THE LULLABY

LIORA

I did not trust the voice, and I told it so.

I stayed in the middle of the Hollow with my back against the cold boulder and my heart going hard, and I said it out loud into the dark. "A trap would sound exactly like this. Give me a reason to believe you."

The whisper took so long to answer that I thought it had gone. Then it came back, thinner than before, and every word cost it something.

He was four years old, it said, and he hid a wooden wolf inside the cushion of the window seat so his father would not take it away. He still has the wolf. Ask him what he named it. And tell him I used to hum the song about the three silver sparrows, the one that never finished, because I always fell asleep before I got to the end.

I sat very still. Seren did not speak, and I understood that she was giving me room to make up my own mind.

"I will tell him," I said at last.

Thank you, the voice breathed, and then it was gone, and the meadow was only a meadow again.

By the time the sun came up, I had told Cassian and Tessa everything, and Cassian had listened without once interrupting. When I was done, he leaned back from the table in the stone house and rubbed his scarred jaw with one hand.

"It could be Veda's hook," he said. "A dead woman's voice is the cruelest bait there is."

"I know. But she gave me something only Darian can check." I turned my cup in my hands. "If I am wrong, I lose nothing but a few words. If I am right, he learns that his mother has been trapped underneath his feet for twenty years, and I will be the one who has to tell him."

Tessa did not say anything. She only reached over and put her hand on my good arm.

We were still sitting there when Torren came to the border.

He walked in alone with his hands held out from his sides, in plain clothes and without his warband coat, and the Ironwood guards brought him straight to us. The gray wolf with the torn ear looked tired and a little sick, like a man who had slept in his boots for two nights, and he did not waste a word.

"Veda knows I cut the girl free," he said. "She has not punished me yet. She is waiting to see what I do." He looked at me. "The marking is postponed to tomorrow dusk, because the pack is restless and she wants one more day to settle it. Tonight, the old passage under the north cells will be unguarded. I made sure of it. The men who usually watch it owe me a debt."

"Why are you helping us?" Cassian asked.

"Because I have a daughter in the kitchen," Torren said, "and I would like her to grow up in a pack that does not hang its own." He glanced at Tessa and gave her a small nod, and I realized with a jolt that the grumpy cook who raised her was this man's wife. "The Alpha's brother is in that cell. If you want him out, it has to be tonight."

We went at dusk, three of us, through the same river reeds where I had crawled out two days before.

Cassian stayed behind at the border with his arms folded and his jaw tight. He could not set foot in Silverfang with a hunting party, he said, without handing Veda the war she wanted, so he gave me one thing instead, a small silver whistle on a cord. If I blew it, he would come, and he would bring every wolf Ironwood owned, and neither of us would ever be forgiven.

The tunnel smelled exactly as I remembered, of wet earth and roots. The little crescent moons my mother had carved glowed faintly under my fingers as I followed them up the long slope. We passed her secret room without stopping and climbed the narrow shaft by the old iron rungs, and Torren went first with a shuttered lamp, silent as a cat for a man his size.

"There is a branch here," Tessa whispered at the top, running her hand along the stones. "My grandmother worked in the kitchens, and she used to say the old cells all shared one wall."

The stone moved when she pressed it, and a thin line of yellow light fell across the floor. On the other side, a long, filthy cell with one small slit in the wall held a young man sitting on a wooden bench with a silver cuff around his left wrist.

"Please tell me you are not a hallucination," Kieran said, without raising his head.

I nearly laughed. He looked terrible, thin and unshaven, with a bruise along his jaw and the metal rubbing his wrist raw, but his eyes were bright, and they went straight to me.

"I told you I was very hard to get rid of," I said.

"And I told you that you could not rescue anyone with your arm in that state." He jerked his chin at my shoulder. "Who sewed that, a goat?"

"I did," said Tessa, offended.

"Excellent work. Truly." He grinned, and then the grin cracked. "Is Darian alive? Is he still in there?"

"He blinked at you, did he not?"

Kieran closed his eyes for a second. "Twice," he said. "Yesterday. I counted."

The cuff was a thick band of dull silver, etched with tiny runes, and it was warm to the touch. I knelt in front of him and turned it over in the lamplight, and Seren sharpened inside me.

It will not open without the key, she said. But it was made with Moonborn silver, and you are Moonborn. It will know you.

I pricked my thumb on the edge of Cassian's knife and pressed the bead of blood against the runes. A tiny silver light flared, and the cuff clicked and fell open into my hand.

For one second, the whole cell was perfectly quiet.

Then the walls began to hum.

It came up out of the floor, a deep low note I felt in my teeth, and the lamp trembled in Torren's hand. Tessa grabbed my sleeve. Kieran stood up very slowly, rubbing his freed wrist, and his face drained of color.

"That is the stone," he whispered. "It sings when something wakes it."

The door at the end of the corridor slammed open, and boots rang on the flagstones. I turned, with my blood still wet on my thumb, and I saw Veda standing in the doorway in her long gray robe, as calm as a woman walking into her own kitchen.

"My stone told me you would come," she said pleasantly. "It tells me everything. Even the things I have not asked."

Darian stepped out of the shadows behind her.

He wore his sword and his black ceremony coat, and the silver in his eyes burned so brightly that it lit his cheekbones from beneath. He did not look at me. He did not look at Kieran. He stood there like a thing that had been wound up and set down.

"Alpha," Veda said gently. "You have a brother who disobeys. Please deal with him."

Darian drew the sword in one long, smooth motion and walked into the cell. Torren shouted. Tessa screamed. Kieran stood his ground with his chin up and his hands open at his sides, and I saw the whole awful shape of it in an instant, the blade rising and the old woman smiling and my last chance slipping away.

I took one step in front of Kieran, and I did the only thing I had.

I sang the first line of a song I had never heard before, and I sang it badly, in a thin shaking voice, about three silver sparrows who flew over the water at night.

The sword stopped an inch from my throat.

Darian's whole body shook. The silver flickered in his eyes like a candle in a draft, and a sound came out of his chest that was not a word, only a raw, broken breath. Then, in a voice rough with years and tears, he sang the second line.