THE VOICE IN THE STONE

DARIAN

They had put my brother in the north cell, in the oldest part of the pack house, where the walls sweated and the only light came through a slit no wider than a hand.

I was not supposed to be there. Veda had gone back to her chamber to rest after the long day, and the guards at the end of the passage had been told to let no one through, but the curse only commands the things it knows to command. It had not thought to forbid me from walking past a wall on the way to my own bed. So I stopped there with my forehead against the cold stone and listened to Kieran breathe on the other side.

"I know you are out there," he said softly. His voice was hoarse, and something metal clinked every time he moved. "You do not have to say anything. Just tell me one thing, brother. Blink once for yes. Is she alive?"

I closed my eyes tight, and I opened them again, slowly, even though he could not see me.

I heard him laugh, a thin, broken, relieved sound, and then his voice dropped. "Then I can wait. Do not do anything stupid for me."

I stayed there until the mark began to burn, and then I walked away, because it was the only thing I was still allowed to do.

LIORA

"Tell me why I should not cut your throat," Cassian said.

He had not lowered the knife. Naomi sat on the stone floor of the archive where he had put her, with her back against the table leg and her burned wrist cradled against her chest, and she looked smaller than I had ever seen her. Tessa stood by the door with her arms folded and her jaw set, and she had not taken her eyes off my sister once since the window.

I did not answer for him. I crouched in front of Naomi, ignoring the throb in my shoulder, and I looked her straight in the face.

"You will answer my questions," I said, "and you will tell the truth. My wolf can smell a lie, and she has had a very long day."

Naomi nodded quickly. She had been crying, and her eyes were swollen and red, but I did not let it move me. I had watched her cry on cue before.

"Did you agree to the Rite?"

The silence that followed was very long. Then she said, almost too quietly to hear, "Yes."

Seren did not stir inside me. It is true, she said.

"Tell me all of it."

Naomi pressed her good hand to her forehead and spoke in a flat, tired voice, like a girl reading from a list she had learned too well. "Veda came to me when I was fifteen. She said the Moon Goddess had a plan for the pack and that I had a place in it. She said I would be Luna, and that I would never again have to live in the healer's cottage, and that there was only one thing in the way." She swallowed. "I knew what it meant. I thought I could live with it."

"You thought you could live with watching me hang."

"I thought," she said, and her voice cracked, "that you would be happy somewhere else. I do not know what I thought. I was fifteen and I was angry, and she made it sound clean."

I did not say anything. I could feel my own pulse in my throat.

"You were not the only one who died that night." Naomi lifted her eyes. "I was Luna for eleven days. I had the circlet and the room and the bed, and Darian never looked at me once. On the twelfth night, Veda took me down to the stone chamber and said the Rite was nearly ready. She said I had been very useful." A tremor ran through her. "She cut my throat on the altar, and I remember everything. I remember the cold. I remember waking up in my bed this morning and thinking that I had been given another chance, and that she had meant to give it to me."

Tessa made a small, horrified sound by the door. Even Cassian's knife dipped a fraction.

"She did not mean to give it to you," I said slowly. "You were just the second soul the Rite required. The one who carried the memory. She needed you to wake up, so that you could steer me the way she wanted."

Naomi's mouth trembled. "I know that now."

"And what does she want this time?"

"The same." She pulled her sleeve back with shaking fingers, and the black thread burned red against her wrist. "At the full moon, the stone breaks. She says it will take the curse out of all of us and make her young again, and the pack will be hers to command for another hundred years. But she did not tell me the price, until tonight. The stone needs three lives to open fully. Darian's, mine, and yours."

I thought of my mother's diary. It will turn on the one it holds, and burn him from the inside. I had read it as a warning, and Veda had read it as a recipe.

"Where is Kieran?" I said.

"North cell, under the pack house. There is a silver cuff on his wrist, and the key is in her sleeve." She spoke faster now, like someone terrified that the offer would be taken away. "Darian will mark me at dusk tomorrow in front of the whole pack. If the cuff tightens, Kieran dies. If you want to stop it, you have to take the key before sunset, and you have to get past the guards at the east gate, because the west one is sealed with moonroot."

It was real information. Every word of it matched what I had seen, and Seren confirmed it without a flicker.

I stood up slowly and looked at Cassian. He had not moved, but I could see that he had already followed my thinking.

"She goes back tonight," I said. "She goes home, and she smiles at Veda, and she says nothing. If she is telling the truth, she will tell us everything she learns. If she is not, Tessa will know within a day."

"Liora," Tessa said, shaken. "She nearly killed you."

"She did kill me." I did not raise my voice. "And she is the only one who can get us to Kieran. I do not forgive her, Tess. I am using her. There is a difference."

Naomi flinched as if I had struck her, and then she nodded very slowly.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"Do not thank me. Go."

She got to her feet and crossed to the window, climbing onto the sill with the awkward care of a girl who was terrified of falling. At the last moment she turned to look at me, and her face was open and miserable and very young.

"Liora, there is one more thing. Last night, when she took me to the stone chamber to show me what she had planned, the stone spoke." Her voice dropped to a thread. "Not Veda. The stone. It said your name, and it sounded pleased."

Cold crawled down my spine. "What did it say?"

"It said..."

She stopped. Her whole body went rigid, and her hand flew to her wrist. The black thread flared bright red, and her blue eyes rolled back until only the whites showed, and when her mouth opened again, the voice that came out of it was not hers. It was deep and slow and very old, like a door opening somewhere underground.

"Little Moonborn," it said, almost fondly. "At last."