THE LEDGER THAT WAS BURNED

Tessa cried the whole time she was cleaning my shoulder, and I let her, because it was easier than crying myself.

We sat in the little stone house at the edge of the Ironwood village, with the fire spitting and my torn sleeve in a bucket of pink water. The cut ran from my collarbone almost to my elbow, long and clean and ugly, and Tessa worked on it with a needle and thread she had borrowed from Cassian's cook, muttering to herself in the stubborn way she always had when she was frightened.

"You should not have crossed that line," she said for the fourth time. "You should have let them take me."

"I would sooner have let them take my own arm."

She stopped sewing and looked at me with her eyes red and swollen, and I felt something tighten in my throat. In my first life, I never got to tell her what that bread had meant. I never even learned if she was alive when the rope dropped.

"They whipped me when you died," she said quietly, as if she had read my mind. "Veda said that anyone who fed the poisoner was a poisoner too. I do not remember dying, but I woke up yesterday in my own bed with scars on my back that were not there the night before, and I thought I was going mad."

My stomach turned over. "You remember?"

"Pieces. Like a dream I cannot hold." She tied off the thread and bit it with her teeth. "But I remember Naomi coming to the kitchen the night before your ceremony, talking low with Elder Veda, and I remember Veda saying that the girl would be useful for a few more days. I did not understand it then."

She had said it so simply, and she had no idea what it meant. I put my good hand over hers and kept it there.

Seren stirred under my ribs, and the sound of her voice was soft with worry. The ash broke the seal further, little one. It is thinner now, and I can feel the moon through it. But the curse stone will not wait for us. We must go to the Hollow again tonight.

"Cassian will want to see me first," I said aloud. "He has been looking at me all afternoon like I am a map he cannot read."

DARIAN

Veda did not shout, and that was how I knew how angry she was.

She walked me down the temple steps in silence, into the cold rooms under the altar where the Elders were never allowed to go, and she stopped in front of a heavy iron door and laid her palm on it. The lock turned by itself. Behind it was a round chamber with no windows, and in the middle of the floor, set into the stone like an eye, was a black moonstone as wide as my chest.

It hummed. I felt it in my teeth, in my ribs, and in the silver mark under my collar, which flared as if it had finally come home.

"You were disobedient today," Veda said, running one thin finger across the surface of the stone. "The ash showed every thread in front of fifty witnesses, and I had to cut it with a lie. Do you know what that costs me, boy?"

"Not as much as it costs me," I said. It came out slurred, and I tasted blood. Even in the stone's presence, some part of me was still holding on.

She smiled, and it was the old, gentle, grandmotherly smile I had known since I was a child. It made my skin crawl.

"Tomorrow at dusk," she said, "you will stand before the whole pack and take Naomi as your mate. A temporary mark only, for now. The real mating can wait until the full moon." She lifted a small iron key from her sleeve and let it dangle between her fingers. "And until the vow is spoken, your brother will wear the silver cuff in the north cell. If you refuse me, it will tighten."

I stared at the key. Kieran had been dragged from the field in the confusion after the ash went dark, and I had not seen him since. I had only guessed.

"Why are you doing this?" The question was out before the curse could catch it. "My father trusted you for twenty years. My mother trusted you."

Her smile finally slipped, just a little, just enough for me to see what lay behind it. It was not hatred, and it was not even cruelty. It was a hunger so old that it had worn her face down to a mask.

"Your mother," Veda said, almost fondly, "was the first one who guessed. And look how well she is remembered."

The world tilted under my feet. I opened my mouth, and the mark seized my throat so hard that I saw white, and she caught me by the chin with her cold fingers and held me up.

"Sleep now," she whispered. "Tomorrow is a big day."

LIORA

Cassian led me into the old archive after sunset, through a low stone door at the back of the Ironwood hall that I would never have noticed on my own. It smelled of dust and beeswax and very old paper. He lit a single lamp and set it down on a long oak table, and then he laid a cracked leather book in front of me.

"This belonged to the Moon Keepers," he said. "Your mother's order. My grandfather bought it from a Silverfang scribe who was leaving the pack in disgrace. He was never told what it was, and neither was I until your mother's letter."

I opened it carefully. The pages were thick and brittle, covered in tiny faded script, and most of it was lists of festivals and offerings. Near the back, though, I found a section that had been scored through with heavy black ink, and under the ink was a title in a looping hand.

The Rite of Returning.

My heart began to pound. "It is a rite. It really was a rite."

"It lets a Moonborn's death turn the moon back by one day," Cassian said quietly. "Three things are needed. A Moonborn who dies at the altar under the full moon. A bound Alpha to be the anchor. And a willing second soul to carry the memory across, so that the one who cast it can steer what happens next." He tapped the page. "That is the whole of what survives. The rest was burned."

Darian bound. Naomi willing. Me dead.

I had known pieces of it already, but seeing them written down in a stranger's hand made my fingers shake. "Then I was never saved by the Moon Goddess," I whispered. "I was used."

"You were." His green eyes were steady. "But a rite like this does not go the way the caster plans, Liora. Look at what is missing. Veda did not need to send you back in order to win. She had already won, with the first death. She cast the rite because something went wrong, and she needed another try."

"What went wrong?"

"That is the line they burned."

A thin crack of cold air slid through the room, and the lamp flame bent sideways. Seren went rigid inside me.

Someone is here, she said. Someone is at the window.

I turned. A small pale figure was crouched on the sill of the high archive window, one leg already over the stone, breathing hard and shaking from head to foot. Her white cloak was torn and her golden hair was wild, and for one terrible moment I thought I was imagining her.

"Do not call the guards," Naomi said. Her voice was thin, and for once there was no sweetness in it, only terror. "Please, Liora. Give me one minute."

Cassian was between us before I could breathe, with his knife in his hand. Naomi did not look at him. She pushed back her sleeve with a trembling hand, and I saw the black thread from the ash, now burned into her wrist like a brand. It was glowing faintly red, and the skin around it was blistered.

"She told me tonight," my sister whispered. "At the full moon, when the stone breaks, the curse takes everyone it is tied to. Darian, and you, and me. She has never needed me alive." Her eyes filled with tears, and I did not know whether they were real. "I am not asking you to forgive me. I am asking you to help me, sister, or we both die."