Chapter 6: What the Moon Owes Me

I've been walking for two days before I understand how little I actually planned this.

No coin beyond what I packed. No map. Just the vague, stubborn idea that anywhere was better than Silvermoon, and the unclaimed land between territories doesn't care how good your reasons for being here are. It's just cold, and it's just far, and by the second night my legs have stopped complaining and gone numb instead, which somehow feels worse.

I hear them before I see them. Three of them, moving loose and unhurried through the treeline the way predators move when they're not in a rush yet.

"Well, look what wandered off the road." The one in front has a scar cutting through one eyebrow and a smile that doesn't belong anywhere near a smile. "All alone out here, sweetheart?"

I don't answer. I back toward a fallen tree, keeping it between us, though I already know that won't matter much.

"No pack scent on her," another says, circling wide. "No mark either. Rejected, maybe."

"Even better." Scar-eyebrow steps closer, and the smell of him — sweat and old blood and something under that I don't want to name — reaches me before his hands do. "Nobody's coming to miss a rejected girl."

I get one good hit in — a fist to his throat that buys me half a second — before the second one has my arm twisted behind my back hard enough that white sparks across my vision. I don't have a wolf to call up, no claws, no strength beyond what's already in my own two hands, and for the first time since I left Silvermoon I understand exactly how much that's about to cost me.

"Hold her," Scar-eyebrow says, and I'm screaming before I fully register I've started.

Light floods the clearing.

Torches, a lot of them, and the sound of horses crashing through brush that isn't careful about the noise it makes. Someone shouts a command I don't catch. The hands on my arm let go so fast I stumble, and by the time I've caught my balance the three of them are scattering into the dark and I'm standing alone in a ring of armed men in the King's grey, all of them looking at me like I'm the thing they came here to find.

"That's her," one says. "That's the fourth one."

"I'm not—" My voice comes out raw. "They were attacking me. I'm not with them."

"Convenient story." A woman steps forward, older, a captain's mark stitched into her collar. She looks at me the way you'd look at a stain you're deciding whether to bother scrubbing out. "We've had reports of rogues working this stretch of border for a month. Four sets of tracks, every time."

"I just left my pack two days ago. I'm not a rogue."

"Prove it. Shift."

If a wolf's scent was hidden for some reason, one could know if he was rogue or not when the person shifts. Rogues tend to hid their scent a lot as it was foul and made them easily detected.

I don't move. I can't, and there's no way to say that fast enough or convincingly enough before the silence does the explaining for me.

Something shifts in her expression, not sympathy. Suspicion, sharpening. "No mark. No pack scent. Can't shift on command." She nods at the two nearest enforcers. 

"Chain her with the others."

"I told you, I'm not—"

"You can tell that to whoever questions you at the palace." She's already turning away, already done with me, the same way everyone in my life seems to be done with me the second I stop being useful to whatever story they've already decided to believe. "Move her out."

---

They catch the other two by dawn, dragged in with rope at their wrists the same as mine, and it doesn't help my case the way I hoped it would. If anything it makes it worse, four bodies chained in a row looks like exactly what the captain already thinks it is, and nobody's interested in sorting out which of us actually did what.

The journey to the palace takes the better part of a day. I spend most of it in the back of a covered wagon that smells like old hay and older fear, wrists bound, watching slices of unfamiliar country slide past through a gap in the canvas — hills going green, then grey, then something taller and stranger on the horizon that I don't have a name for yet.

Nobody talks to me. Scar-eyebrow tries, once, low and mean, something about how I'd better keep my mouth shut when we get wherever we're going, and one of the enforcers cuffs him hard enough across the head that he doesn't try again.

I don't sleep. I don't cry either, though by the time the wagon finally stops and the canvas is thrown back to reveal walls taller than anything Silvermoon ever built, I've come closer to it than I have since the night I heard Damian's voice through that study door.

They march us down. Down past guardrooms, down past a level of cells with actual light in them, down to something colder and wetter where the torches are further apart and the air tastes like stone that's never once been warm.

The cell they put me in already has people in it. Not the three from the woods, different faces, different crimes, all of them looking at me with the flat, assessing stare of people who've stopped being surprised by anything a long time ago.

I sit against the wall furthest from the door and finally let myself add it all up, because there's nothing left to do down here but count.

My mother, dead before I was old enough to really know her. Twenty-three years of trying to be enough for a mate who never once looked at me the way he looked at someone else. Wolfless, in a pack that measured my worth by the thing I didn't have. Rejected in front of everyone I'd ever known. And now this, chained in a stranger's dungeon, mistaken for exactly the kind of person who tried to hurt me, because apparently even the truth doesn't count for much when nobody's inclined to believe it.

"You've got the Moon Goddess's own luck, you do," I mutter, mostly to myself, mostly just to hear something other than the drip of water somewhere down the corridor. "Take everything and still find something left to take."

"Would you shut up." One of the other prisoners, a broad-shouldered man with a voice like gravel, doesn't even open his eyes. "Keep whining like that and I'll tear you apart myself, save the guards the trouble."

I don't shut up. Not right away. I tip my head back against the cold stone and let the question rise up out of everything I've been carrying since I was seven years old with a mark on my wrist I never asked for.

"What really was your purpose," I say, to no one, to the ceiling, to whatever's left of a goddess who clearly stopped paying attention to me a long time ago, "in creating me?"