THE MOTHER IN THE STONE

LIORA

Nobody in the archive moved, and for a long moment the only sound was the lamp flame guttering in the draft from the window.

Naomi's body stood rigid on the sill with her head tilted back at an angle that no living neck should have allowed. Her mouth was still shaped around the words, and her blue eyes had gone entirely white. The black thread on her wrist burned so red that it threw a small glow across her chin.

"Do not answer it," Seren said, very quietly, in my head. "It is listening through her. Whatever it is, it has been listening for a long time."

"Little Moonborn," the voice said again, soft and unhurried, like an old man settling into a chair. "Do not be rude. I knew your mother well. She knelt on my face the night she died, and I tasted her. She was sweet."

Tessa made a small sound and put her hand over her mouth. Cassian had moved in front of me with his knife held low, and I felt the heat of his anger through his coat.

"What are you?" I said.

"What is left when a pack forgets to feed its moon." The voice sounded almost amused. "Veda carved me out of a black rock and thinks she holds my leash. I let her think so. She has been very useful to me, and she will be more useful at the full moon, when the stone takes three lives and opens its mouth." Naomi's head turned a few inches toward me, and her white eyes seemed to see straight through my skin. "You will come to the temple, daughter of Elise. You will come because the boy is there, and you love him, and you cannot help it. I will be waiting."

I did not think. I crossed the room in four steps, and Cassian shouted my name, and I grabbed my sister's burned wrist with my bare hand.

Seren came up through me like sunlight through a window. A wave of silver poured down my arm and into the thread, and the thread screamed. It was not a sound I heard with my ears. It shook the lamp on the table and rattled the old books on their shelves, and the voice inside Naomi rose into a long, ugly howl that made Tessa drop to her knees with her hands over her ears. The black cord splintered like glass and burned away to nothing, and Naomi crumpled forward off the sill into my arms.

She was breathing. Her skin was cold and clammy, and the blistered ring on her wrist had faded to a pale pink scar, but her heartbeat was steady and strong under my fingers.

"Is she alive?" Cassian asked, in a voice that had lost all its calm.

"She is alive." I laid her down on the stone floor and pulled my cloak over her. "The thread is gone. I do not know what else it did to her."

"It knows where we are," Tessa whispered.

"It always knew." I sat back on my heels and found that my hands were shaking. "So did Veda. They sent a warband to our border yesterday. The only thing they do not know is what I am going to do next, and I have not decided yet."

Naomi woke an hour later, in a spare bed in the back room of the stone house, and she remembered nothing after the window. She asked in a small hollow voice whether she had said anything strange, and I told her no. I do not know why. Perhaps it was the sight of her lying there with the color gone from her face, looking exactly like the child who used to climb into my bed on stormy nights. Perhaps it was only that I needed her to go home and keep lying for me, and the truth would have broken her.

She went back over the border before dawn with Cassian's best scout watching her all the way to the Silverfang gate. I did not watch her go.

DARIAN

Veda made me rehearse the words in the temple, twelve times, with my hand over Naomi's wrist.

I will not repeat them. It was a simple oath, and the curse made every syllable cost me, so that by the end I was sweating through my shirt and my knuckles had gone white around the altar's edge. Naomi stood opposite me with her chin lifted and her eyes lowered, doing her best to look like a grateful bride. She had lost her color overnight, and her left wrist was wrapped in a clean cloth.

When Veda finally let us go, I stayed behind in the empty temple, standing very still with my back to the altar.

Under my boots, so faint that I almost thought I imagined it, someone was humming.

It was a slow, sweet, wandering tune that I had not heard in twenty years. My mother used to sing it in the evenings, in the old nursery with the window seat, when I was too small to know what she was doing and too tired to ask. I had not thought of it once since the day they carried her out of the pack house under a sheet.

I pressed my hand to the floor over the stone chamber, and the humming stopped.

LIORA

I could not sleep that night, so I went to the Hollow of Stones.

The moon was a day past its quarter, pale and lopsided over the frozen meadow. I sat in the center of the ring with my back against the tallest boulder and let Seren work on the seal, and for a while there was only the cold and the silence and the slow, patient ache of silver being peeled away from my bones.

I was almost asleep, I think, when the whisper came.

It was not Seren. Seren's voice lived behind my eyes and always carried a kind of laughing warmth. This one was thin and tired and very far away, a woman's voice, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a deep well and had very little breath left to spend.

Liora. Please. I do not have long.

I went still, and the hair rose on my arms. "Who is this?"

The thread you burned, child. It left a door open, and I have been waiting a very long time for a door. The voice cracked, and when it came again, it was shaking. I am not like the other one. I am not hungry. I only want you to carry a message.

"To whom?"

To my son. Tell Darian his mother never left him. Tell him I am still here, in the stone, and I can hear every word they make him say.