Chapter 1

Wren's POV

"My son has bled in the Ashlands for three years," Luna Helena Vale said, "and his mate repays him by carrying another wolf's bastard."

The doors were barred, and every wolf she trusted stood along the walls to hear it.

I knelt on the cold stone before the moonstone with one hand over my belly. Every wolf in the room could hear the second heartbeat under my palm, small and quick beneath mine.

I was born wolfless. I could set a bone and turn a breech pup, but I had never heard my own child's heart.

Adrian Vale and I were bound at this stone when I was eighteen. The marking was meant to follow at moonrise. A rider from the north came in before the moon did, and Adrian went out to his horse with the vow-cord still knotted on his wrist. He never came back to set his teeth to my neck.

His letters came with the supply wagons, a few lines about roads and weather, signed with his rank.

I had delivered eleven pups for this Pack and knew every sign of a carrying. I had simply never looked for them in myself.

Last week a laundress passing me on the back stairs stopped, tilted her head toward my stomach, and went white. I went to Healer Brannoch that night. He listened and said four months. I made him say it twice, and the second time my legs gave out and I sat down on his floor.

Four months ago was the Longest Night.

Sera had written to me that winter. Half of Hollowbrook was down with a chest fever, she said, and could I bring the stillroom's winter draughts and stay through the feast. I spent the evening going from cot to cot. Near midnight she put a cup of hot clove mead into my hands herself and told me I'd earned it.

I don't remember finishing it. I remember the stairs going soft under my feet, an arm around my waist, a door.

After that, only pieces. A hand that burned. A ridge of hard skin across the palm, the kind a sword grip wears in. A low, rough voice against my hair, saying one word.

"Stay."

I woke at gray light in a chair by the sickroom hearth with my own cloak tucked around me. My maid Nessa was rubbing a cool salve into my wrists and the side of my neck. I had dozed off over the cots, she said. The mead had done the rest.

I thanked her. I had no wolf to tell me whose scent was on my skin, and the salve smelled only of mint.

I rode home ashamed of the dream and went on counting the weeks until Adrian came home to mark me.

For three years the Luna had barely used my name. This past autumn she began sending for me to sit with her in the evenings, and at the first frost she put the stillroom keys into my hand herself. I had cried over those keys.

Kneeling under her eyes now, I counted from the keys to Sera's letter. Six weeks. The warmth went out of my hands.

Sera sat at her mother's right hand in dove-gray silk, gentle as a nursemaid.

"Mother, please. Let it wait for Adrian. She's his mate. He should be the one to hear her out."

"Hear her out?" The Luna didn't raise her voice. "Every wolf in this hall can hear it, Seraphine. Shall the court hear of it before my son is out of the saddle?"

"Pack law is plain," she said, turning back to me. "A mate who carries another wolf's pup is cut from the bond and given to the Ashlands, pup and all." She looked at me the way she looked at a cracked dish. "Aldric took you in because your grandfather died on a claw meant for him. A wolfless barracks orphan, no blood, no breeding. Her mother was likely some camp—"

I lifted my head.

A wolf on her knees does not look the Luna in the face, and in three years I had never once done it in this hall. Someone near the hearth drew a sharp breath.

"My mother was Maren Ashdown," I said. My voice shook, but it carried. "She was a healer. She stitched up the Ashlands line for nine years, and she died at the ford beside my father, Captain Rowan Ashdown, so the rogues would never come south to halls like this one."

"You stood at their pyre, Luna. The King spoke their names himself."

The Luna shut her mouth. Beside her, Sera's eyes went to the barred doors and stayed there.

I knew why they couldn't wait for morning. The Ashlands army was already two weeks into the march home, and at midwinter the King's daughter had sent Adrian a ribbon for his spear. The Luna had told me so herself, smiling.

"Mother," Sera murmured, "whatever we do, it has to be quiet. If the court hears of this before Adrian is home, the princess hears of it too."

The Luna drew a small stoppered vial from her sleeve and set it on the moonstone in front of me. I knew the green wax on it. I had sealed it myself, in autumn, in my own stillroom.

"Brannoch will say it was the chest fever you carried home from Hollowbrook," she said. "You drink that tonight and don't wake, and you'll have a proper pyre like your mother."

She let that settle. "Or you refuse, and tomorrow I cut the bond in front of everyone and send you to the Ashlands."

Either way I would be in the ground before Adrian reached the river.

My hands had stopped shaking. I picked up the vial and turned it so the hearth light came through.

"Foxglove and poppy," I said. "The whole vial stops a heart before dawn. I know, Luna. I made it." I set it back on the stone. "I'm not drinking it. And I'm not going to the Ashlands."

The Luna stood. "Then Pell will hold you, and I will pour it myself."

The bar on the doors lifted. Mistress Pell came in with two guards, and between them a stable hand with straw still caught in his sleeves. Tobin Rusk. He had led my horse to Hollowbrook on the Longest Night.

"He came to me this morning, my Luna," Pell said, smoothing her apron. "Tell her, Tobin. All of it."

Tobin kept his eyes on the floor. "She sent for me after the feast. When the others were abed. She said her mate had been gone so long he'd never know."

Pell had him say the last part again, louder, for the walls.

"Wolfless," the Luna said, as though that explained it.

Sera pressed her fingers to her lips. "Mother, he's barely grown. Don't hang the boy for it. She's the one who sent for him."

I looked along the walls. The cook was studying her apron. A guard had found something on the ceiling. Nessa stood by the door with her eyes on her shoes.

Not one of them would speak for me. I kept my hand on my belly, over the heartbeat I couldn't hear, and didn't move.

"You always send for us so quickly when a pup falls ill at Hollowbrook, Sera," I said. "Brannoch says no lady in the north takes such care."

Behind her fingers, the corner of Sera's mouth lifted.

"I went with him every time," I went on. "Your husband's first mate gave him pups. Not one of them lived to see a second winter after you came. I helped Brannoch wash every one of them for the ground, and every one of them had blue lips. He taught me what that color means."

I couldn't hear what happened inside Sera's chest, but every wolf along those walls could. Pell went still. Heads turned toward the Luna's right hand one after another, the way the laundress had turned to me on the stairs.

I knelt on the cold stone and watched them all hear Sera's heart stumble.