Chapter 16

Asher’s POV

“Read it again,” I said.

“I’ve read it six times, Asher.”

“Read it a seventh.”

Noa sighed and bent over the yellow page again. It was past midnight. The kitchen smelled of rising dough and woodsmoke. Leah had gone back to her rooms an hour ago so her father wouldn’t miss her, and Micah was asleep across two chairs by the door with his arms folded and his chin on his chest.

“Under the full moon,” Noa read, “by the blood of the Hearth freely spilled, her gift may pass whole to the one who.” She looked up. “And then it’s torn.”

“To the one who what?”

“I don’t know. That’s the point of it being torn.”

I rubbed my face with both hands. My side ached, a dull, low burn now instead of fire. She had given me half again at ten o’clock, sitting on the kitchen bench with her palms against my ribs, humming while the bread rose. Then she had stopped, right at half, and wiped her hands on her apron and gone back to her dough as if nothing had happened.

I was learning to love watching her stop.

“Freely spilled,” I said. “That’s the word that matters. Freely. You can’t be forced.”

“So he can’t just cut me.”

“Not if this is right. It has to be your choice.”

“Then he’s out of luck.” She tapped the page. “Because I’m not choosing to bleed for Reuben Vane.”

“No,” I said slowly. “But you’ll be in a ring with Kezia on the night of the full moon. Where you’ve already promised everyone you’ll yield the second you’re losing.”

She went still.

“A yield is a choice,” I said. “Freely given. In front of witnesses. On ring stone. Under the moon.”

The color slid out of her face.

Neither of us spoke for a while. The oven ticked. Micah snored. Somewhere in the walls, the old pipes knocked.

“So if I yield,” she said finally, “I might lose Ora.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what the rest of the line says.”

“And if I don’t yield, Kezia might kill me.”

“She won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know I won’t let her.”

“And then you lose your pack.” She gave a short, cracked laugh. “That’s a very good trap. I almost admire it.”

I reached across the table. I stopped with my hand an inch from hers, palm up, the way I’d learned to.

She looked at my hand. She looked at me. Then she laid her floury fingers in my palm, and I closed my hand around them, and the warmth of her went up my arm like sun.

“We find the other half,” I said. “Before the moon. We find out what it says, and we find a way around it. Together. Not me deciding. Us.”

“Together,” she said.

“Term eleven?”

She almost smiled. “Term eleven.”

~

At eight in the morning I walked into the council chamber and asked the council to move the challenge.

I didn’t tell them why. I couldn’t. If I said the word blood or the word gift, Reuben Vane would know how much we’d learned, and he’d burn every scrap of paper in his study before lunch. So I stood at the head of the stone table and I talked about the Luna’s health, and the river, and the strain of the healing, and how an honorable pack gives a new Luna a fair chance to prepare.

“Ten more days,” I said. “One more turn of the moon. That’s all I’m asking.”

Gideon nodded at once. So did old Councilor Hart, who was eighty and deaf in one ear and had loved my father. Councilor Price looked down at her folded hands.

Vane didn’t even let it come to a vote.

“I’m afraid it’s not ours to move, Alpha,” he said gently. “Section nine is very clear. The next full moon. Not the one after. The moon sets the date, and none of us here outranks the moon.”

“The council can amend the Charter.”

“With five votes.” Vane smiled around the table. “Shall we count?”

“Count, then,” said Gideon. He was sitting at the far end of the table in his cardigan and scarf, the first time he had taken his chair in three years. His voice was rough, but every head turned when he used it. “But before we do, I’ll say one thing, Reuben. I sat in this chamber when your father read that clause aloud for the first time in a century. He called it a relic. He said no Luna had been challenged to the end since the days of muskets. Now you want to use it on a girl who brought me back from the dead with a loaf of bread.”

“I don’t want anything, Gideon,” said Vane mildly. “The Charter wants it. I’m only its servant.”

“Then serve it honestly. Tell the room who you’ve chosen to fight her.”

Vane opened his leather book. He read from it in the same pleasant voice he used for the price of hay.

“Kezia Vane, of Clearwater. Twenty-eight years old. Champion of the Idaho rings for six seasons. Four challenges answered. Four challenges won.” He closed the book. “She is a she-wolf of rank. She has every right.”

