I heard about the smokehouse,” she said.

“Kezia found it.”

“I know. My father knows too.” Leah crossed to the table. Her hands were shaking. She pulled a folded piece of yellowed paper from her sleeve. “He’s angry. He went into his study and slammed the door, and he left the drawer open. The one with the Charter.”

“Leah, what did you do?”

“What I should have done years ago.” She laid the paper flat on the floured table. “This is the original page of section four. Not the copies everyone reads. The real one, from fifteen ninety-three. In the copies, the last line of the section is gone. Somebody cut it out of every single version but this.”

I wiped my hands on my apron and bent over the page.

The ink was brown and faded. The writing was spiky and old, all long s’s and strange spellings. Half of the last line had been torn away, a ragged edge right through the middle of the words.

But the half that was left was clear enough.

Under the full moon, by the blood of the Hearth freely spilled, her gift may pass whole to the one who

The tear ran through the rest.

Leah’s finger shook on the edge of the page.

“Pass whole,” she whispered. “Noa. I think my father isn’t trying to keep your power for Ironwood. I think he’s trying to take it for himself.”