“Two of those four never walked out,” said old Councilor Hart, loudly, the way deaf men do. “I read the papers.”

“They chose not to yield,” said Vane. “That was their right too.”

Councilor Price made a small sound in her throat. Everyone looked at her. She looked at the table.

“I only wonder,” she said, very quietly, “whether ten days would truly hurt anyone.”

“It would hurt the law, Margaret,” said Vane. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to. “And the law is all that keeps a pack from becoming a mob. Shall we count?”

We counted. It was two to five. Councilor Price wouldn’t look at me as she raised her hand on Vane’s side. Her knuckles were white.

“There we are,” said Vane. He closed his leather book. “Twenty-six days, Alpha. I’m sure the Luna will be ready.”

~

Leah caught my sleeve in the corridor outside.

“He’s going into town at two,” she whispered. “To the bank. He does it every Thursday. He’ll be gone an hour.”

“Leah.”

“The drawer’s in his study. Bottom left. He keeps the key on his ring, but the lock’s old, and I’ve been opening it with a hairpin since I was twelve.” Her gray eyes were enormous. “If the torn half is anywhere, it’s there.”

“I’ll go alone.”

“You don’t know where to look. I do.” She let go of my sleeve. “Two o’clock. The back stairs.”

~

At five past two, I followed Leah Vane into her father’s study.

It was a neat, warm room on the second floor, all dark wood and green lamps and shelves of leather books. It smelled of pipe tobacco and his cologne, cedar and a sweet note underneath. A cardigan hung over the back of the desk chair. A pair of reading glasses lay folded on the blotter, as if he had just stepped out.

Leah went straight to the desk. She knelt, pulled a pin from her braid, and slid it into the lock of the bottom left drawer. Her hands were completely steady.

The lock clicked.

She pulled the drawer open. Inside were folders, a box of silver pens, a stack of letters tied with string, and, on top of them all, a long flat leather case.

She opened the case. Her breath caught.

Inside, on blue velvet, lay a thin silver knife with a handle wrapped in black cord. The blade was no longer than my finger. It was old. The metal had the soft, pale shine of real silver.

And on the velvet beside it, folded in quarters, lay a scrap of yellow paper with one ragged edge.

Leah’s fingers hovered over it.

Ari went rigid inside me.

Footsteps, he said.

I heard it a second later. A key in the outer lock of the study. The click of the latch.

Leah’s face went white. She shut the case. She shoved the drawer closed. The lock didn’t catch. There was no time to fix it.

I grabbed her wrist and pulled her behind the tall green curtains at the window. They fell across us, heavy and dusty. Through the narrow gap at the edge I could see a slice of the room. The desk. The lamp. The door, swinging open.

Reuben Vane walked in with his phone at his ear.

“No, no,” he was saying, in his soft, reasonable voice. “The jar was a mistake. I told you it would be. You don’t frighten a girl like that, Simon. You make her angry, and angry girls are careful.”

He set his car keys on the desk. He didn’t look at the drawer.

“It doesn’t matter. Forget the jar. Forget the salve, too. She’s made her choice there. Let her heal him. Every night she heals him, she gets a little more tired. A little more silver in her hair.” He picked up his reading glasses and polished them on his sleeve. “By the full moon she’ll be soft as butter. Kezia will put her on the ground in a minute. Less.”

A pause. He listened.

“Because she’ll yield,” he said patiently. “Of course she’ll yield. She’s told the whole pack she would. She’s a sensible girl. A sensible girl yields when she’s losing. Freely, Simon. In front of four hundred witnesses, on the old stone, under the moon. I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d written her lines.”

Beside me, Leah’s hand closed so hard on my arm that her nails went through my shirt.

“And then the knife,” said Vane. “One small cut. That’s all the old line wants. And then it’s ours.”

He listened again. His smile went thin.

“No. He won’t interfere. He’ll want to. But if he steps into that ring, he loses Ironwood, and he knows it. He’s an Alpha. In the end, they always choose the pack.”

He hung up. He put the phone face down on the desk. He stood very still in the middle of the warm green room, and he lifted his head, and he breathed in slowly through his nose.

Then he turned and looked straight at the curtains.

“Leah, sweetheart,” he said softly. “I know you’re in here. I can smell your shampoo.”